| II-A There is no
development plan to avoid a demographic time bomb.
The Roadmap peace
plan proposed by the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the
U.N. is inherently unworkable on a demographic basis alone and
it contains other fatal flaws as well. It attempts to confine
two conflicting parties within a space far too small to
permanently accommodate even one of them. In a few years the
natural growth of both Arabs in the disputed territories and
Jews and Israeli Arabs inside Israel will generate bitter
conflicts from competition for limited space and resources.
Modern infrastructure
projects routinely come with comprehensive development plans
to assure that long term needs can be met. If the Roadmap plan
was truly feasible, its proponents would have already
presented a comprehensive development plan along with it.
Proponents of the
Roadmap propose to confine about 6 million Jews and about 6
million Arabs, including refugees from surrounding Arab
countries, within only 10,165 square miles ( Israel, Gaza and
the “West Bank”) The initial density would be over 1,000
people per square mile (ppsm). The present densities of China
and India are 360 and 930 ppsm, respectively, and they are
considered crowded nations. Even America, with only 80 ppsm,
has many pockets of high population densities, which are
already causing infrastructure and transport-related problems
due to overcrowding.
Any credible
development plan should accommodate growth requirements for at
least 100 years. In only 50 years the total Israeli population
comprising Jews and Israeli Arabs is projected to become 20
million with 2,550 ppsm. The proposed Palestinian state would
contain 19 million Arabs with 8,100 ppsm. Even if birth rates
decline gradually there would still be a problem because birth
rates would have to decline dramatically and soon to avoid
trouble. Any viable plan must assure jobs, food, water,
energy, a viable economy, infrastructure, etc. combined with
rising living standards which acts as a multiplier on the
demand for resources. These problems would exist even without
an ethnic conflict. Simply put, the Roadmap announced on April
30, 2003 offers no practical development plan because none is
possible given demographic realities. More details and
references are available in Appendix I-B.
II-B Arab hostility
toward, and rejection of, Israel and Jews are not being
addressed.
The Road Map fails to
deal with the reality of Arab hatred for Israel, Jews and
Judaism, and the encouragement of and indoctrination in this
hatred by nearly all Arab governments, the Palestinian
National Authority (PNA) and the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO). And it fails to deal with the fact that
the organizations which currently dominate the Palestinian
Arab community, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, The Popular
Resistance Committees, and the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and others, are terrorist in
character and dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It
does not require an end to foreign financial and military
support to the terrorist organizations, but it requires
continued international financing for the PLO and the PNA,
which are fronts dominated by terrorist organizations.
II-B.1 The Roadmap
approach leaves terrorist organizations, which are unalterably
opposed to peace, in power
While
it is true that the Roadmap and similar proposals in theory
call for an end to terrorist attacks on Israel and the
disarming of terrorist organizations, they assign all the
authority for carrying out the suppression of terrorism to the
Palestinian National Authority, which is dominated and
controlled by the very terrorist organizations that it
is supposed to disarm. Not surprisingly, no progress whatever
has been made in carrying out these provisions of the Roadmap.
Palestinian Arab leaders have repeatedly promised Israel in
writing since the first Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 to
stop terrorism and other forms of violence. Yet no effort to
carry out these promises has been made, and instead terrorism
has grown steadily worse and Israeli casualties from it,
primarily civilians, have steadily increased. The
reason for this failure is directly related to the terrorist
character of the present Palestinian Arab leadership. The
Roadmap does nothing to address this underlying cause of the
continuing terrorist aggression against Israel, and does not
place the Palestinian Arab self-governing areas under a new
regime that is genuinely opposed to terrorism and prepared to
take action against it.
Numerous members of
the Palestinian “police” and “Presidential guard”
double as active members of the Al Fatah Martyr’s Brigade,
one of the most vicious and bloodthirsty of the terrorist
organizations (it is the “military” arm of Fatah).
