We have no intentions to propose a solution to the struggle between Jews and Arabs over life and dominion in the Land of Israel. Proposed paper solutions were either consigned by time to oblivion while others appear today as mere caricature. Solutions that were actually implemented were drowned in blood. A precondition for a rational approach to the subject is an understanding that this conflict is sui generis, a direct result of the singularity of the Jewish people's existence and fate. Never was there a dispute where two peoples demanded that very same portion of land and regarded the same city as their capital.
If one required proof that the Jewish-Arab dispute over Palestine is insoluble, then along came Ehud Barak with his spurned concessions, which some people considered most generous while others termed them profligate, and demonstrated the thesis that there is no solution. Indeed, Barak himself and his collaborator Shlomo Ben Ami currently admit that an agreement with the Palestinians is impossible and therefore the former proposes unilateral retreat and hunkering down behind a fence, while the latter would go as far as inviting an international coercive force, which would interpose itself between the parties in order to save them from each other.
Despite this, the know-it-alls and the prognosticators of the left continue to disseminate the empty slogan "there is no military solution, there's only a political solution". In this manner they are more or less effacing all of human history, which is studded with military decisions that ultimately dictated political outcomes. With demagogic manipulation, leftists point to signing ceremonies of political agreements, but conceal the swords that enabled those ceremonies. The antecedent to the "political solution" that established the Hellenistic World was Alexander the Great's military victory. The victory over Napoleon at Waterloo yielded, as a political result, the "restoration" of the old royal regimes. It was only the military victory over the "Third Reich" which created the political conditions for the formation of present day Europe. The creation of the State of Israel would not have come about, save for the military victory which preceded it.
Hence, one should turn the leftist mantra on its head and state that, in general, military victories determine political outcomes.
According to this principle, what is the political outcome to which we should aspire as the result of a military victory in the Oslo War? The answer almost suggests itself: Dismemberment of the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of its leaders. The liquidation of Arafat's terrorist Authority is Israel's preeminent military goal, because that entity personifies two mortal, terminal threats to the very existence of the Jewish State: The demand for the ?right of return? of all the Arab refugees and their descendants and the demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state in Western Eretz Israel. The Palestinian Authority is both the "Palestinian State in the making" and also, by its very essence, the "Arab agency" for implementing the ?right of return.? Therefore, negotiations of any sort whatsoever are possible only with local bodies representing local interests, as opposed to the men from Tunis, the emissaries of the Palestine Diaspora. Furthermore, all negotiations can only refer to the search for a modus vivendi, a Latin term which means "a way of life" or a mode of existence, and not "Peace" nor a "Solution."
Thus, a realistic response to the question "What is your solution?" is the continuation of Zionist praxis and even its manifold intensification. Without it, not only will we not make progress, but our very existence will be in danger, because, for the State of Israel, stagnation is poison. Israel?s situation resembles a performer in a high wire act, where all physical forces attract him downward and only dynamic movement forward saves him from falling and crashing. The Arabs have all the material advantages, including unconditional support of the "world" due to hatred for Jews, love of petroleum and the vast Arab market, and the Arabs are aware of their strength. Therefore, merely to survive we must strengthen ourselves all the time both spiritually and physically, in that order. Our leitmotif must be unilateral action, free of any agreement or pact with the Arabs. Following the failure of the Oslo Agreements even the Israeli left has now reached the conclusion that "an agreed-upon solution" with the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yesha) is not possible and that therefore nothing remains but unilateral action.
However, only because the leftist camp is possessed, as if by a dybbuk, with an obsession to relinquish Yesha, has it hastily fabricated a new artificial "political horizon," dubbed Unilateral Withdrawal. According to that plan, Israel is to abandon, without any agreement, most of Yesha and uproot perhaps a hundred settlements, along with their 150,000 Jewish inhabitants, and ?apr?s moi, le deluge?: Flames of internecine civil war kindled within the Jewish people and flames of enthusiasm and motivation amongst the Arabs following the flight of the Israeli defense forces and the collapse of the Jewish settlement project. The outside world will then slowly arrive at the conclusion that the State of the Jews in its entirety was but a passing episode. The Palestinians, free even of the Oslo agreement stipulations, will immediately declare a state and this state will conclude military agreements with countries such as Iran, Iraq and Syria. Their armed forces and guns will swiftly threaten Jerusalem, Petach Tikva and Beersheba. The Palestinian state will be flooded by returning refugees who will press upon the Green Line. The waters of the mountain aquifer will be exploited to exhaustion and the air space will be closed off. These are the starting conditions under which Israel will then be compelled to fight an all out regional war to the very bitter end over Jerusalem and the Jordan valley. Alternatively, should these areas also be included in the Unilateral Withdrawal, then the war will erupt over the boundaries of the 1947 UN resolution and the Arab claim for the ?Right of Return?.
