Actually the Green Line would be more likely used to refer to the borders from the 1949 armistice, not the borders from the 1947 partition plan. The 1947 UN proposal would have given Israel considerably more precarious borders than what Israel actually wound up getting in the 1949 armistice (the irony of course being that the Jews accepted the 1947 plan and the Arabs rejected it, and the Arabs wound up being worse off than they would have been if they’d taken the UN borders).
To those saying Israel will never give up the West Bank, I have to ask: what do you think the long term solution should be? Do you think Israel should just keep on enforcing a military occupation on a hostile population of over 2.3 million people? Forever? Or should Israel annex the West Bank and let all 2.3 million Palestinians there vote in Israeli elections, travel freely from Nablus to Tel Aviv, etc.? Or do you think Israel should begin “ethnically cleansing” the territories?
“Vital to security” in the sense that it makes Israel very thin at one point? If so, then why has the Security Wall already been built there, around the effectively imprisoned town of Qalqiliya? Heck, its inhabitants (and those of nearby Jayyous) would probably prefer simple outright occupation of the West Bank for evermore since at least they could then farm their land again! I don’t understand how occupying the West Bank makes Israel safer from invasion given the vast concrete wall (indeed, why didn’t they build this on the Jordan side if this “thin=insecure” point was so important?). In fact, building the wall on the Green Line is actually my long-term suggestion for stability. Building it where it steals 80% of the arable land and 50% of the water resources will make any West Bank state non-viable, with obvious consequences for the desperate residents.
Which of course was the point. To destroy a people.
To get an idea of one of the security concerns, have a look at how many major Israeli population centers are very near the West Bank.
Now consider what the Palestinians started doing as soon as they had autonomy in Gaza - they started firing rockets across the border into Israeli population centers.
As the saying goes, the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They were just handed sovereign control in Gaza. If they had responded by rebuilding those greenhouses, forming plans for economic rebuilding, putting people to work, and in general behaving like a reasonable, peaceful neighbor, they’d have a chance to prove that they could be trusted with control over the West Bank. It was their best hope for a state and a peaceful coexistence with Israel, from which they could have negotiated further concessions.
Instead, they start rocket attacks on Israeli citizens inside Israel. Not settlers, mind you, but people just minding their own business in their own country. This has played right into the hands of the hard liners in Israel, and the response is going to be a crushing military operation and probably a re-occupation of the territory.
And will the U.N. condemn the Palestinians for this naked aggression in the face of a peace offering? Will the left on this board? Or will you just make excuses about how the poor Palestinians are really helpless to control their extremists, and no one can blame them, and it’s all the evil Zionists who are to blame?
At one point in my life I was actually a bit sympathetic to the Palestinians.
No longer.
They have consistently amazed me with their awesome, mind-blowing lack of sense. I’m not certain why. It may be a leadership issue. But I can’t say much for the average Palestinian who tolerates it, either.
Israel has made mistakes, no doubt. Still, I see the Palestinians doing nothing for themselves. ISrael has conmsistenyl shown it is willing to step up the plate - the Palestinians have failed to honor any of their promises.
But the (despicable) rocket attacks are not new: 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, the list continues. There is clearly nothing about occupation which prevents those attacks: it is simply easier to aim a rocket at a settlement on your side of the wall than on the other. One must ask whether occupying the West Bank really does make Israel more secure from rockets, or whether it is a prime factor in murdering scum launching them in the first place. I would suggest that a Green Line Wall would at least allow Israel to document and photograph each rocket incursion to Israel proper in order to clearly establish the basis for any retaliation, and we all know who would come off worse in what would effectively be a battle of artillery between sovereign states.
Long term solution? Outright annexation I think. I’m a bit murky as to why exactly Israel never has formally annexed all the lands it won on the battlefield…though I suspect US meddling on the same order as keeping Taiwan from formally declaring itself soveriegn. Just a WAG on my part as I really don’t know.
As for the Palestinians there, they should be given a choice…accept formal Israeli citizenship or move out. Harsh I know, and probably equally unpopular with both Israeli citizens and Palestinians, but in the long run I think it would be best.