Hundreds of members of the Palestinian ‘police” have
carried out terrorist attacks. Several thousand terrorists are
on the payroll of the Palestinian National Authority.
Thus it is impossible for the Palestinian “police”
as presently constituted to stop terrorist attacks on Israel
or to disband terrorist organizations—which include
themselves!
As we have already
pointed out, the constitutions or covenants of Fatah, Hamas
and all the other Palestinian Arab terrorist
organizations call explicitly for the destruction of
Israel. Members of such organizations cannot possibly serve in
a Palestinian Arab government that is genuinely willing to
live in peace with Israel.
II-B.2 The Roadmap
and similar approaches make no provision for reeducation for
peace.
Palestinian
television and radio, the print media, and the PNA-appointed
preachers in the mosques regularly and insistently call for
the destruction of Israel, the extermination of the Jews, and
terrorist attacks (“martyrdom operations.”). Small
children, including kindergartners, are given military
training and told that it is their duty to carry out terrorist
attacks on Jews and Israel. School textbooks describe Israel
as an illegitimate entity and teach Palestinian Arab children
that it is their religious and patriotic duty, to war against
and destroy it.
Similar lessons are
taught to Palestinian Arab children in the schools of “refugee
camps” (actually Palestinian Arab towns and urban or
suburban neighborhoods) run by the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency (UNRWA). This agency is totally dominated and run
by the Palestinian terrorist organizations, which exploit it
as a source of funding for their propaganda, child
indoctrination and “military” training programs
Any genuine peace
settlement will absolutely require the end of all
international funding, whether from Arab countries, Iran, the
United Nations, the European countries, or the United States,
to the Palestinian and other Arab terrorist organizations and
their diplomatic-political front organizations, including the
Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian National
Authority. Diplomatic recognition of these organizations will
also have to be withdrawn if peace is to be achieved. The
Palestinian Arab community will need to choose a completely
new leadership, not tainted by terrorism, aggression and
anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred, to negotiate peace with
Israel.
The climate of hatred
which created and continues to sustain the Muslim-Israel
conflict, and which is the root cause of the Palestinian Arab’s
problems, is hardly confined to the Palestinian Arab
community. In the Arab states, Iran, and other Muslim
countries, Israel and Jews are vilified in schools, the
government-financed and controlled press, and books by
respectable academics. Children in school are taught that
jihad, or holy war against the non-Muslim world, is their
sacred duty. Vicious anti-Semitic forgeries, such as the
notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been
widely circulated and endorsed by respected scholars, and even
placed on exhibit in libraries as “authentic” Jewish
documents. Another widely circulated book, The Matzah of Zion,
by Syria’s Defense Minister Mustapha Tlas, repeats the
medieval “blood libel” that Jews practice human sacrifice
and cannibalism of non-Jews in their religious
ceremonies. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is also a best
seller. Serials on government television in Egypt, Syria and
Iran depict Jews as conspiring to take over the world, killing
and consuming the blood of Gentiles as a part of their
religious rituals, pouring molten lead down the throats of
Jews who marry Gentiles, and scores of other vicious lies.
These programs are also broadcast by the widely viewed Al-Manar
television station broadcast by the Lebanese terrorist
organization Hizbullah. Saudi Arabian television programs for
toddlers teach them that Jews are “bad” and “the sons of
pigs and monkeys.” Three-year old toddlers are even forced
to repeat such lies on these television programs. The list of
examples of massive indoctrination in hatred of Jews, Judaism
and Israel, pervading the educational systems of the Arab
countries, Iran and several other Muslim countries, could go
on and on. [link to
pmw.org.il]
Any genuine and
viable peace settlement between Israel, the Palestinian Arabs,
and the Arab and Muslim worlds as a whole absolutely requires
an end to this indoctrination in hatred, and its replacement
by education for peace and co-existence. This process of
re-education must include the accurate information about the
Jewish people, Judaism as a faith, the positive statements
about the Jewish people and Judaism in the Qur’an, and the
actual history of the Jewish people, the state of Israel and
the conflict over Palestine that we have summarized above. It
will also mean an end to the teaching of the distorted and
hostile perceptions of Israel and Jews that currently
dominate Arab and Muslim schools and the government-controlled
media of the Arab and Muslim countries.
