In order to save its status in the international community, Israel must offer the PA what former Prime Minister Ehud Barak once offered former Palestinian Authority head Yasser Arafat, Major-General (res.) Amos Yadlin proposed Tuesday.
Speaking at the Kalkalist economic conference in Tel Aviv, Yadlin, the former head of IDF Intelligence, suggested that Israel "put on the table the offer that Clinton put on the table." The Camp David offer included plans to give the PA roughly 94% of Judea and Samaria and all of Gaza for the creation of a new Arab state, and to give it control of the Temple Mount.
"Unfortunately," Yadlin said, "as I understand the PA's stance, they will reject [the offer]. But that will give us back our legitimacy."
If Israel does not do this, he warned, "we will lose the world."
Losing international support would mean financial ruin, he predicated. "The Israeli economy cannot survive if it loses the moral high ground," he warned. "The Israeli economy will thrive as it did in the 1990s if we offer a plan that the world sees as fair, a moral plan."
Regarding Iran, Yadlin expressed satisfaction with the United States administration's efforts to find a compromise.
"I suggest the following method of measuring if a strategy is good or bad for Israel," he proposed. "If the suggested compromise moves the clock back by half a year when it comes to the centrifuges - closure of problematic installations, removal of material... that is an important achievement, and if the Americans can obtain it I think we need to support it."
"It's not clear that it will work," he noted. "But I think the Americans are using the appropriate strategy."