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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - August 13, 2007

Q. ...Can you make sense of various proposed plans for peace? Q. Why did so many IDF soldiers refuse to carry out settler evacuation orders in Hebron?

Q. Everyone in the Israeli leadership seems to have a plan for peace with the Palestinians. Can you make sense of them?

A. Only insofar as the leaders themselves have concretized their thinking and communicated it to the media and their associates. Nearly all of these diverse ideas being presented for a peace process with the Palestinians are intended for discussion in the negotiating forum in which PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meet every few weeks in coordination with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Olmert himself aspires to reach an agreement in principle regarding territorial issues with Abbas, to be presented to the international meeting suggested by President George W. Bush and intended for around November in Washington. A Palestinian state in the West Bank, to be extended to Gaza at some point in the future when Hamas does not rule there (with Gaza and the West Bank attached by a tunnel), would embrace around 90 percent of the West Bank, excepting the settlement blocs but including some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem where a Palestinian capital would be proclaimed. The Palestinian state would be compensated for the remaining 10 percent of the West Bank with territory from within Israel. According to one version of this approach, some of that compensatory territory would comprise Arab towns and villages near the green line, whose residents would somehow be persuaded to acquiesce in an arrangement whereby the green line is moved to the west and henceforth they would live in Palestine.

This idea, while unrealistic from a legal and some would argue a moral standpoint, has the advantage of keeping Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitenu party in the coalition. Lieberman opposes concessions to the PLO but favors altering the border so as to reduce the percentage of Palestinian citizens inside Israel. Presumably, even mention of this option in the press gives Lieberman ammunition to argue for the advantages of remaining in a coalition that is ostensibly dedicated to a deal with Abbas involving a West Bank withdrawal that he opposes.

Olmert's initiative leaves the issues of 1948 refugees/right of return and Jerusalem holy places for a later opportunity, once the Palestinian state exists on an interim basis and confidence between the two sides has been restored.

An initiative associated with President Shimon Peres, put forth at Olmert's encouragement, goes further. It would give the Palestinians 95 percent of the West Bank and territorial compensation for the remainder. It would solve the refugee question now, though the published version doesn't say how. It envisions a Palestinian or other Arab flag on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and a joint administration of representatives of Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the Holy Basin and Old City parts of Jerusalem.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has for some time now been advocating a "virtual" final status agreement in which the Palestinian side accepts the twin principles that no refugees will return to Israel and Israel will not recognize even in the abstract the "right of return". Implementation of the agreement, which presumably follows the territorial lines associated with Olmert and Peres and before them with President Clinton and the Geneva accords, would be conditioned on Palestinian performance regarding practical issues such as security. In many ways, Livni's approach parallels Olmert's: despite their political rivalry, both believe that Israel will gain advantages in Washington and Europe from demonstrating its readiness for an agreement even if, in practical terms, Abbas probably is not capable of carrying it out due to his own weakness and Hamas' opposition.

Newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon, whose portfolio includes the Palestinian issue, is reportedly associated with a plan revealed by Israel TV Channel 10 a few weeks ago, according to which Israel would renew its unilateral withdrawals on the West Bank, this time in close coordination with Abbas, and would remove isolated settlements and outposts. This process would encompass some 70 percent of the territory. A date would be agreed for initiation of final status talks.

Then there is the more conservative position of Minister of Defense Ehud Barak. In taking his distance from the peace schemes that emanate from the centrist Kadima party, Labor party leader Barak appears to have positioned himself to the right of Kadima, where he presumably hopes to undercut support for the Likud and Binyamin Netanyahu. Barak cautions that under current security conditions final status talks, even at the level of principle, have no chance of being concluded successfully. He has described the Olmert-Abbas talks as "baking a souflet". He sees little difference between the long-term goals of Hamas and Fateh and he suggests that negotiations be restricted to confidence-building measures alone. He also notes that, in the case of agreement or a return to unilateralism, no more territory should be abandoned by Israel until it has developed and deployed suitable means of intercepting and destroying incoming short-range rockets like the Qassam and Qatyusha--a task likely to take 2-5 years.

Barak, whose views have undoubtedly been influenced by the collapse of a previous Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the outbreak of the second intifada on his watch in 2000, reportedly favors placing more emphasis on an attempt to reach peace with Syria.

Barak's recent statements enunciating his position regarding the Olmert-Abbas talks were greeted with dismay by his Kadima coalition partners as well as many others on the political left. Under pressure, he allowed--in statements to the press as well as a phone conversation with Rice--that he supports current political efforts to strengthen the moderate Palestinian camp as well as the international initiatives to advance a final status solution. One key test of Barak's willingness to accommodate Olmert's position will be his readiness to remove IDF roadblocks and checkpoints on the West Bank. Olmert has been promising Abbas movement on this issue for months; Barak and the security establishment argue that any relaxing of IDF security arrangements could be costly to Israel in terms of human lives, and point out that even Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad acknowledges that PA security forces are not yet ready to take exclusive responsibility even in area A.

Finally, there is a camp of Palestinians and left-wing Israelis that insists that no real progress toward agreement between Abbas and Olmert is possible without bringing Hamas back into the picture. Otherwise the agreement will under the best of circumstances be hollow and incomplete, and in the worst case will be torpedoed by Hamas terrorism against Israel and assassinations of Fateh leaders in the West Bank.

In Palestine, former security chief Jibril Rajoub and veteran Fateh leader Hani al-Hassan take this position. Their views appear to reflect broader currents of pessimism among Palestinians regarding Abbas' capacity to succeed. In Israel, Meretz leader Yossi Beilin warns of the humanitarian disaster facing Gaza. He proposes that Israel first make a concerted effort to reach agreement with Hamas regarding prisoner exchange, a long-term ceasefire, opening of commercial passages and readiness to acquiesce in arrangements negotiated by Abbas.

Nor, incidentally, is there full agreement in Washington regarding Israel's approach to negotiations with the Palestinians. Bush and Rice's initiative--biweekly Olmert-Abbas meetings leading to agreement in principle and to an international meeting in the fall--is reportedly unacceptable to Vice-President Cheney and his advisers, whose position on the Palestinians (but not Syria) is closer to Barak's.

Q. Why did so many IDF soldiers refuse to carry out orders to help remove settlers squatting illegally in the Hebron market last week?

Q. All told, 12 soldiers in one unit refused, even though the task assigned them was to secure the perimeter of the Hebron operation, thereby avoiding any actual contact with the two settler families involved and their supporters. A number of factors explain this sudden new and dangerous rise in discord over the settlements issue within the IDF. In many ways, too, these factors illustrate what has changed in the Israeli approach to ensuring both army discipline and as large as possible a measure of national unity on sensitive Land of Israel issues since the withdrawal from Gaza two years ago.

First, this was quite simply the first time soldiers (as opposed to police) had been used to evict settlers since the Gaza pullout. Second, Hebron is by any standard a more holy place to Jews than the Gaza Strip, which according to many interpretations of halacha is not even part of the Land of Israel. Thus some religious security personnel who removed settlers from Gaza with equanimity might have second thoughts about removing settlers from Hebron. Third, Israel's political leadership today is weaker than the leadership demonstrated two years ago by Ariel Sharon regarding Gaza; the more extremist settler leaders sense this. Indeed, the Gaza pullout was made by government decision, whereas last week's minor operation in Hebron reflected a High Court decision carried out after delays by a hesitant political leadership.

Then too, the inclination of the Olmert government and the IDF in recent months has been to forgive the youth who forcibly opposed the security forces in Gaza, drop charges against them, allow them to serve in the army and not take punitive action against those yeshivas in the territories that send to the army ideological extremists regarding Land of Israel issues. This reflects a misplaced understanding of the settlers' motives and a sense (borne of weakness) that wall-to-wall Jewish national unity transcends all other national needs, together with an admixture of traditional Jewish compassion that explains quite a few apparent miscarriages of justice in Israel, such as releasing habitual traffic offenders to terrorize the roads. The 12 soldiers involved had every reason to believe that their punishment--instant removal from their combat units pending trial--would eventually be softened to a mild slap on the wrist.

As the government has backed down on this issue the settler leaders, and particularly the more extremist rabbis, have sharpened their tone to a point where they declare openly on state and IDF radio that on matters like Hebron their writ supersedes that of the government. Settler MKs publicly support the soldiers' refusal to obey orders. In this atmosphere, more moderate religious leaders opt for silence.

Finally, the army made mistakes. Asking a soldier from Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron, to take part in removing squatting settlers in Hebron is plainly asking for trouble.

There are about 5,000 students in yeshivot hesder, i.e., yeshivas that by agreement with the IDF send their students to a shortened 16 month term of service (instead of the usual three years) in IDF combat units. This year these yeshivas received about $7 million in budgetary supplements from the Ministry of Defense and $9 million from the Ministry of Education. Following instances of refusal to carry out orders in the Gaza pullout, the Ministry of Defense had intended to sever its agreement with the most extreme yeshivas. Then it backed down.

Now once again it confronts the problem created when successive Israeli governments allow religious extremists to flourish in the territories to the extent of giving them money and pardoning their blatant hate-mongering. That hate, incidentally, is directed first toward Arabs, but eventually--as in the case of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin--toward Jews as well.

True, left-leaning soldiers have on occasion refused to serve in the territories; some have refused to be drafted by the IDF altogether. Not only did they serve time in military jail for their refusal. Not only were they condemned by left-wing members of Knesset. They were obeying their individual consciences, whereas in the case before us the soldiers were bowing to an establishment of rabbis and settlers who set themselves up as an ex-governmental authority and whose behavior threatens the foundations of the state.