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Looking to Washington
David Horovitz

FOR ENTERTAINMENT ON THESE warm evenings in Gaza, many Palestinians gather outside the homes of Hamas and Fatah suicide gunmen and bombers to watch the "farewell clips" the killers record before they set off to murder Israelis. The father of the bomber often takes a seat among the rows of viewers, and tells hovering camera crews he hopes all his children will follow in the new martyr�s footsteps. In yet another chilling precedent, one recent bomber�s mother appeared in the video with her son, spurring him on.

It�s no surprise, in such a climate, that 46 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed last month by Tel Aviv University�s Jaffee Center favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories. The unprecedented finding reflects utter despair at the prospects for reconciliation -- a widening national sense that intifada violence is ultimately designed not to rid the territories of settlers and soldiers, but to rid the region of Israel.

In any climate, though, forcing innocent families to leave their homes is morally untenable, Jewishly offensive. It also happens to be entirely impractical. A decade ago, the Rabin government expelled 400 leading Hamas activists who, when barred from entering Lebanon, spent the winter on a hillside in no man�s land, doubtless discussing terror tactics, before Israel was forced to bring them home again. Imagine attempting something similar, but on a larger scale, and among civilians. Would any neighboring country take them in? Would the international community stand silently by? The answer to both questions is no. Never mind kicking people out, our main strategic ally, the U.S., won�t even tolerate our sending troops into Palestinian population centers to try and thwart the terror attacks being plotted there against our civilians on our sovereign territory.

Whatever Israelis now tell pollsters, they�ve hitherto shown at the ballot box that they know transfer to be out of the question. Indeed, recognition of that fact is one of the reasons why most Israelis embraced the notion of land-for-peace -- hardly the most viable equation at present, but the only one that could offer Israel the hope of normalizing its relations with the Arab world, while maintaining its democratic and Jewish character. And support for that equation, in turn, is a key factor in the decision -- reendorsed for 35 years by governments of left and right -- not to expand sovereignty into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We have asserted sovereignty throughout Jerusalem since 1967, and extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights in 1981. But we have never tried to press a formal claim to Judea and Samaria because, among other reasons, to do so would either destroy our Jewish majority or, if we sought to deprive the Palestinians of the vote and other rights, destroy our democracy.

Yet over the years, those same governments of left and right have enabled 200,000 Israeli Jews to make their homes in that unclaimed territory. We have, in short, consistently followed an entirely inconsistent policy.

With successive governments either unable or unwilling to resolve that contradiction, the U.S. now seems to be stepping in. On March 13, it drafted the first ever Security Council resolution to endorse a vision of Israel and Palestine side by side. Why did Resolution 1397 register not a whit of Israeli government protest? Because, one suspects, it came almost as a relief.

And looking down the road, one suspects there would be further unstated relief were the U.S. to lead an international coalition imposing a permanent Israeli-Palestinian settlement, based on the bridging proposals set out by president Clinton. Such a "solution" would present all manner of religious, historical and most of all security concerns for Israel -- given the unreliability of international guarantees, especially at a time of confrontation with an uncompromising Palestinian leadership and a ferociously hostile Palestinian populace.

But if it were attempted, it would come as a consequence of our inability as a nation to solve for ourselves the internal contradiction that saw us populating parts of the territories while simultaneously acknowledging that we could not claim them as our own. We hoped Yasser Arafat would resolve this for us in 2000 -- by offering us peace if we chose to relinquish the unclaimed land. But he didn�t. And so, despite decades of resistance to an imposed solution, it seems we are now looking silently to Washington.