The son of former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin has suggested a peace agreement based on principles that the Palestinian Authority already rejects.
Businessman Yuval Rabin and Nice Technologies executive Koby Huberman posted their “new approach” on the Bitterlemons web site last week. Rabin and Huberman explained that their “Israeli Peace Initiative” (IPI) is a successor to the Arab Peace Initiative, the Saudi Arabia 2002 plan that would grant an undefined "normalcy" in relations between the Arab world and Israel in return for the Jewish State's surrender of all of the land restored to Israel in the Six Day War in 1967.
Abba Eban, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, once referred to the old boundaries as the ”Auschwitz borders.”
Although Rabin and Huberman encouraged Israel to respond with a “pragmatic ‘yes’” to their “end-game" vision, the PA already has rejected its basic points: land swaps, Jerusalem as a shared capital, long-term security arrangements and “mutual recognition of the genuine national identities of the two states.”
The Fatah movement, headed by Palestinian Authority PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has categorically rejected land swaps because “illegal settler gangs cannot be placed on an equal footing with the owners of the lands and rights.”
Fatah also thoroughly dispelled Rabin and Huberman's notion of "mutual recognition of…genuine identities.” Fatah officially affirmed “its rejection of the so-called Jewish state or any other formula that could achieve this goal," this past weekend at a three-day meeting of its faction's Revolutionary Council.
Although Rabin's father said several times that Jerusalem would remain Israel's undivided and eternal capital, his son Yuval envisions it beng "shared by the PA, despite Abbas's repeated denials of any Jewish presence even in the Old City, where the PA last week declared that the Western Wall has no connections with Jewish history.
The “IPI” also calls for Israel to surrender the strategic Golan Heights to Syria, “with one-on-one land swaps, coupled with tight security arrangements to curb terrorists and paramilitary organizations.” The authors of the plan said they would leave to “experts" how to carry out their idea of maintaining security with Syria, which has become a close ally of Iran and which has helped Hamas and Hizbullah stockpile lethal weapons in southern Lebanon and Gaza.
Regarding security for Israel in the proposed Palestinian Authority state, Abbas has stated there will be no international troops in areas such as the Jordan Valley.
The plan also unilaterally assumes that the PA will accept “symbolic exceptional solutions for refugees in Israel.” A basic Palestinian Authority demand, based on the Saudi peace plan, is to allow the immigration into Israel of milions of foreign Arabs who claim Israel as their home because their parents and grandparents fled the country in 1948. Most of them fled at the behest of Arab leaders who promised them they would return after annihilating the young Jewish state within a short time.