Thats because you are thinking politically instead of from a purely military perspective. Sure, in the long run a political solution to this would be best. But from a purely military perspective, they don’t really care if those communities are cut off, if the folks there are unhappy, etc…as long as they control the key ground. And militarily the West Bank is strategically vital ground to the security of Israel.
-XT
You can’t blame Taiwan on the US. They won’t declare themselves sovereign because of the big monster to the north. China would eat their lunch in no time if they did that, US involvement notwithstanding. If we were to interfere all we’d end up with is a bunch of dead Americans, and the outcome would be exactly the same.
Because then those millions of Palestinians would have to be given the vote in Israeli elections. Add them to the million or so Israeli Arabs who already do so, and you start to near a 51% majority voting block. And what will they vote for? Something Syria, Jordan or Egypt like and Jews emphatically don’t, whatever it is.
How, exactly? Against invasion from Jordan? Then spend those staggering billions already spent on the wall at the thinnest point on strengthening the border along the Jordan river, surely?
Well, ‘blame’ isn’t exactly the word I would use, but certainly I can say that the US has been a key factor in maintaining the status quo wrt Taiwan’s sovereignty, as pressure has been applied to them in the past to ensure that they do this. Whether or not China could or would ‘eat their lunch’ is a matter for debate, and I would love to discuss it with you (if you don’t know my views on this subject…I seem to recall you were in many of the same threads as I was in the past on this subject), but probably not in this thread. 
That sounds like a personal problem to me. Seriously, if thats the issue then they need to bite the bullet and deal with it IMHO. IS this the issue though?
Well, invasion from Jordan is certainly what they were originally taken to prevent, as thats kind of how they were used in the past. However, I was thinking of that ground in the hands of a hostile Palestinian state unable to curb its militant faction. Building walls does nothing to protect you from artillary/rockets after all. Look at the map and note the proximity of the borders of the West Bank to Israel’s various population centers (and to Jerusalem in particular). The West Bank represents a dagger that nearly cuts Israel in half and represents key strategic ground (I’m thinking ‘defense in depth here’) to Israel from the perspective of ground they NEED to hold and more importantly NEED to prevent anyone who may be hostile to Israel in holding. And I think Palestine would go neatly into the category of ‘hostile to Israel’…yes?
-XT
Yes.
But neither does occupying it: indeed, by doing so you are merely presenting closer targets for any weapon or bomb, not just rockets. If it so strategically important, why spend vast billions on a wall which does not encompass it?
xtisme:
Because they were hoping to use them as bargaining chips for peace deals with Jordan and/or Egypt.
But Jordan and Egypt outsmarted them…they renounced any claim to those territories in order to force Israel have no one but the PLO to negotiate with over them.
Ah…now that makes sense. I seem to recall something along these lines but had forgotten it. Thanks.
-XT
You’re making no distinction here between “Palestinians” and “Hamas” – they’re not one and the same. It was Hamas firing the rockets, not the Palestinians. Should the attacks be condemned? Sure. Even Hamas seems to be conceding they were stupid. (It’s worth noting in passing that the rocket attack was actually a reprisal for what Hamas thought [apparently mistakenly] to be an Israeli attack on one of its trucks. And in Israel, if you start trying to work out what was in reprisal to what, you’ll never do anything else with the rest of your life.)
Nope… Gaza is anything but sovereign. If it was, the Palestinians there would be citizens of something, rather than citizens of nothing.
All the above might seem far afield from what the OP asked, except that it exposes, to my mind, the fact that Israel and its supporters have no idea whatever what to do about the Occupied Territories. And absent any strategic ideas or vision, they fall back on what they know, namely blaming and demonizing the Palestinians. Well, if that was anything like a solution, then the Arab-Israeli problem would have been solved a long time ago.
MEBuckner lays out the choices starkly and accurately. Unfortunately, not a single one is acceptable to the Israelis, which is why we’ll just muddle on with the unworkable status quo.
