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Dr. Aaron Lerner is co-founder of , Independent Media Review and Analysis, an Israel-based news organization which provides an extensive digest of media, polls and significant interviews and events relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
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By Dr. Aaron Lerner
September 15, 2006
A year after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted the vibrant Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria, and realization of the security dangers that opponents of the move warned would follow, it would appear that the world is gearing up for a demand that Israel make yet another sacrifice to the "peace process" Moloch.
Oslo was supposed to be a nation-building process under which the Palestinian autonomy progressively took on more authority and responsibility.
Instead, Oslo was marked by a series of agreements under which Israel made more concessions in return for recapitulations of Palestinian Oslo obligations in ever more watered-down forms.
The Road Map took the diminution of Palestinian obligations a step further, offering to reward them with a sovereign state within temporary borders if the Palestinians would at least start going through the motions of moving in the direction of fulfilling some of the Oslo security obligations that they repeatedly committed to honor in the various of Oslo photo-op signing ceremonies.
And yet now, at a time that anyone who has eyes in his head can see that armed Palestinian groups of all stripes are working full tilt to upgrade their security threat to Israel by several magnitudes, it seems that even the Road Map is going to be watered down even more.
If anything, developments in the last year should be grounds for tightening the Palestinian's Road Map requirements -- not papering them over.
But what of the danger of stalemate?
Stalemate under current conditions is preferable to stalemated final status talks under the auspices of third parties that can be expected to break the stalemate to Israel's disadvantage.
Stalemate under current conditions, with the Gaza Strip and West Bank still within Israel's essentially uncontested security envelope, has considerably less potential to lead to conflict with Arab nations than stalemate with a sovereign Palestinian entity.
What, then, can Israel show the international community?
One place to start is to redouble efforts to expedite the flow of commerce subject to security constraints and get the story out to the world -- both about the Israeli efforts and the security problems the Palestinians wantonly create.
The situation is hardly ideal. But more Israelis concessions would only make it worse.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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