January 23, 2006
By Martin Walker, UPI Editor
Washington Times
The Gaza Strip since the Israeli withdrawal last summer has "turned into Hamas-stan and al-Qaida-stan," Israel's recently retired military chief General Moshe Ya'alon claimed Monday.
The violence and chaos in Gaza and its use as a launching pad for repeated rocket attacks was an ominous lesson that meant that Israel could not afford to proceed with the proposed unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, Ya'alon went on. Gaza was now in a state of anarchy and was wide open to terrorists who sought to use it as a launch pad for attacks on Israel.
Israel would need "defensible borders" that would have to include the ability to control the crossing of the River Jordan and all other access points to any future Palestinian state on the West Bank, Ya'alon told the annual Herzliya security conference. Ya'alon spoke after former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who said that Israeli settlements on the West Bank were "illegal" under international law and claimed that some settlers sought to justify "the sustained subjugation of the Palestinians."
Carter added that Gaza "as presently constituted is not viable" and that "there is no possibility of a viable Palestinian state on what remains of their territory.
"It could be acceptable as well as viable if the Wall (Israel's new security fence) was moved to the 1967 borders and the Green Line and if the settlements are removed," Carter later explained.
The contrast was sharp between Carter's position and that of General Ya'alon and other Israeli security experts, who all stressed that with Hamas poised to achieve political legitimacy in this week's Palestinian elections, Israel could not count on a reliable negotiating partner from the Palestinian side. Without such a partner, able to make a peace treaty and to uphold it and enforce it, Israel could hardly proceed.
"The basic problem is that the Palestinians do not accept Israel's right to exist as an independent state," Ya'alon said.
Israel's security dilemma was now acute, warned former General Amos Gilead, director of the Political-Military Bureau at Israel's Defense Ministry, who said that the Palestinian elections were likely to entrench Hamas into a powerful political role.
"It is likely that Hamas will never give up the option of terrorism," Gilead said. "The emergence of a violent terrorist entity by democratic means, as we have seen with Hezbollah in the Lebanon, changes the situation. The question now is whether the United States and the Europeans will hold to their promise to shun a Palestinian Authority that includes Hamas."
Former President Carter, given a respectful hearing as the statesman who brokered the Camp David agreement that negotiated the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, accepted that the new political role of Hamas had changed the situation.
"All of us recognize that Hamas is a radical organization that has been guilty of acts of violence and terrorism," Carter said. "I hope that political success will moderate Hamas and lead it to become a non-violent organization."
Carter, who was scheduled to hold talks with the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen later today, was in the region to help monitor the Palestinian elections. Abu Mazen was "a person of integrity, but he has severe limitations on his authority," Carter said. The precondition of any progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations would be "the control of the violent elements in Palestinian society," Carter went on, adding that he was prepared to accept "violent military confrontation" for this to be achieved.
His Israeli audience was skeptical of the ability of Abu Mazen and Fatah to achieve this, and thus also skeptical of the emergence of a stable political authority that could be an authoritative, legitimate and trustworthy partner in any peace process. This Israeli conviction had been the basis of hospitalized Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision last year to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, with the option of a further unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.
Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, currently running the government as Sharon lies in a coma, had been a leading advocate of unilateral withdrawal. But there is no early prospect of such a withdrawal from the West Bank while Israel awaits the outcome of this week's Palestinian elections.
The terms of such a unilateral withdrawal have now become a contentious political issue in Israel, not simply over the future of the settlements in such a withdrawal but also over its security implications. A hostile or lawless Palestinian state on the West Bank could expose Israel, only 9 miles wide at its narrowest point, to rocket or missile attacks on strategic targets like the Ben Gurion international airport and its power plants, its strategic highways and central urban areas.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, earlier told the conference that he was "categorically opposed" to any further unilateral withdrawals. Netanyahu added that the current security fence should be moved to increase Israel's ability to safeguard its "strategic core," such as the airport and the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Israel's vulnerability to such attacks means that any future settlement would have to include firm guarantees of de-militarized areas in a future Palestinian state to prevent the deployment of any heavy weapons or rockets in areas that could reach Israel's strategic core. To guarantee that such weapons could not imported, said the former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, Israel would have to control all the access points to any future Palestinian state.
http://washtimes.com/upi/20060123-080637-5165r.htm