The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East - Hardcover

Glick, Caroline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385348061 ISBN 13: 9780385348065

Verlag: Crown Forum, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A landmark manifesto issuing a bold call for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
 
The reigning consensus in elite and academic circles is that the United States must seek to resolve the Palestinians' conflict with Israel by implementing the so-called two-state solution. Establishing a Palestinian state, so the thinking goes, would be a panacea for all the region’s ills. In a time of partisan gridlock, the two-state solution stands out for its ability to attract supporters from both sides of America's ideological divide. But the great irony is that it is one of the most irrational and failed policies the United States has ever adopted.

Between 1970 and 2013, the United States presented nine different peace plans for Israel and the Palestinians, and for the past twenty years, the two state solution has been the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy. But despite this laser focus, American efforts to implement a two-state peace deal have failed—and with each new attempt, the Middle East has become less stable, more violent, more radicalized, and more inimical to democratic values and interests. 

     In The Israeli Solution, Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor to the Jerusalem Post, examines the history and misconceptions behind the two-state policy, most notably:

- The huge errors made in counting the actual numbers of Jews and Arabs in the region. The 1997 Palestinian Census, upon which most two-state policy is based, wildly exaggerated the numbers of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

- Neglect of the long history of Palestinian anti-Semitism, refusal to negotiate in good faith, terrorism, and denial of Israel’s right to exist.

- Disregard for Israel’s stronger claims to territorial sovereignty under international law, as well as the long history of Jewish presence in the region.

- Indifference to polling data that shows the Palestinian people admire Israeli society and governance. Despite a half-century of domestic and international terrorism, anti-semitism, and military attacks from regional neighbors who reject its right to exist, Israel has thrived as the Middle East’s lone democracy.
 
After a century spent chasing a two-state policy that hasn’t brought the Israelis and Palestinians any closer to peace, The Israeli Solution offers an alternative path to stability in the Middle East based on Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CAROLINE GLICK  is the senior contributing editor to the Jerusalem Post, where she writes two weekly syndicated columns. Her writing has also been published in leading newspapers and journals, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Journal of International Security Affairs, and Commentary. She is the director of the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles and the adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. In 2009, Glick founded the popular Hebrew media satire website latma.co.il, where she writes a regular blog and serves as editor in chief. She lives in Mevasseret Zion with her family.

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Chapter 1

A Bipartisan Pipe Dream

On May 23, 2002, Israel narrowly averted what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in its history.

That morning an Israeli fuel tanker driver named Yitzhak Ginsburg drove to the Pi Gelilot liquefied petroleum gas depot to fill up his tank. The depot was located on the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv, adjacent to Ramat Hasharon, and Herzliya, which put it in the middle of the most densely populated area in the Western world.1

At seven a.m. Ginsburg passed through the security checkpoint, entered the depot, and began fueling. Suddenly the ground began to shake beneath him. “There was a massive boom,” he later told reporters. “Everyone went flying in all directions, and the tanker, which weighs twenty tons, just exploded in the air. Everything was burning and going up in flames. Miraculously nothing happened to me. I thought it was an electrical malfunction. It never occurred to me that it was a terrorist attack.”2

But it was. Palestinian terrorists had placed a bomb in Ginsburg’s fuel tank. A cell member had followed Ginsburg to Pi Gelilot, waited for him to begin fueling, and remotely detonated the bomb.

The only reason Pi Gelilot is not remembered as the most deadly terror attack in history is because Ginsburg’s tanker carried diesel fuel.3 Had it been carrying gasoline, which is much more flammable than diesel, not only would the entire facility have been destroyed, but the fireball created by the explosion would have engulfed neighboring communities. Tel Aviv’s tony Ramat Aviv neighborhood, home to 11,400 people, would likely have been reduced to a smoldering ruin. So would Ramat Hasharon and Herzliya, which have a combined population of 127,600.

And that wouldn’t have been the end of it. Pi Gelilot is also located next to one of Israel’s busiest traffic arteries, as well as the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and of Israeli Military Intelligence. The Israel Security Agency, Israel’s version of the FBI, is located nearby. Had the bomb worked as the Palestinian terrorists planned, the highway would have become a fireball at the height of rush hour, and Israel’s intelligence nerve centers would have been leveled.

