Last weekend Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, argued that a peace agreement must include disappearing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens by transferring their homes to a future, very circumscribed Palestinian state.
Palestinian legislator Ahmed Tibi's complaint that Palestinian citizens were viewed by Israel's leaders as nothing more than "chess pieces" goes to the heart of the matter. It is easy to dehumanize those you know and care little about. Israel's separation policy -- and its security justifications -- requires not only that Jews and Palestinians be kept apart, but that Palestinians be confined to a series of discrete ghettos, whether in the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza or Israel.
These divisions are the cause of endless suffering. A recent study of Gaza, the most isolated of these ghettos, found that a third of Palestinians there were physically separated from a close relative. Israeli-imposed restrictions force Palestinians to forgo marriages, learn of relatives' deaths from afar, miss college courses, and lose the chance for medical treatment.
The prioritizing of Israelis' security over Palestinians' freedom was a central weakness of the Oslo process, and the same skewed agenda pollutes the current peace talks.
In a commentary for the Haaretz newspaper last week, a leading general, Gadi Shamni, set out at length the many military reasons -- quite apart from political ones -- why Israel could never risk allowing the Palestinians a viable state. On the army's best assessments, he argued, Israel would need to control such a state's borders and much of its territory, including the Jordan Valley, for a period ranging "from 40 years to forever."
The reality is that no arrangement on earth can guarantee protection for those in the villa from the beasts lurking outside. Either it is time to abandon the villa, or to start seeing the jungle as a forest to be explored.
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