Netanyahu: The Land of Israel Will Be Divided

Netanyahu: The Land of Israel Will Be Divided
IsraelNN.com) The Israel HaYom newspaper reveals a leftist turn for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Speaking in an interview to be published Thursday, the Prime Minister admitted he had come to terms with dividing the Land of Israel. “The land is already divided. How it will be divided, that is the question,” the newspaper reports.

In the interview, Netanyahu insisted that the new reality required “practical solutions”. “How will the land be divided? Territory-wise, there have been those who predicted the land would be divided according to the 1967 armistice lines, which is not acceptable to me. Israel requires defensible borders.”

"I know every place in this land, but there is a reality that exists regarding the million and a half Palestinians that live in the heart of the Jewish State. We need to find a true solution for co-existence with them."

General Yigal Allon ordered the expulsion of the remaining Arabs but the local commanders did not do so and the Arab population soon recovered to more than 2500 due mostly to refugees slipping back. During the next year or so, the Arabs were held in a confined area surrounded by barbed wire while a secret debate took place about their fate. Some, such as General Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wanted them expelled, while others, such as the left-wing minority party Mapam and the Israeli labor union Histadrut, wanted them to remain. The government decided that the Arabs should be expelled, but their consent should be obtained first, which the government might have conceded because of growing international pressure. A carrot-and-stick campaign was carried out. Positive inducements included favorable currency exchange, and negative inducements included "black propaganda" and harassment such as night-time raids. On 17 August 1950, the town's inhabitants were served with an expulsion order and the first group of them were taken on trucks to the Gaza Strip where they joined their fellows in the refugee camps there. The expulsion was pushed through by David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan over the objections of Pinhas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut, who had wished to turn the town into a productive example of equal opportunity to the Arabs. By October 1950, only 20 Arab families remained, most of whom later moved to Lydda or Gaza. Lavon declared that the expulsion had dissipated "the last shred of trust the Arabs had in Israel, the sincerity of the State's declarations on democracy and civil equality, and the last remnant of confidence the Arab workers had in the Histadrut."