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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (85737)	3/24/2003 5:21:09 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<Can you say "bargaining chip"?> At some point, after a lot more Israelis and Arabs have died, after there has been regime change in both Palestine and Israel, after both sides have leaders who are willing to compromise, after Force is rejected by Israelis and Arabs as the way to achieve national goals, after all that, a border will have to be drawn somewhere, to write a peace treaty. The borders that Sharon is drawing today, under the cover provided by Iraq2, puts off that day, by more decades. The Palestinians are not going to accept 4 separated tiny cantons as a "State", not in 10 years, not in 50 years from now. Sharon is making it impossible to draw the boundaries of a viable Palestinian State with a contiguous area. This is not a "bargaining chip", this is "facts on the ground." Sharon has 50 years of speeches and actions, all consistently saying he has no intention of dismantling any settlements. I could accept a Wall on the Green Line, as legitimate self-defense. I could even accept it, if they included the large settlements directly adjacent to the Green Line. But to extend it to totally enclose and subdivide Arab areas, this is not "defense". This is offense, a de facto expansion of Israel. It is the equivalent, the mirror image, of the Palestinian's "right of return" maximalist demand. Arafat still is trying to "push the Jews into the sea", and Sharon still is trying to "push the Palestinians East of the Jordan". If I'm right, then at some point Israel will unilaterally declare a Palestinian State in those 4 cantons, and then declare all Arabs as citizens of that State, and begin deporting Arabs into those areas, from the rest of the Occupied Territory. And the belts of Israeli settlements that surround these cantons, will continue to be expanded.