Israel is not Algeria

The Algerian Precedent in Israel

by Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Arutz Sheva Opinion, 22 October 09

(Israelnationalnews.com) A Palestinian state, or even a fledgling political entity exercising governmental and security functions, will act to provide the base necessary for accelerating the Arab war against Israel. This was explicitly stated when the PLO adopted its 1974 ‘stages plan’, and it was implied in the 1988 PLO Declaration of Independence. The advent of the 1993 Oslo Accords saw this Palestinian strategy get off to a good start with the establishment of the armed Palestinian Authority in areas from which Israel withdrew in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.

As a result of ideological rigidity, national exclusivity, and religious dogmatism, the Palestinian struggle against Israel knows no limits. The PLO, no less than Hamas and Islamic Jihad, demands refugee return, settlement dismantlement, and Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital. These positions enjoy the support of UN resolutions and of the entire international community, leaving Israel standing alone and isolated on this diplomatic front.

There were more politically congenial days for Israel in the past. President Reagan intimated in his Plan of 1982 that Israel should not go back to the 1967 borders, nor should there be a Palestinian state. President Bush, though calling for a Palestinian state, agreed in 2004 that Jewish ‘settlement blocs’ would provide Israel with territory beyond the Green Line borders. However, in his recent UN address, President Obama in 2009 demanded “ending the [Israeli] occupation which began in 1967.” Removing all Israeli presence from the territories, both civilian and military, is now at the heart of an American policy that considers the formation of a Palestinian state the key to conflict-resolution based on justice – for the Palestinians.

Successive Israeli Prime Ministers – Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Netanyahu – endorsed a Palestinian state and defined it as being in Israel’s national interest. They thus accepted the canard that the ‘Land of Israel’ is the land of Palestine, and that a Palestinian state is a sine qua non element on the map of peace. Concomitant with the timidity of Israel’s leaders, the settlers were deemed lawless, their Zionist dedication an obstacle to peace– while the Palestinians were seen as the rightful owners of the Land, and the historical zeitgeist was stamped with the Palestinian revolutionary logo.

A widespread miscomprehension of history promoted the idea that a Palestinian state would be the end-point for reconciliation, when it actually will be the upgraded launching-pad for perpetuating the conflict. It will galvanize the ardor of Palestinian nationalism and the flames of Islamic fanaticism. It will deny Israel land for homes and demographic expansion and air-space for military surveillance; it will expose Ben-Gurion Airport to missile fire and the Samarian aquifer to pollution; it will deny Jewish rights, surrender Jewish sites, and demoralize the Israeli public; it will escalate Arab sedition in the Galilee, and expose Israel to the political reality that the Palestinians have one state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and part of a Jewish state mutating into a bi-national Israel/Palestine ‘for all its citizens’. The ‘one state in Palestine’ scenario is just around the corner, one further step away. A Palestinian state will also squeeze Israel territorially and divide its people by expelling Jews from their homes.

The balance-of-power in the conflict’s arena would change dramatically. The ‘hard variables’ equation of geography and topography, military troops and weapons acquisitions, would tilt in favor of the Palestinian side to the detriment of Israel. The ‘soft variables’ would include a buoying up of the Palestinian side and a resulting surge in  popular ecstatic calls for a conquest of the entire country. 

Only a fool believes that the Sudetenland debacle, which ultimately destroyed Czechoslovakia, is exclusive to Central Europe or that the incremental conquest from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, with its staged strategy, is indigenous to Southeast Asia. An even more fitting hypothetical parallel is that of Algerian national liberation, the paradigm studied and commended by the Palestinians decades ago: to wit, French military defeat and the mass flight of French settlers after 132 years of French rule in North Africa.  

Will Palestine become the Israeli Algeria?

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