Bolderdash

President Bush has, unfortunately, encouraged the belief of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the Jewish State can safely abandon 90-95% of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem. At a press conference yesterday, the President suggested that his Administration might be reluctant to support and possibly finance Olmert’s "bold ideas" only because Israel’s departure had not been negotiated with – and presumably approved by – the Palestinian government.

In fact, irrespective of such negotiations, Olmert’s "convergence" plan is riddled with fundamental problems, which were clarified in three powerful op.eds. yesterday by associates of the Center for Security Policy.

As explained in a piece for the Wall Street Journal by R. James Woolsey, former director of the CIA and Honorary Co-Chair of the Center’s National Security Advisory Council, the proposal encourages a false optimism among Israelis:

Israeli concessions indeed enhance Palestinian hope, but not of a reasonable two-state solution – rather a hope that they will actually be able to destroy Israel….Someday a two-state solution may become possible, but it is naive in the extreme to believe that this can occur while the centerpiece of the radical Islamic and Palestinian agendas is maximizing Jewish deaths.

Writing in the Washington Times, Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. describes how Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank – that would presumably follow the Gaza pattern and create a power vacuum filled by terrorists – threatens the immediate strategic interests of the United States and its allies in the region:

It would surely result in destabilizing and quite possibly ending Hashemite Jordan. The effect would combine Jordan’s territory, well-armed military and the 80 percent of its population that is Palestinian with the radical, Hamas-ruled state next door. The effort to consolidate the liberation of Iraq would also be jeopardized as one of two U.S. re-supply routes into the country – from Israeli ports across Jordan – becomes vulnerable to al Qaeda and others’ attacks.

And in her column for the Jerusalem Post, the Center’s Senior Middle Eastern Fellow Caroline B. Glick summarizes the long-term consequences of an Israeli withdrawal, which:

Provides a strategic victory to the forces of global jihad in a war they wage not only against Israel but against the U.S. and the Western world as a whole because they will see Israel destroying itself under the gun of their terror and enabling the establishment of yet another base for global terrorists.

The Center for Security Policy urges President Bush and Congress to take the greatest care in evaluating Olmert’s proposal that threatens the existence of Israel and neighboring Jordan, makes difficult our consolidation of victory in Iraq, and hands Islamofascists a victory that will encourage their belief that the United States can be defeated in this War for the Free World.

West Bank Terrorist State
By R. James Woolsey
The Wall Street Journal, 23 May 2006

What does one say to a good ally who seems determined to reinforce failure? That the U.S. will pay for the undertaking?

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is in Washington, where he will be asking for advice and assistance in financing the withdrawal of 50,000 to 100,000 Israeli settlers from 90% to 95% of the West Bank and major portions of Jerusalem, and for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to be repositioned largely near the security barrier Israel is constructing. Most Americans are inclined to believe that such disengagement may be a reasonable step toward a two-state solution, even if some territorial disputes remain to be negotiated. It is also widely assumed that Palestinian hostility to Israel is fueled by despair that can only be reduced by Israeli concessions. Both assumptions, however, may be fundamentally flawed.

The approach Israel is preparing to take in the West Bank was tried in Gaza and has failed utterly. The Israeli withdrawal of last year has produced the worst set of results imaginable: a heavy presence by al Qaeda, Hezbollah and even some Iranian Revolutionary Guard units; street-fighting between Hamas and Fatah and now Hamas assassination attempts against Fatah’s intelligence chief and Jordan’s ambassador; rocket and mortar attacks against nearby towns inside Israel; and a perceived vindication for Hamas, which took credit for the withdrawal. This latter almost certainly contributed substantially to Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections.

The world now needs to figure out how to keep Palestinians from starving without giving funds to a Hamas government in Gaza resolutely focused on destroying Israel. Before his massive stroke last year Ariel Sharon repeatedly said he would not replay the Gaza retreat in the West Bank. With good reason: Creating a West Bank that looks like today’s Gaza would be many times the nightmare. How would one deal with continuing launches of rockets and mortars from the West Bank into virtually all of Israel? (Israel’s Arrow missile defense will probably work against Iranian Medium Range Ballistic Missiles but not against the much shorter-range Katyushas.) A security barrier does no good against such bombardment. The experience in Gaza, further, has shown the difficulty of defending against such attacks after the IDF boots on the ground have departed. Effective, prompt retaliation from the air is hard to imagine if the mortar rounds and Katyushas are being launched, as they will be, from schools, hospitals and mosques.

Israel is not the only pro-Western country that would be threatened. How does moderate Jordan, with its Palestinian majority, survive if bordered by a West Bank terrorist state? Israeli concessions will also make the U.S. look weak because it will be inferred that we have urged them, and will suggest that we are reverting to earlier behavior patterns — fleeing Lebanon in 1983, acquiescing in Saddam’s destruction of the Kurdish and Shiite rebels in 1991, fleeing Somalia in 1993, etc.

Three major Israeli efforts at accommodation in the last 13 years have not worked. Oslo and the 1993 handshake in the Rose Garden between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat produced only Arafat’s rejection in 2000 of Ehud Barak’s extremely generous settlement offer and the beginning of the Second Intifada. The Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000 has enhanced Hezbollah’s prestige and control there; and the withdrawal from Gaza has unleashed madness. These three accommodations have been based on the premise that only Israeli concessions can displace Palestinian despair. But it seems increasingly clear that the Palestinian cause is fueled by hatred and contempt.

Israeli concessions indeed enhance Palestinian hope, but not of a reasonable two-state solution — rather a hope that they will actually be able to destroy Israel. The Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis is quite explicit about a genocidal objective. When they speak of "ending Israeli occupation" they mean of Tel Aviv. Under these circumstances it is time to recognize that, sadly, the Israeli-Palestinian issue will likely not be the first matter settled in the decades-long war that radical Islam has declared on the U.S., Israel, the West and moderate Muslims — it will more likely be one of the last.

Someday a two-state solution may become possible, but it is naive in the extreme to believe that this can occur while the centerpiece of the radical Islamic and Palestinian agendas is maximizing Jewish deaths. A durable compromise will only be achievable when we no longer, to borrow from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "define deviancy down" for the Palestinians.

Today we cannot envision the 250,000 Jewish settlers who live outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders being permitted to live at all, much less live free and unmolested, in a West-Bank-Gaza Palestinian state. But some 1.2 million Arabs, almost all Muslim, today live in Israel in peace among some 5 million Jews — about double the percentage of Jews now in the West Bank as a share of the Muslim population there. Israel’s Arab citizens worship freely — one hears muezzins calling the faithful to prayer as one walks around Tel Aviv. They vote in free elections for their own representatives in a real legislature, the Knesset. They give every evidence that they prefer being Arab Israelis to living in the chaos and uncertainty of a West Bank after Israeli withdrawal.

A two-state solution can become a reality when the Palestinians are held to the same standards as Israelis — to the requirement that Jewish settlers in a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state would be treated with the same decency that Israel treats its Arab citizens. Until then, three failures in 13 years should permit us to evaluate the wisdom of further concessions.

Mr. Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence, is co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger.