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MK Arieh Eldad (photo: Knesset)
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| By israelinsider staff and partners April 11, 2007 |
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Knesset Member Arieh Eldad (National Union/ National Religious Party) takes a tough stand on the two-state solution, calling it "bankrupt." He advocates a different solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In Part One of an interview with Pajamas Media, Eldad discusses his proposal for an alternative to the two-state solution, as well as his experiences as head of the burn unit at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem at the height of the intifada.
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Click here to view the video of the first part of a three-part interview with Dr. Arieh Eldad conducted by Pajamas Media.
See Part Two: MK Eldad: Disengagement revealed Israel to be a creature that eats itself
See Part Three: MK Eldad: Iran has rationale of suicide bomber
The transcript of Part One of the interview appears below.
PART ONE: The Middle East: A Reality Check
Terrorism in the Emergency Room
All my medical career, for twenty-five years, I was a burn physician. I'm a plastic surgeon by training, but I choose to treat burns in plastic surgery. I was the head of the burn unit in Hadassah hospital, Jerusalem during the Intifada time where every week or so we'd have waves of casualties from a suicide bomber on a bus or in a coffee shop or in the marketplace.
One of the things you will never be able to forget is the smell... the smell of burning flesh in the emergency room... and I will carry it to my last day.
I remember one suicide bomber who survived because maybe only ten percent of his explosives were effective and he only injured himself. He told us the story that he went down to Mea Shearim, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, and there was a group of young people standing near a family bar mitzvah or something, but there weren't enough children there, so he aimed toward the other group that was further away. There weren't enough children. Because if you want to create terrorism, to spread terrorism, it's the shock, the fear, and they know if they kill more children that intensifies the impact that they want.
I had to treat a couple of suicide bombers. This is part of the anomaly in Israel because if I would see a terrorist in the street and know that he is a suicide bomber I would take my gun and kill him. Once he is a patient of mine in the hospital I would fight for his life, treat him as a patient. And they never understood why we do it.
The Bankruptcy of the Two-State Solution
The two-state solution is a very old idea. And it failed time and again. It started failing in 1921 and 1922. And then there were more offers by international committees that came back and forth to Palestine and then to Israel to offer a partition of the land... to create a Jewish state side by side with an Arab state. It never happened because the Arabs rejected the idea. They wanted the whole Palestine.
If they really wanted to have an independent state, they would have accepted Ehud Barak's generous offer in Camp David in the year 2000. They refused having an independent state in Gaza and Judea and Samaria because they wanted to conquer the Land of Israel.
The issue is not a territorial issue. The conflict is not over whether the line or border would pass on that side of the mountain or the other side of the mountain. We do not have a partner for sharing the land. We do not have an option to live side by side. We must go to seek another possibility, another solution.
A New Paradigm
Seventy percent of the population of Jordan is Palestinians. So Jordan is Palestine.
If we understand that the problem of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 is the ongoing fuel and explosive to the conflict... we must try to re-settle the refugees because the humanitarian problem is immense, it's huge... people are living on $700 annually in these refugee camps... so we must take an international initiative to re-settle them, to build them homes, water, sources of energy, jobs. This can be done in parts of Jordan that will be specially allocated by the international community with the cooperation of the Kingdom of Jordan to develop these areas and to re-settle millions of Palestinian refugees.
Once we've done that, and Jordan is the national homeland of the Palestinian, all the Arabs that do not want to move there and decide to live in Israel will have a Jordanian-Palestinian citizenship and an Israeli residence. They can still live in their homes. I do not offer to push them out or to transfer them forcefully anywhere else, but they will vote for the parliament in Amman and live in their home in Nablus. |
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