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Israeli concern after UN endorses Trump plan with path to Palestinian state
"The vast majority of the Israeli public, between 75% and 80%, reject another Palestinian terror state, which this time would overlook Ben-Gurion Airport," Dani Diker said
In the hours leading up to the U.N. Council’s unanimous vote, 13-0, on Monday to approve a U.S.-drafted resolution endorsing Washington’s 20-point plan for Gaza, experts told JNS that Israelis worry about the plan’s “pathway” to Palestinian statehood.
Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, said the “deterioration” was due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “silence,” and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, said his party would not be part of any government that agrees to a Palestinian state.
“It’s not only the right-wing ministers that are against this,” Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told JNS.
Diker’s organization found in a poll that between 75% and 80% of Israelis “reject another Palestinian terror state, which this time would overlook Ben-Gurion Airport,” he told JNS.
It’s unfair to blame Netanyahu, who wants to maintain close ties with U.S. President Donald Trump and keep the possibility open to normalizing with Saudi Arabia, according to Diker, who said that Trump has been making “enormous” efforts to bring Riyadh into the Abraham Accords.
Israel doesn’t want to come across as a “killjoy” and pour cold water on the U.S.-sponsored plan, according to Diker.
Diker told JNS that the Trump administration is making a mistake by taking its plan to the United Nations, which he thinks it did at the urging of its Arab partners, who hope to use the global body as an international lever to isolate Israel and bring further pressure against it.
Efforts to establish a Palestinian state won’t work, and repeating calls for a “two-state solution” ignore the nature of the struggle that Israel faces, according to Diker.
Martin Sherman, founder of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and a member of the Israel Defense & Security Forum, told JNS that the notion of a Palestinian state is a “dangerous mirage.”
“It’s been the centerpiece of the dialogue on the Israeli-Arab conflict for almost a third of a century, and we’re no closer to it,” he said. “The reason that they haven’t done it is because that’s not the real aspiration. The aspiration is not to build a Palestinian state but to demolish a Jewish state.”
A critic of the Oslo Accords since they were proposed in 1993, Sherman was harsher in his criticism of Israel’s leadership, calling the Trump plan a “grave missed opportunity by the Netanyahu government.”
When Trump spoke about relieving Gaza of its current population and rebuilding it, Israel should have immediately embraced, advanced and anchored it in the public debate, according to Sherman.
In every other global conflict, civilians are allowed to exit combat zones, Sherman said.
Egypt kept Palestinians trapped in dangerous conditions in Gaza for political reasons, despite needing to populate its new administrative capital under construction near Cairo, which was designed to house six million people. Turkey also could have used Sunni Arabs to counter its Kurdish demographic problem, according to Sherman.
“The whole Gaza population is around about 1% of the combined population of Turkey and Egypt,” he said.
Of the available alternatives, relocating the population is the most “liberal,” Sherman said.
He told JNS that he has advocated for three decades for giving “generous relocation loans” to Palestinians to escape the cycle of violence and the “clutches of the corrupt cliques” that hold power over them.
“The thing that I find amazing is anyone who claims to cherish liberal values supporting the Palestinian state,” he said. “Everybody knows that a Palestinian state will be the antithesis of liberal values. It will be a homophobic, misogynistic, Muslim-majority tyranny. Why would anyone advance that?”
The Israeli government should have invested heavily for years in advancing the idea of relocation, and it “boggles the mind” that it did not, according to Sherman.
Israel now finds itself with the Trump plan, which, in point 19, calls for the redevelopment of Gaza, reform of the Palestinian Authority and a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
“How is that any different from the Oslo Accords?” Sherman asked.
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