The attack at Pi Gelilot took place the morning after a suicide bombing at a pedestrian mall in downtown Rishon Lezion, a bustling coastal city due south of Tel Aviv. In the month that followed the attack, another sixty-five Israelis were murdered, including fifteen children, in Palestinian terrorist attacks of every sort carried out from one end of the country to the other. Adjusting for Israel’s relatively small population, this would have been the equivalent of 2,600 Americans being killed.

More than 90 percent of the attacks that month were directed against civilian targets. Less than 10 percent of the dead and less than 5 percent of the wounded were Israeli military forces engaged in counterterror operations.4 Teenage boys were gunned down at a basketball court. A grandmother and her infant granddaughter were blown up at an ice cream parlor. Another grandmother and her five-year-old granddaughter were blown up, along with five other people, at a bus stop. Two families were massacred in their homes, and a fourteen-year-old girl was murdered at a falafel stand.

The perpetrators of these attacks came from almost every active Palestinian terror group. Most were Fatah terrorists.

Fatah is the largest faction of the PLO. It was founded by Yassir Arafat in 1957 and the leaders of the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority are overwhelmingly members of Fatah. The Fatah terror cells that perpetrated most of the terrorist operations were directed and funded by the Palestinian Authority.

Others attacks were carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad cells. Some of the terrorists served more than one master.

In perpetrating these attacks, terror groups openly collaborated with one another. Some of the attacks were carried out jointly by terrorists from different groups. For instance, a terror cell with members from Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine massacred forty-year-old Rachel Shabo and her sons, sixteen-year-old Neria, twelve-year-old Zvika, and five-year-old Avishai in their home.5

This sort of mayhem is what passed for everyday life in Israel on June 24, 2002, when in a much-anticipated speech, President George W. Bush set out his position on the Palestinian conflict with Israel.6

Until that date, Bush had kept his position to himself. Warring factions within his administration competed over which narrative the president would advance. The establishmentarians, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, wanted the United States to pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. The renegade hawks in the Defense Department and on Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff wanted the United States to put pressure on the Palestinians and side openly with Israel in its war on the Palestinian terror wave that had engulfed the country. In the days leading up to President Bush’s speech, the international community was abuzz with anticipation that America’s commander in chief was finally ready to choose which side he was on.

To a certain degree, Bush lived up to those expectations. In that speech, he became the first U.S. leader since the onset of the peace process between Israel and the PLO in September 1993 to tell the Palestinians to get their house in order. Other American leaders had called for the Palestinians to fight terrorism, but Bush told them to stop sponsoring it. Moreover, he seemed to express that U.S. support for the Palestinians depended on a change in their behavior. “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism,” he said. “This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.”

Bush also spelled out what he meant by Palestinian political reform. In his words, “Reform must be more than cosmetic change, or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics, and action against terrorism.”

Bush’s words were like an adrenaline shot for the beleaguered Israeli citizenry. Not only had the president of the United States recognized that they were the victims of unrelenting terrorist assaults; he recognized that Israel’s very right to exist was under attack. From the Arab world to Europe to U.S. university campuses, Israel was under the gun of hateful propaganda. Its army was being falsely and maliciously accused of committing the same very crimes that the Palestinians were carrying out against Israelis. Its leaders and generals were being targeted by scurrilous war-crimes allegations in European courts. And now here was Bush, the leader of the free world, pledging to put an end to this nonsense.

Unfortunately, a closer--and less emotional--reading of Bush’s speech shows that there was less to the speech than met the eye. While the tone was indeed pro-Israel, Bush later acknowledged in his memoir that it was actually the most pro-Palestinian speech that any U.S. president had ever given.7 It was the first time an American president openly embraced the cause of Palestinian statehood. Moreover, while Bush did call the Palestinians to account for their involvement in terrorism against Israel, he didn’t give them an ultimatum. He didn’t say, Clean up your act or sacrifice U.S. support. He said, Clean up your act and get even more support.

And he also blamed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Forum
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385348061
• ISBN 13: 9780385348065
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: MUSIC STORE professional GmbH; 022188841282; Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de; ; Istanbulstr. 22-26; Köln; 51103; Deutschland