Former Minister Yossi Beilin supported the position of Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay that there is no need to evacuate the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria if Israel reaches a political settlement with the Palestinian Authority to create a Palestinian Arab state.
Beilin said in an article in Yisrael Hayom that he also believes that the Jewish communities should be left under the sovereignty and responsibility of the Palestinian Arab state that he believes should be established in Judea and Samaria.
"Labor Party chairman Avi Gabbai is right about the future of the settlements," Beilin wrote. "I am very hopeful that if he succeeds in the negotiations with the PLO, he will insist that settlers who wish to do so will be allowed to continue to live in their homes as Israeli citizens andand the residents of Palestine, and will respect the laws of the Palestinian state that will be established."
According to Beilin, Gabbai's words mean that the presence of Jews in their communities will no longer be an obstacle to political negotiations. "Gabbai says to the settlers: Israel's strategic consideration of not becoming an apartheid state, G-d forbid, will prevent you from forcing the majority in Israel. which supports the two-state solution and the implementation of the agreement. But since you settled (usually whether before or retroactively, with the help of the state) many places in the West Bank, you can, if you wish, stay there, with the consent of the Palestinian state, without Israeli law applying to you. The evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis will not take place, and you will not succeed in torpedoing any agreement."
Beilin noted that in the agreements he reached with PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the agreements that were known as the Beilin-Abbas agreement, they reached a similar conclusion. In this agreement, he wrote, "it was noted that all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip would be evacuated and all Israeli settlements in the West Bank would remain in place. The person who headed the Palestinian negotiating team during the years in which such negotiations took place, Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala), the former Palestinian Prime Minister, said publicly at a show at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds that he was prepared for all the settlements to remain, and that Israelis who wanted to continue living there would be allowed to do so. It is therefore worthwhile to listen to Gabbai.