Every time the United States forces Israel to surrender land for “peace,” it is followed by rocket attacks and civilian casualties, National Union chairman and Knesset Member Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz said Monday.
Commenting shortly after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “Israel undermines U.S. policy” speech at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention, MK Katz referred specifically to the actions of two former United States presidents.
Ex-President Bill Clinton, husband of Secretary Clinton, convinced then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to withdraw IDF forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. George W. Bush pressured Ariel Sharon to surrender the Gaza region in 2005 and expel all Jews from the area.
MK Katz noted that in both cases, massive rocket attacks from those areas on Israeli civilian populations followed and escalated into all-out wars. By now, he continued, America should have learned from its mistakes, but Obama seems to expect Israel to divide Jerusalem and give up Judea and Samaria. The result would be is another source of rocket barrages and another war.
The legislator, a former elite special forces commander who was critically wounded during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, is responsible for helping to establish many Jewish communities throughout Gaza, Judea and Samaria.
MK Katz also responded to Secretary Clinton’s ominous warning that if Israel does not surrender Judea and Samaria, local Arabs would soon over-populate the country and cost Israel its Jewish majority.
He declared that similar demographic scare tactics are a century old and that the population figures officially being used were doctored by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority under then-chairman Yasser Arafat in an effort to inflate the number of Arabs living between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River.
Former Ambassador Yoram Ettinger has presented population statistics that show that conventionally accepted demographic figures are inaccurate and that the number of Arabs in the Land of Israel is far less than what most people believe.
Katz's main point was that demographic fears used to defend withdrawals can not be given the same significance as security threats, such as rockets being fired from the hills of Samaria at Israel’s densest population centers if Israel agreed to a withdrawal.