Mohammed Mar'i Saudi Gazette RAMALLAH – Senior Israeli politicians from the ruling Likud party called for the government to annex all or part of the West Bank and proposed paying each Palestinian family $500,000 to encourage it to immigrate to a place with a better future. The politicians made the controversial statements during a Jerusalem conference late Tuesday organized by Women in Green on the “Application of Israeli Sovereignty over Judea and Samaria (West Bank).” Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein of Likud said that applying sovereignty to the West Bank would send a strong message to the international community, which overwhelmingly supports the two-state formulation. “The lack of Israeli sovereignty over Area C means the continuation of the status quo. It strengthens the international community's demand for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines,” Edelstein said. “Looking ahead, we can start searching for ways to co-exist. Of course we recognize that another people live here and we need to find a modus operandi for living together,” Edelstein said. According to the Oslo Accord, Area A is under Palestinian administrative and security control, Area B under Palestinian administrative control but under Israeli security, and Area C is under full Israeli control. Area C, which today constitutes about 60 percent of West Bank land, is a geographic area created in negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1995. An Israeli annexation of the West Bank, land the Palestinians want as part of their future state, would likely be met with harsh international sanctions and rebuke, and is generally regarded as outside mainstream political discourse in Israel. Likud MK Zeev Elkin, who chaired the outgoing governing coalition in the Knesset, said Israel should take a page out of the Palestinian playbook, advancing piece by piece while never renouncing any of its territorial claims. “The time has come for us as the state of Israel to start acting in exactly the same manner. We will try to apply sovereignty over as much as we can at any given moment,” Elkin said. “In this way, we will try, slowly but surely, to expand the circle of settlements, and to afterwards extend the roads that lead to them, and so forth. At the end of this process, the facts on the ground will be that whatever remains (of the West Bank) will be merely marginal appendages,” he said. Last week, two senior Likud MKs caused an uproar when they stated that the party does not support a two-state solution, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech, during which he in principle agreed to a demilitarized Palestinian state, if the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state. Gideon Sa'ar, Education Minister, who is No. 3 on the Likud-Beiteinu joint list, said “two states for two peoples was never part of (Likud's) election platform.” MK Tzipi Hotovely, No. 15 on the list, said the Bar-Ilan speech was a tactical maneuver by Netanyahu only meant to placate the world. The extreme right MK Moshe Feiglin said that Israel “is paying 10 percent of its GNP every year for the two-state solution and the Oslo Accords. It's paying for separation fences, Iron Domes and a guard at every café. Soon we'll have to place Iron Domes in every school in Tel Aviv.” Feiglin added: “With this budget we can give every Arab family in Judea and Samaria $500,000 to encourage it to immigrate to a place with a better future.” “Polls conducted in Gaza and Judea and Samaria show that 80 percent (of Palestinians) in Gaza and 65 percent (of Palestinians) in Judea and Samaria want to immigrate. We have here the perfect solution,” Feiglin said at the Jerusalem's conference. Alan Baker, former Israel Foreign Ministry legal adviser, warned the conference that annexation was an abrogation of the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which Israel and the Palestinians committed to resolve their dispute through negotiations, rather than unilateral measures. “Israel recognized its right to annex Area C, but has chosen not to do so for diplomatic reasons,” said Baker, who explained that he did not support such a move because of its diplomatic implications. “We have committed ourselves to negotiations in the Oslo Accord, which is still in effect, whether we like it or not.” Baker said he believed that the government should focus on strengthening the Jewish right to build over the pre- 1967 lines, adding that it should “stop apologizing all the time.” The former advisor is one of the three legal experts who penned the Levy Report, which stated that Israel has a legal right under international law to settle Area C of the West Bank. He explained that “no one can deny the Jewish people its place as an indigenous people” on both sides of the pre-1967 lines. But he noted that international opinion increasingly refused to recognize this “historical fact.” European politicians, he said, have shifted their language with regard to the West Bank from “disputed territories” to “occupied Palestinian territories.” On Tuesday afternoon, Netanyahu said it would be foolish to run headlong into a peace agreement with the Palestinians that would entail deep concessions. “The regime has changed in Egypt, in Syria the government is shaking, and that can happen as well in the Palestinian Authority territories in Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu said that every sensible person understands that Hamas could take control of the Palestinian Authority, as it did in Gaza. “Therefore, contrary to the voices I hear in recent days encouraging me to run ahead, make concessions, withdraw, I think the diplomatic process needs to be managed in a responsible, not hysterical, manner, and with wisdom, not hastily. Otherwise a third Iranian terror base will be established in the heart of the country.” “Peace can only be achieved when security is guaranteed.”
