Dan Pollak: It’s not annexation because it was always the Jewish people’s land

“Israel is not annexing Palestinian territory, because the land never stopped belonging to the Jews,” Dan Pollak of the Zionist Organization of America tells Secure Freedom Radio.

Last week, President Trump released his plan for Middle East peace alongside Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Dan Pollak, ZOA Co-Director of Government Relations, characterized the Peace Plan in his Secure Freedom Radio Interview:

“President Trump has been an outstanding president for the American-Israel relationship and we thank him for that. This plan gets kind of a qualified endorsement. We (ZOA) put out a paper with 30 excellent points about the Peace Plan and there are some very good things in it. We don’t come out and endorse it explicitly and there’s good reason for that as well.

“The basic idea is that if the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Arabs would accept Israel as a permanent member of the nation’s in the area, all kinds of things could be possible, and this is what that peace plan talks about. The conditions, though, are so far removed from what the reality is of the actual governance of the Palestinian Arabs that it is very difficult to see some of these things coming to fruition. But we have to be praising the President for his farsighted vision in recognizing certain principles, and those are the things that the no transfer of population, Israel does have a legitimate claim, there are many things that are positive.

“On the negative side, once a peace plan is put forward by the US, one worries that in the future if there should ever be Palestinian Arabs that are ready to in good faith negotiate the future of the region, which is not the case now unfortunately, some of these things will be the starting point and the least acceptable position. And there are some significant Israeli concessions in this document and it’s kind of negotiating with yourself since the Palestinian Arabs refuse to come to the table once again.”

Pollak also clarified why Israel should formally annex the areas of the West Bank:

“One of the good things about this plan is that it seems to make a provision that Israel’s case to be the actual legitimate owner of Judea/Samaria, what people erroneously call the West Bank, it is kind of an archaic term, it would be like calling the US the ‘colonies.’

“This is a former status, but we don’t call it annexation because the land has never stopped belonging to the Jewish people actually and it has been recognized as such by international law since WWI and the treaties that ended it. That territory was allocated for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

“So, it has been disputed territory and Israeli sovereignty will be extended, we hope, in two stages probably, to areas around Jerusalem where there are majority Jewish homes. People call them settlements but they are really communities, and they’re well-established suburbs of Jerusalem in the first case. The more far flung settlements, the communities in Judea/Samaria are also provided for in this plan.

“The second place where sovereignty needs to be extended is along the Jordan River. There’s a natural barrier there that is vital to Israel’s security. The Jordan river itself isn’t much of a big river, many people call it a stream, but there are mountains on either side of it that are tremendously important from a strategic point of view. Israel has said that its security requires that that territory remain part of Israel at the end of any negotiations, and therefore sovereignty is actually a way of helping the peace process in both areas.”

Listen to the full show here