And Xtisme, we’re on the same page here. You call for annexation, and say, “As for the Palestinians there, they should be given a choice…accept formal Israeli citizenship or move out. Harsh I know, and probably equally unpopular with both Israeli citizens and Palestinians, but in the long run I think it would be best.” Of course, nothing makes Israelis and their supporters go ballistic faster than that suggestion. Just watch.
Israel CAN’T annex the west bank and continue to be a liberal democracy, since all the Palestinians would have to be given Israeli citizenship and be allowed to vote. And since the Palestinians would be more interested in wrecking Israel than becoming full citizens of Israel this just won’t work. It’s like proposing the solution to the Northern Ireland conflict would be for Ireland to annex Northern Ireland. Sure that would satisfy the republicans and stop the bombs from going off in Britain, but now you’ve got bombs going off in Dublin. You’ve made the problem worse, not better.
Israel can’t annex the territories, it can’t expell the Palestinians, and it can’t allow full Palestinian independence since the first action of an independent Palestine would be to start firing rockets into Israel. So they muddle through with the occupation, even though everyone knows it can’t continue indefinately.
As for SentientMeat’s suggestion that Israel allow the creation of a Palestinian state, the Palestinian state will attack Israel, and Israel will invade that Palestinian state again, what exactly does that accomplish? It won’t help the Palestinians, it won’t help the Israeli’s, it won’t stop the Israel haters from blaming Israel for the war. Remember the Jenin “massacre”? Right now we’ve got low-intensity conflict, I don’t see how switching to high-intensity conflict will help.
Well…it seems to me that the article you cited doesn’t prove that its THE issue, one one of the issues. In fact, they don’t actually talk about voting as a key factor at all (which is what I thought you were getting at…I may be mistaken), but demographics. I’d say the majority of that article could more reasonbly be viewed as Jewish Israeli’s being a bit gun shy over Palestinians in their midst due to things like men and women strapping explosives to themselves and going into shopping malls or riding busses…and Arab Israeli’s taking the brunt of that hostility and wistfully thinking back to when things were better. Don’t you think? After a certain point I can certainly see a level of distrust and out right discriminiation creeping into ANY population where you have some undefined number of another ‘racial’ group that seems hell bent on killing themselves and taking as many of your ‘racial’ group with them.
There are certainly two sides of this coin, and unfortunately its the militants on both sides, but mostly the ones on the Palestinian side, that have made this situation what it is today. Reading through the article its pretty clear that in the past things weren’t nearly as bad as they are today…that Arab Israeli’s used to have a connection to Israel, that there were more good interactions between Arab and Jew, etc…but that this has changed for the worst. Who’s to blame for this change? Certainly the Jewish Israeli’s have a measure of blame…but I think the Palestinian’s, especially the militant variety, need to weigh in with their own full measure of blame for how things are. In fact, my guess is that this is exactly how they WANT it to be today, and they have gone out of their way through suicide bombings to create this level of hostility between the two groups.
-XT
And what a ringing endorsement of democracy this is!
Israel need not re-invade Gaza and the West Bank. Sickening as it may be, the Wall would turn the conflict into a simple artillery battle which Palestinians would see almost instantly that they were utterly outgunned in, whereas occupation allows roadside bombers and snipers to hold to an illusion that they were gradually winning the struggle. Sympathetic as I am to the plight of the desperate Palestinian people who bear the brunt of Israeli reprisals against militant scum, I think the entire world would recognise at that point that Israel could reasonably do no more than pull back behind the Green Line Wall and retaliate from the air against any rockets or mortars: at the moment, there is good reason for that Palestinian grievance (though it does not of course excuse those despicable actions of a tiny minority.)
One of the issues in the withdrawal, yes, but you asked why Israel never formally annexed Gaza and the West Bank: Voting demographics is the crucial factor in that issue.
Again, I see it as a factor, but I don’t see how the article you cited proves its a ‘crucial factor in that issue’. In fact, most of that article pointed me in a completely different direction from that. I guess I read it differently than you did.
-XT