by Dan Schueftan

The dangers Yossi Beilin raises in arguing for Israel to make territorial concessions are valid concers. But we must not make the mistake of thinking the Palestinians will ever be partners in peace.

Yossi Beilin's warnings in response to an op-ed I wrote about the lawlessness of the Palestinians should be listed to, but we should not be tempted to adopt the policies he proposes. Someone who wants to cut Israel off from the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria and avoid the harm caused by a single state and poisoned integration with the Palestinians should do so in opposition to their nationalist movement. Because in the 100 years it has existed, there has never been any chance of it taking part in any historic compromise.

It is a flawed movement – violent, corrupt, and whiny – that has no constructive foundations and does not seriously try to promise its people a better future. It is addicted to terrorism and recalcitrance. In its existing form, it cannot be rectified. Under former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a Palestinian founding father and patriot whose hands were clean and who sought a constructive compromise, he won only 2% of popular support and was quickly shoved out of the public sphere.

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There is historic precedent for recognition of Palestinian lawlessness: the far-seeing David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, who was empathetic and moderate, realized as far back as 1947 the need to divide the land, for the same Zionist reasons that Beilin talks about now. They knew that this sick movement was an uncompromising enemy that would always be fighting us and always block Israel from applying its resources to implementing the reason for its existence: building the nation and taking in aliyah. Therefore, they formed a strategic partnership with King Abdullah of Jordan against the Palestinians that guaranteed Israel almost two decades of relative calm. That ended in 1967, only because the radicals in the Arab world – Syria, Egypt's Nasser, and of course the Palestinians – forced Jordan into war.

After than war, the right thing to do would have been to renew Israel's partnership with Jordan and shrug off rule over the Palestinians by reconnecting to a state on both sides of the Jordan River in which they were the majority and which was led by a responsible regime that would have kept them under control. But their proven danger demanded that they be prevented from venting their violent rage through the establishment of a physical divide in the Jordan Valley that would separate the West Bank from the "eastern front" in terms of strategic security. That was the core of the Allon Plan, which was accepted by the centrist elements in Israel's government, in contrast to the Right, along with Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, who rejected any territorial compromise and aspired to permanent control over Judea and Samaria. King Hussein could not make peace with Israel in those day, for fear that Nasser and his supporters would topple him.

When Jordan gave up its claims to the West Bank in 1988, the unilateral option remained. The fruitless attempts to work with the Palestinians, before the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and after it, all failed, for good reason.

The dangers that Beilin points to are serious and deserving of a response. As someone who wrote a book in 1986 committed to the Jordanian option and another book in 1999 (Disengagement: Israel and the Palestinian Entity) that preaches unilateral withdrawal from the vast majority of the West Bank, I am well aware of the need to detach ourselves from the Palestinians, as well as the cost and limitations of doing so.

But it has been proven time and time again that conditioning said response on partnership with the Palestinians or their approval leads only to an impasse. The Palestinians will oppose a unilateral move because they want to collapse into the state of Israel and/or be built up politically and economically by waving their veto power. They must be forced to accept borders and security arrangements, especially in the settlement blocs and in the Jordan Valley, that will take away their ability to hurt us.

About half of the Palestinians, the ones who live in the West Bank, can be expected to become a violent, whining enemy, like the half in Gaza after disengagement. An enemy that Israel can keep from causing harm without staying near it is preferable to an enemy for whose fate Israel is responsible.

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