II-C
By compelling
Israel to withdraw from territory without requiring the
Palestinian Arabs to recognize its borders, the Roadmap
contains a formula for an indefinite continuation of the war.
The provisions of the
Roadmap would require Israel to withdraw from most or all of
the territory it acquired in 1967, without any prior agreement
by the Palestinian Arabs recognizing permanent borders
for Israel. This would enable the Palestinian
organizations to continue terrorism against Israel
indefinitely, on the grounds that no final settlement has been
reached and that some of their territorial claims remained
unsatisfied. These provisions would permit the war to
continue, while greatly weakening Israel’s ability to defend
itself against continued attacks.
II-D The Roadmap
and similar proposals deprive Israel of sufficient territory
for self-defense, which would create dire risks to everyone.
The Road Map and
similar proposals would severely weaken Israel’s defenses by
forcing Israel to withdraw to the June 4, 1967 borders or
something very close to them. Far from bringing peace, this
enclosure of Israel within what former Israeli Foreign
Minister Abba Eban once memorably called the “Auschwitz
borders” would inevitably result in a huge increase in
Israeli and Arab casualties from terrorist attacks and the
unavoidable Israel measures of self-defense.
Every military
specialist who has ever examined these borders, including the
Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces of the United
States, has concluded that they are indefensible. It would
leave Israel only nine miles wide at its narrowest point –
or less than the distance from one end of Washington, D.C. to
the other. The Jewish sections of Jerusalem, with a population
of some 400,000 people, and many more than that including the
city’s suburbs, would be literally a stone’s throw from,
not to mention within easy rifle and pistol range of, m
potentially hostile forces in the eastern sectors of the city.
An ugly defensive barrier would have to be built right in the
middle of a major urban center and holy place for three faiths
in order to create even a small modicum of everyday safety for
the city’s now-divided inhabitants. This is exactly what
spokesmen for the Palestinian Arabs say they wish to prevent
at all costs.
The proposed “old-new”
borders would place the mountains of Judea and Samaria, as
well as those of the Golan Heights, all of them immediately
adjoining Israel’s population centers, in the hands of
enemies or potential enemies who could use them to shell
Israel’s major cities and urban areas at will, and sweep
down to occupy them within a matter of minutes. In the event
of another war, reoccupying these mountains, now once again in
the hands of enemies, could only be done at an immense cost in
Israeli and Arab lives, if it could be done at all.
By stripping Israel
of the territorial depth that is absolutely necessary for its
successful self-defense, in the event of a major attack on it
by still hostile, or at the very least potentially hostile,
neighbors, the Roadmap and similar proposals increase the
danger that Israel might be forced to choose between utter
annihilation on the one hand and the use of nuclear weapons as
a last-ditch act of self-defense on the other. Therefore it is
necessary to contemplate the unthinkable and point out that
any existential threat to Israel’s survival could provoke
Israel to unleash her maximum response, with dire consequences
for other countries as well. Any genuine peace
settlement, in order to protect the interest of Israel, the
Arab and Iranian peoples and the entire international
community must avoid placing Israel in such a dilemma by
allowing it sufficient territorial depth to defend itself if
need be.
