FM: Creation of Palestine requires West Bank exit

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Saturday that the founding of a future Palestinian state will require Israel to make withdrawals from the West Bank.

In an interview to Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper, Livni was quoted as saying that "the pullout from the Gaza Strip was not the last withdrawal."

However, the foreign minister maintained that the peace process has been slowed because of moderate Palestinian leaders' inability to control the violence in the territories, and not because of Israel.

"Israel does not want to rule over the Palestinians," Livni said.

On Thursday, Livni met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo for two hours and discussed the diplomatic process with the Palestinians and the Arab peace initiative. The foreign minister also met with her Egyptian counterpart, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and their visiting Jordanian colleague, Abdelelah al-Khatib.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/858521.html

A chopped-up mix of Palestinian micro-bantustans and Israeli-controlled areas is no Palestinian state that's of any use to anybody.

If Israel doesn't want to rule over the Palestinians (or take their land and evict them?), it can start offering a just, workable vision for a future of peaceful coexistence.

Still not hearing any of that yet.

If Israel doesn't want to rule over the Palestinians (or take their land and evict them?), it can start offering a just, workable vision for a future of peaceful coexistence.


I think Camp David in 2000 was a great start. The Palestinians had 100% of Gaza and around 95% of the West Bank, including the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and land swaps to compensate for the large settlement blacks that can't reasonably be removed, almost all of Hebron and tens of billions of dollars in financial compensation for refugees. It was a perfectly fine place to begin negotiating. Arafat had not prepared anyone for the reality that the Palestinians were not going to get 100% of their demands. It seemed like his stance was 100% or nothing. I can't see otherwise why he would have broken off talks without making counteroffers or negotiating at all.

As far as evicting Palestinians, even as things stand now, Israel isn't ruling over many of them. 98% of them are in areas administered by the PA. And settlements account for 2% of the west bank. The reality is that much more land is controlled by Israel for security around the settlements and for the roads leading to and from, but the important thing is that none of that land is thought by anyone to be part of Israel, post-settlement. It is all land that will be part of the future Palestine. Israel has slowly been reducing the amount of checkpoints as well.

The talk about the chopped up banthustans has been focused on the wall, which is an extremely new, (and ultimately temporary should the Palestinians get their security act together) affair that doesn't affect future statehood. There were, in actuality, no "banthustans" in the final proposal to Palestinians at Taba. The Israeli concern has always been one of security. Their actions make no sense with any other motive in mind. It is an unfortuante truth that the Palestinians have proven the right wing Israeli militants to be correct in their every prediction so far. I did not expect that to be the case, but thus far the Palestinians have shown them to be correct at every turn.

There will never be a full, 100% "exit" to behind the green line. Simply because the green line never meant anything. It is no more of a border than the security fence is, by everyone's agreement. Land that is traditionally Jewish (for thousands of years) and Judaism's most holy sites are on the eastern side of the line, such as the wailing wall and the Temple Mount. It gets a little ridiculous when peoplke start demanding that Israel "give back" the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem to the Arabs, who only moved in 60 years ago when Israel lost the land to Jordan.

The Myth of the Generous Offer
Distorting the Camp David negotiations

By Seth Ackerman

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113

"The annexations and security arrangements would divide the West Bank into three disconnected cantons. In exchange for taking fertile West Bank lands that happen to contain most of the region’s scarce water aquifers, Israel offered to give up a piece of its own territory in the Negev Desert--about one-tenth the size of the land it would annex--including a former toxic waste dump.

Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new “independent state” would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called “bypass roads” that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.

Israel was also to have kept "security control" for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt--putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.

Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements, the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end. For at Camp David, Israel also demanded that Arafat sign an "end-of-conflict" agreement stating that the decades-old war between Israel and the Palestinians was over and waiving all further claims against Israel. "

"Anyone who reads the European Union account of the Taba talks," Ha'aretz noted in its introduction, "will find it hard to believe that only 13 months ago, Israel and the Palestinians were so close to a peace agreement." At Taba, Israel dropped its demand to control Palestine's borders and the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians, for the first time, made detailed counterproposals--in other words, counteroffers--showing which changes to the 1967 borders they would be willing to accept. The Israeli map that has emerged from the talks shows a fully contiguous West Bank, though with a very narrow middle and a strange gerrymandered western border to accommodate annexed settlements.

In the end, however, all this proved too much for Israel's Labor prime minister. On January 28, Barak unilaterally broke off the negotiations. "The pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted," Ben-Ami said (New York Times, 7/26/01).


link: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113
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There may have been meaningful negotiations at Taba:

here is a link to the European Union summary document regarding the Taba talks first published in Haaretz on February 14, 2002 -- Text: "Moratinos Document" - The peace that nearly was at Taba:

http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/papers/moratinos.html

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Visions in Collisions: What Happened at Camp David and Taba
by Dr. Jeremy Pressman, University of Connecticut

Here is a link to very long 43 page pdf file summary. The article is neutral and dispassionate. It gives a very calm and rational critique of all sides:

http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/BCSIA_content/documents/pressman.pdf

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If so I would be curious what your information is on that.

I have found that Jerusalem itself did become a Jewish majority city around the end of the 1800's. But I cannot find any information that suggest it has been a majority Jewish city since the early centuries AD.

I'm not arguing. I'm just curious.

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