NAZARETH // Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign
minister, set out this week what he called a “blueprint for a resolution to the
conflict” with the Palestinians that demands most of the country’s large
Palestinian minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel’s
future borders.
Warning that Israel faced growing diplomatic pressure for a full
withdrawal to the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, Mr Lieberman said that, if
such a partition were implemented, “the conflict will inevitably pass beyond
those borders and into Israel”.
He accused many of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of
acting against Israel while their leaders “actively assist those who want to
destroy the Jewish state”.
Mr Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party campaigned in last year’s
elections on a platform of “No loyalty, no citizenship” and has proposed a raft
of loyalty laws over the past year targeted at the Palestinian minority.
True peace, the foreign minister claimed, would come only with
land swaps, or “an exchange of populated territories to create two largely
homogeneous states, one Jewish Israeli and the other Arab Palestinian”. He added
that under his plan “those Arabs who were in Israel will now receive Palestinian
citizenship”.
Unusually, Mr Lieberman, who is also deputy prime minister,
offered his plan in a commentary for the English-language Jerusalem Post daily
newspaper, apparently in an attempt to make maximum impact on the international
community.
He has spoken repeatedly in the past about drawing the borders in
a way to forcibly exchange Palestinian communities in Israel for the Jewish
settlements in the West Bank.
But under orders from Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, he
has kept a relatively low profile on the conflict’s larger issues since his
controversial appointment to head the foreign ministry more than a year ago.
In early 2009, Mr Lieberman, who lives in the West Bank
settlement of Nokdim, upset his own supporters by advocating the creation of “a
viable Palestinian state”, though he has remained unclear about what it would
require in practice.
Mr Lieberman’s revival of his “population transfer” plan – an
idea he unveiled six years ago – comes as the Israeli leadership has understood
that it is “isolated like never before”, according to Michael Warschawski, an
Israeli analyst.
Mr Netanyahu’s government has all but stopped paying lip service
to US-sponsored “proximity talks” with the Palestinians after outraging global
public opinion with attacks on Gaza 18 months ago and on a Gaza-bound aid
flotilla four weeks ago in which nine peace activists were killed.
Israel’s relations with the international community are likely to
deteriorate further in late summer when a 10-month partial freeze on settlement
expansion in the West Bank expires. Yesterday, Mr Netanyahu refused to answer
questions about the freeze, after a vote by his Likud party’s central committee
to support renewed settlement building from late September.
Other looming diplomatic headaches for Israel are the return of
the Goldstone Report, which suggested Israel committed war crimes in its attack
on Gaza, to the United Nations General Assembly in late July, and Turkey’s
adoption of the rotating presidency of the Security Council in September.
Mr Warschawski, a founder of the Alternative Information Centre,
a joint Israeli-Palestinian advocacy group, said that, faced with these crises,
Israel’s political elite had split into two camps.
Most, including Mr Lieberman, believed Israel should “push ahead”
with its unilateral policies towards the Palestinians and refuse to engage in a
peace process regardless of the likely international repercussions.
“Israel’s ruling elite knows that the only solution to the
conflict acceptable to the international community is an end to the occupation
along the lines of the Clinton parameters,” he said, referring to the two-state
solution promoted by former US president Bill Clinton in late 2000.
“None of them, not even Ehud Barak [the defence minister and head
of the centrist Labour Party], are ready to accept this as the basis for
negotiations.”
On the other hand, Tzipi Livni, the head of the centre-right
opposition Kadima party, Mr Warschawski said, wanted to damp down the
international backlash by engaging in direct negotiations with the Palestinian
leadership in the West Bank under Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Lieberman’s commentary came a day after he told Ms Livni that
she could join the government only if she accepted “the principle of trading
territory and population as the solution to the Palestinian issue, and give up
the principle of land for peace”.
Mr Lieberman is reportedly concerned that Mr Netanyahu might seek
to bring Ms Livni into a national unity government to placate the US and prop up
the legitimacy of his coalition.
The Labour Party has threatened to quit the government if Kadima
does not join by the end of September, and Ms Livni is reported to want the
foreign ministry.
Mr Lieberman’s position is further threatened by a series of
corruption investigations.
However, he also appears keen to take the initiative from both
Washington and Ms Livni with his own “peace plan”. An unnamed aide to Mr
Lieberman told the Jerusalem Post that, with a vacuum in the diplomatic process,
the foreign minister “thinks he can convince the government to adopt the plan”.
However, Mr Warschawski said there were few indications that Mr
Netanyahu wanted to be involved in any peace process, even Mr Lieberman’s.
This week Uzi Arad, the government’s shadowy national security
adviser and a long-time confidant of Mr Netanyahu, made a rare public statement
at a meeting of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to attack Ms Livni for “political
adventurism” and believing in the “magic” of a two-state solution.
Apparently reflecting Mr Netanyahu’s own thinking, he said: “The
more you market Palestinian legitimacy, the more you bring about a detraction of
Israel’s legitimacy in certain circles. [The Palestinians] are accumulating
legitimacy, and we are being delegitimised.”
Mr Warschawski doubted that Mr Lieberman believed his blueprint
for population exchanges could be implemented but was promoting it chiefly to
further damage the standing of Israel’s Palestinian citizens and advance his own
political ambitions.
In his commentary, Mr Lieberman said the international
community’s peace plan would lead to “the one-and-a-half to half state
solution”: “a homogeneous, pure Palestinian state”, from which Jewish settlers
were expelled, and “a binational state in Israel”, which included many
Palestinian citizens.
Palestinians, in both the territories and inside Israel, he said,
could not “continue to incite against Israel, glorify murder, stigmatise Israel
in international forums, boycott Israeli goods and mount legal offensives
against Israeli officials”.
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