II-E The Roadmap
approach would probably require the expulsion of
400,000-500,000 Israelis from Their Homes
By insisting that the
June 4, 1967 lines, which were never intended to be anything
except temporary military ceasefire lines, should form
the basis for future permanent borders between Israel and its
neighbors, and requiring Israel to “dismantle” what it
terms “settlements” or “colonies” outside these
borders , ( by the use of such language declaring the hundreds
of Israeli communities outside the 1967 borders to be
illegitimate), the Roadmap plan could result the uprooting of
as many as 400,000- 500,000 Israelis who now live outside the
1967 lines. Such an uprooting would cause massive
suffering to hundreds of thousands of people, would utterly
bankrupt a small country that is already overburdened with
huge defense and humanitarian expenses, and would force an
already overcrowded country, the size of New Jersey and
two-thirds nearly uninhabitable desert, to suddenly
accommodate a huge influx of refugees. The demoralization,
confusion, anger and vast increase in poverty would be enough,
in and of themselves, to cause the collapse of Israel, or at
the very least so lower its people’s morale as to make them
extremely vulnerable to invasion and conquest.
Even the unilateral
evacuation of 9,000 to 10,000 Jews from Gaza and parts of
Samaria (in the “West Bank”) by Israel’s own government
in 2005 has caused immense suffering and hundreds of millions
of dollars in expenses to Israel’s people. Far from bringing
peace to Israel’s frontier with Gaza as Israel’s leaders
hoped, this unilateral concession by Israel has led to the
daily shelling and rocketing of Israeli towns and villages
near Gaza, including the city of Sderot with its population of
20,000 people. Today, half or more of the population of this
unfortunate town, now on the “front line” for terrorist
attacks by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular
Resistance Committees and all of the other terrorist factions
that control Gaza, have also become refugees. This experience
has proven that Israeli withdrawals from territory and the
forced evacuation of Israelis from their homes in this
territory, only result in more terrorism and more refugees.
Such forced evacuations of Israelis are definitely not the
road to peace.
II-F By declaring the
Saudi plan to be one of the bases for a final settlement
between Israel and the Palestinians, the Roadmap may force
Israel to resettle up to 3 million hostile Palestinian Arabs.
Such a massive
resettlement would utterly bankrupt Israel. There is no space
in Israel for such a massive influx, especially since hundreds
of thousands of Jewish expellees would have to be resettled
simultaneously, and since the Palestinian Arab refugees have
been indoctrinated for decades to hate Israel, the Saudi plan
would result in massive rioting, guerilla warfare, terrorism
and chaos within Israel, and would allow the surrounding Arab
states to invade and conquer it. Yet the wording of the
Roadmap implies that Israel will have to accept the Saudi
Plan.
As noted in the
previous section, the Saudi plan is simply a restatement of
the demands of the Palestinian National Authority and the “Plan
of Phases” adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization
in 1974. Both aim at the destruction of Israel.
II-G The
Roadmap fails to recognize the historic rights of the Jewish
people and their contributions to world civilization
Any just settlement
of the conflict must respect the legitimate rights of the
Jewish people and also the unique contribution of the entire
Jewish people to the world community over thousands of years.
Recognizing Jewish rights does not diminish Arab rights nor
conflict with them. It is usual to hear people speak in
support of specific “rights” of the “Palestinian Arabs”.
It is unusual to hear people speak equally in support of
specific rights of the Jewish people in Israel. This type of
anti-Jewish bias is reflected in one-sided ‘peace’
arrangements such as Oslo and now the Roadmap.
For this reason, an
authentic and enforceable peace agreement must explicitly
recognize the rights of the Jewish people to their national
homeland, Israel, also known as Palestine, and must affirm all
the parties’ commitment to the rights of the Jewish people
to return to, settle in, and acquire land in their national
homeland, in accordance with the original provisions of the
League of Nations Palestine Mandate.
These issues are
covered in more detail in the Appendixes to Part II, sections
A through E, including maps, charts, graphs and
illustrations
One of the major
obstacles to peace between Jews, Arabs and Muslims, and one
major reason why no solution to the problems of the
Palestinian Arabs has been implemented, is that historic
truths are being ignored and distorted. The first component of
the P.A.I.R Initiative must therefore be
to communicate the actual historical background of the
conflict, and to correct the misconceptions, the distortions,
and the outright lies that advocates of war against Israel and
the Jewish people have perpetuated over sixty years, in order
to justify an irrational and pointless vendetta. |