Even assuming that such a war would have erupted in any case as a direct and necessary consequence of the Oslo Agreement, just as the second World War was born out of the Munich agreement of 1938, let the readers judge our prospects for winning and our foreseeable casualty total under each one of these two scenarios: The present status quo as a starting line for war, versus the situation following Unilateral Withdrawal from most areas of Yesha. In any event, the question that is now posed in Israel no longer concerns this or that agreement with the Arabs, but our own agenda, unilateral in either case: Are we to retreat and discard everything we own beyond the Green Line or, on the contrary, go forward in building Zionism in the original ?Zion,? which is Jerusalem and Yesha?
In this context, listen to an echo from 68 years ago, the voice of Zeev Jabotinsky in his famous article "On the Iron Wall", which could have been written today:
?One cannot dream of a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs over the Land of Israel, neither today nor in the foreseeable future... Any native people is going to fight settlers as long as it has a shred of hope to rid itself from the danger of alien settlement. This is how the Arabs of Eretz Israel are acting and this is how they will act as long as they have a spark of hope that they can succeed in preventing the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel...
?We have no way of promising something in exchange to the Arabs of Eretz Israel? A voluntary agreement is ruled out? and therefore settlement can proceed apace only under the protection of a force which is not dependent upon the local population, an iron wall which the local population will be unable to breach.
?We are damaging our cause with our own hands if we keep prattling about an agreement and din into the minds of the leaders of the Mandatory Power that an iron wall is not the essential, but incessant negotiations.
?I do not intend to maintain that any agreement whatsoever is impossible with the Arabs of the Land of Israel. What stays impossible is a voluntary agreement.
?When every crack in the iron wall will be sealed, only then will the extreme groups lose their influence... and only then will influence pass to more moderate groups... in other words the only way to attain an agreement in the future is to totally abandon any attempt to reach an agreement in the present.?
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Elyakim Ha?etzni is an attorney and activist on behalf of Eretz Yisrael. He lives in Kiryat Arba.
If one required proof that the Jewish-Arab dispute over Palestine is insoluble, then along came Ehud Barak with his spurned concessions, which some people considered most generous while others termed them profligate, and demonstrated the thesis that there is no solution. Indeed, Barak himself and his collaborator Shlomo Ben Ami currently admit that an agreement with the Palestinians is impossible and therefore the former proposes unilateral retreat and hunkering down behind a fence, while the latter would go as far as inviting an international coercive force, which would interpose itself between the parties in order to save them from each other.
Despite this, the know-it-alls and the prognosticators of the left continue to disseminate the empty slogan "there is no military solution, there's only a political solution". In this manner they are more or less effacing all of human history, which is studded with military decisions that ultimately dictated political outcomes. With demagogic manipulation, leftists point to signing ceremonies of political agreements, but conceal the swords that enabled those ceremonies. The antecedent to the "political solution" that established the Hellenistic World was Alexander the Great's military victory. The victory over Napoleon at Waterloo yielded, as a political result, the "restoration" of the old royal regimes. It was only the military victory over the "Third Reich" which created the political conditions for the formation of present day Europe. The creation of the State of Israel would not have come about, save for the military victory which preceded it.
Hence, one should turn the leftist mantra on its head and state that, in general, military victories determine political outcomes.
According to this principle, what is the political outcome to which we should aspire as the result of a military victory in the Oslo War? The answer almost suggests itself: Dismemberment of the Palestinian Authority and the expulsion of its leaders. The liquidation of Arafat's terrorist Authority is Israel's preeminent military goal, because that entity personifies two mortal, terminal threats to the very existence of the Jewish State: The demand for the ?right of return? of all the Arab refugees and their descendants and the demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state in Western Eretz Israel. The Palestinian Authority is both the "Palestinian State in the making" and also, by its very essence, the "Arab agency" for implementing the ?right of return.? Therefore, negotiations of any sort whatsoever are possible only with local bodies representing local interests, as opposed to the men from Tunis, the emissaries of the Palestine Diaspora. Furthermore, all negotiations can only refer to the search for a modus vivendi, a Latin term which means "a way of life" or a mode of existence, and not "Peace" nor a "Solution."
