By Reuven Koret
December 5, 2003
As I was beginning to write a piece attempting to answer the question that appears in the title, reports came through concerning the attempt by two officers of Arafat's General Security Services to carry out a suicide bombing sat a school in the Israeli town of Yokneam, southeast of Haifa. They were moonlighting, as it were, for Islamic Jihad, their orders coming from Damascus and their salaries paid by the Palestinian Authority.
As Yossi Beilin and his post-Zionist partners pranced on a stage in Switzerland, the Palestinian Authority's policy of murdering Israelis continued apace back home. Only the superb work of Israeli intelligence, and our army, prevented a catastrophe. The existence of the security barrier, as the bombers themselves acknowledged, forced them to take the long way around to an unfenced area, contributing to their capture.
So it could have been a very short article. The answer to the question of "what's the alternative?" could be simply: "none." No diplomatic agreement can be negotiated with liars and cold-blooded murderers of children, one that lies as it signs, and negotiates as it kills. Been there, done that: Oslo should have proved to one and all the mendacity and corruption of Arafat and his proxies. If the children in the Yokneam school had been blown to bits as planned, and the Arafat's direct link revealed, Geneva would have been shattered in the same instant, and Israel would be once again on a war footing.
But even if the Geneva Accords and other grassroots "peace" initiatives are exposed as dangerous nonsense and futile non-starters -- and each day brings more evidence and voices to support this claim -- the question remains what best can the government of Israel do to create a more secure and stable situation, and to address strategic and demographic threats posed by our unrepentant, unrelenting, and unreliable enemies.
The "strategic attack" that takes dozens of Israeli lives may yet come, and when it does Israel must be ready to act, swiftly and decisively. The knowledge of that impending reaction may even serve as a deterrent, much as Israel's threat to "remove" Arafat contributed to the recent lull. Even more effective, I believe, in the inexorable progress of Israel's security barrier, closing security holes and opening diplomatic possibilities.
Israel's natural security border is the Jordan River. On the other side is a state that is historically, geographically, and demographically Palestine. One day it may be called that.
But we don't enjoy the luxury of dreaming. The security barrier being built today, and more than half-way complete, means that Israel now, for the first time, has the ability not only to defend itself better, but also to define itself, and address the demographic problem. The motivation in building the fence was to keep out bombers, but its ultimate value will be ensuring the long-term viability of a Jewish democratic state.
This is, or should be, the Sharon strategy. Not for nothing his nickname is "the bulldozer." He is creating facts on the ground. The controversy over illegal outposts is a distraction, a shell game. Some will be dismantled, and others will become army positions, or civilian communities. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. Trees planted, homes built, people living on the land: these will determine who owns it. The Palestinians know it, and those Israelis who are rooted to this land know it.
At some point in the not distant future, as the fence is nearing completion, or soon thereafter, the government of Israel will make decisions about its future borders, which will be, more or less, demarcated by the security barrier. The borders will include the cities of Ariel and surrounding communities in Samaria, and in Judea the city of Efrat, Gush Etzion, Kiryat Arba and Jewish Hebron. Greater Jerusalem will remain part of Israel forever. Israel will extend some sort of municipal autonomy to the Palestinians there and, unlike the Arabs, continue to allow unfettered access to holy sites to all.
There will be, as Sharon promised, painful sacrifices. Some isolated Jewish communities will be uprooted, and their residents resettled. But if thousands of families uprooted are fairly compensated for their loss, and allowed to move elsewhere in Judea and Samaria, or even to the settlement blocs in Gaza, then the trauma will be bearable for Israel and civil strife avoided.
The result of such a repartition will be that Israel retains control over its eastern flank in the Jordan valley, and maintains a presence on the ridge of the Samarian highlands overlooking our densely populated coastal plain. Israel will still retain the right to prevent the importation of weapons and the traffic of armed forces into the autonomous region of contiguous Palestine, by land, sea and air.
By retaining borders that provide a security buffer and put a distance from what Abba Eban called the "Auschwitz lines" of 1967, Israel also assert the enduring right of the Jewish People to live in the Biblical hills of Judea and Samaria. Most importantly, we will be sending a message that we will not be chased away by terror. The distance between the "green line" and the fence is the price the Palestinian will pay for the crime of having sent a hundred plus suicide bombers to blow up hundreds of innocent Israelis.
A secure border will enable us to pose a choice to the Arabs, whether they hold Israeli citizenship or Palestinian. If they violently oppose Israel, and wish to destroy it, they may move a few miles over and realize their right of self-determination in Palestine, just as Jews in Judea and Samaria had to make a similar choice.
If they wish to live peacefully, they can continue to reside here, while voting for the members of parliament of Palestine, just as Jewish settlers who choose to reside on the other side of the barrier-cum-border will have their right to reside there protected even as they retain Israeli citizenship and vote for their representatives in the Knesset.
The number of Israeli settlers "on the other side" of the proposed fence route probably numbers a couple tens of thousands. The number of Palestinians on the Israeli side are about as many.
Palestinians may not be pleased initially by this solution. But in time they will realize the benefits of living in a place that lacks the expense of an army. They will no longer need to sacrifice the future of their children by educating them to kill ours, because we will not let the killers get near us. They can concentrate on real education, science and technology, not on murdering Jews. They will be there, and we will be here.
The international community, too, may come to appreciate the benefits of stability and relative quiet that would likely result from a solution that does not depend on the good will and good faith of Arafat and his terrorist regime. The region will prosper as day-to-day friction is reduced, and massive terror attacks become much more difficult to carry out.
The Palestinian leaders, by sending suicide bombers to kill us and by continuing to strive to delegitimize the Jewish right to live here in our ancient born-again homeland, have for this generation destroyed the dream of coexistence. Again, they have not missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Sadly, we must defer the dream of living together, of reaching consensual agreements for cohabitation with another people in our already crowded national home. For now we must separate, and dwell alone, putting a fence between our nations so that we can perhaps live, in safety, apart and in peace. Who knows? Time may heal our wounds; distance may make our hearts grow fonder. Prosperity may bring, one day, true reconciliation.
But the bitter choice today, not primarily of Israel's making, has come down to this: divorce or death, separation or suicide. We need to do what must be done to end the nightmare of living alongside hordes of fanatics who make no secret of their desire to displace and destroy us, and celebrate their massacres of our kids by passing out sweets.
There was a black comedy a few years back called the War of the Roses, with the estranged couple going at each other's throats and destroying the house they were condemned to share as part of a settlement. The last decade here has been a little like that. It ain't healthy. Any marriage counselor would say that in this shotgun marriage there were from the start irreconcilable differences.
So what's the plan? Let's keep it simple. We need to tell the Palestinians that we've had enough. It's time to split.
On our terms.
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