Thus, a realistic response to the question "What is your solution?" is the continuation of Zionist praxis and even its manifold intensification. Without it, not only will we not make progress, but our very existence will be in danger, because, for the State of Israel, stagnation is poison. Israel?s situation resembles a performer in a high wire act, where all physical forces attract him downward and only dynamic movement forward saves him from falling and crashing. The Arabs have all the material advantages, including unconditional support of the "world" due to hatred for Jews, love of petroleum and the vast Arab market, and the Arabs are aware of their strength. Therefore, merely to survive we must strengthen ourselves all the time both spiritually and physically, in that order. Our leitmotif must be unilateral action, free of any agreement or pact with the Arabs. Following the failure of the Oslo Agreements even the Israeli left has now reached the conclusion that "an agreed-upon solution" with the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yesha) is not possible and that therefore nothing remains but unilateral action.
However, only because the leftist camp is possessed, as if by a dybbuk, with an obsession to relinquish Yesha, has it hastily fabricated a new artificial "political horizon," dubbed Unilateral Withdrawal. According to that plan, Israel is to abandon, without any agreement, most of Yesha and uproot perhaps a hundred settlements, along with their 150,000 Jewish inhabitants, and ?apr?s moi, le deluge?: Flames of internecine civil war kindled within the Jewish people and flames of enthusiasm and motivation amongst the Arabs following the flight of the Israeli defense forces and the collapse of the Jewish settlement project. The outside world will then slowly arrive at the conclusion that the State of the Jews in its entirety was but a passing episode. The Palestinians, free even of the Oslo agreement stipulations, will immediately declare a state and this state will conclude military agreements with countries such as Iran, Iraq and Syria. Their armed forces and guns will swiftly threaten Jerusalem, Petach Tikva and Beersheba. The Palestinian state will be flooded by returning refugees who will press upon the Green Line. The waters of the mountain aquifer will be exploited to exhaustion and the air space will be closed off. These are the starting conditions under which Israel will then be compelled to fight an all out regional war to the very bitter end over Jerusalem and the Jordan valley. Alternatively, should these areas also be included in the Unilateral Withdrawal, then the war will erupt over the boundaries of the 1947 UN resolution and the Arab claim for the ?Right of Return?.
Even assuming that such a war would have erupted in any case as a direct and necessary consequence of the Oslo Agreement, just as the second World War was born out of the Munich agreement of 1938, let the readers judge our prospects for winning and our foreseeable casualty total under each one of these two scenarios: The present status quo as a starting line for war, versus the situation following Unilateral Withdrawal from most areas of Yesha. In any event, the question that is now posed in Israel no longer concerns this or that agreement with the Arabs, but our own agenda, unilateral in either case: Are we to retreat and discard everything we own beyond the Green Line or, on the contrary, go forward in building Zionism in the original ?Zion,? which is Jerusalem and Yesha?
In this context, listen to an echo from 68 years ago, the voice of Zeev Jabotinsky in his famous article "On the Iron Wall", which could have been written today:
?One cannot dream of a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs over the Land of Israel, neither today nor in the foreseeable future... Any native people is going to fight settlers as long as it has a shred of hope to rid itself from the danger of alien settlement. This is how the Arabs of Eretz Israel are acting and this is how they will act as long as they have a spark of hope that they can succeed in preventing the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel...
?We have no way of promising something in exchange to the Arabs of Eretz Israel? A voluntary agreement is ruled out? and therefore settlement can proceed apace only under the protection of a force which is not dependent upon the local population, an iron wall which the local population will be unable to breach.
?We are damaging our cause with our own hands if we keep prattling about an agreement and din into the minds of the leaders of the Mandatory Power that an iron wall is not the essential, but incessant negotiations.
?I do not intend to maintain that any agreement whatsoever is impossible with the Arabs of the Land of Israel. What stays impossible is a voluntary agreement.
?When every crack in the iron wall will be sealed, only then will the extreme groups lose their influence... and only then will influence pass to more moderate groups... in other words the only way to attain an agreement in the future is to totally abandon any attempt to reach an agreement in the present.?
------------------------------------
Elyakim Ha?etzni is an attorney and activist on behalf of Eretz Yisrael. He lives in Kiryat Arba.