The Israeli negotiator’s handbook

By Uzi Dayan, ISRAEL HAYOM

So far, we have seen negotiations about negotiations. Negotiations about the very existence of negotiations. Only now do the real peace talks seem poised to begin.

After many years of dealing with Israeli issues, and armed with the experience — not to mention quite a few scars — as an official who served as the head of the security committee during talks with the Jordanians, the Syrians and the Palestinians, I’m ready to offer my services and recommend seven core principles for this round of new-old negotiations.

1) A speedy, decisive return to negotiations, without any preconditions:

We must stop acquiescing to preconditions such as the release of terrorists. Freeing these prisoners is problematic both from an ethical and tactical perspective. The U.S. set that precondition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has decisively and wisely pushed peace talks forward, accepted it, to the best of my understanding, to neutralize prospects of either a settlement freeze or an early discussion on the 1967 borders. Negotiators must now return to a position of “no preconditions” in all other matters.

2) Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital:

We do not need the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish nation’s historic right to a state in Israel. But failing to recognize the existence of a Jewish state draws a huge question mark over how ready the Palestinians truly are to agree to two states for two peoples.

3) Defensible borders:

Israel’s need for defensible borders is written in blood. But how will such borders look? The answer is that they will be drawn in a way that fulfills our three basic security needs:

The need for strategic depth: The average width of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is 64 kilometers (40 miles). The strategic depth here is of little importance. But the need increases in light of growing threats stemming from the age of nuclearization, ballistic missiles, and long-range rockets that mostly threaten population centers.

The need for defensive depth: The era of “slim chances for war” is over. The Middle East has become a realm of uncertainty. Civil wars and the lethal combination of terrorism and movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood make it necessary for us to remain vigilant over the possibility of an attack from the east.

The need to be able to combat terror: The only factor that will guarantee the demilitarization of the Palestinian entity is a permanent Israeli presence along the West Bank’s eastern border. The disarmament of the Palestinian state is not only a condition that was guaranteed to Israel’s when it signed the “two states for two nations” principle. It is also a condition that ensures the security and fulfillment of any agreement. The situation in Sinai is a testament to that. The Jordan Valley “envelopes the state of Israel.”

Holding onto the Jordan Valley is the only way to fulfill these three national security needs. Only through full Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley can the Jewish state manage its own arrangements for security — us, the IDF and Israeli settlements in the Jordan valley. Not foreign armies.

4) Zero compromise on the “right” of return:

Only Israel can be allowed to permit any individual who wants to immigrate to do so, and that is, of course, if the country wants to absorb the immigrant. Plain and simple.

5) Security arrangements:

Israel requires several security arrangements to provide protection to its citizens whose lives, and not the Palestinians’, are in constant danger, and whose existence is wrapped up in the dangerous and delicate fabric of the region. Control and prevention, hot pursuit, the authority to arrest, and so on. The fifth principle has one critical aspect, and that is the control over airspace. The territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is, on average, just 40 miles wide. A fighter jet covers that distance in a few minutes. If we factor in our concern over safe civilian air traffic, then we reach one inevitable conclusion: Israel must maintain exclusive control over the territory’s airspace.

6) A solution to Hamastan in Gaza:

Whom does Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas represent? He can’t enter Gaza, and he couldn’t include Gaza in the Palestinian state which he represents. There won’t be a “three-state solution.”

7) Bilateral negotiations:

How many times have we heard the (true) cliche that “it takes two to tango”? Have you ever tried to tango with a third partner?

The Americans did not participate whatsoever in peace negotiations with the Jordanians. During negotiations with the Palestinians, the Americans did not so much as enter the room. On the other hand, the Americans sat down to negotiations with the Syrians and the results were as expected: The parties stopped speaking altogether, communicating instead with the Americans alone. A modern variation on the famous non-dialogue skit by legendary actor Shaike Ophir.

The Palestinians need to reach agreements with Israel, not with the U.S., not with the United Nations, not with the Quartet. The U.S. must understand that its role is limited to bringing the two sides to the table and implementing agreements. Other pretensions won’t succeed and will only cause harm.

A few words on the U.N.’s strategy

While both parties chose to pursue peace talks for a permanent solution, they also knew such negotiations had scant chances for success. It was a choice they made based on the assessment that the political cost of various concessions on the road to an interim agreement would be intolerable. The two sides also understood that even if they could not reach a permanent arrangement, an interim agreement would always be a possible alternative.

Israel controls most of the territory in Judea and Samaria, and it does not lay claim to territories under the Palestinian Authority’s rule. Therefore, Israel must insist that territorial issues will only be settled at the end of negotiations. And if not, so be it. Deliberations over Jerusalem, the refugees and other core issues will end up depleting Israeli munitions.

These are the seven core principles. There is no need to introduce red lines or road maps to solutions. Experience has taught us that such proclamations only produce one-sided obligations. The Palestinians, with the help of the “useful Israeli idiots,” view them as Israeli points of no return and continue to gnaw away at them, bargaining for the next concession.

Can you recall how the “Beilin-Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] agreement,” the “Geneva initiative,” the “Clinton parameters,” or the “Olmert concessions” wound up? We cannot afford to walk into the same trap.

And the most important thing to remember? We have got a Jewish state to build.

August 17, 2013 | 20 Comments »

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  1. Shmuel,

    Usual information about the Arab hamulas and their ingrained nomadism. I am sure that when and if the occasion arises, they can be bought out and moved elsewhere.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  2. @ ArnoldHarris:
    Allow me to supply for your perusal some hard facts from the field.
    The Arabs hamulas, (large extended families), inserted by various occupying powers into Eretz Israel and nomads. We have well established connections with several of them.
    They are in appearance settlers for the long pull but NONE established infrastructures in their villages and only have that if they move onto Jewish towns.
    They build huge family dwellings which as those of well off nomads have are great within but desolate and temporary outdoors.
    For example, Majd El Kurum, nearby, include some 10000 Moslems… all part of only four families…
    Adjacent to it is the village of Dir El Assad, from Syrian roots, and with the same development style.
    They are intrinsically not attached to the land they usurp and would move with the correct incentives.
    POINT of reference:
    When the Islamic armies prepared to destroy Israel in 1948, hordes of the nomads easily picked up and left to facilitate the planned massacres here.
    A great number of them will do it again if the Jews finally eject the unJews from government and elect Jews to govern.
    We do not need to do anything else.

  3. @ Yidvocate:
    Nonetheless, the wars of the Middle East, exacerbated by the cultural aspects of the Arabs, the murderous hatreds of Muslim Sun’a and Shi’a toward one another, the inability of most of these Muslim countries to feed, employ, care for and control their urban crowds, will continue indefinitely. Jews presumably are smart enough to utilize such unique circumstances as endlessly repeated opportunities for national expansion. That’s precisely what the European settlers who came to the Western Hemisphere did when they discovered that the hundreds of separate native American tribes spent most of their time fighting one another. By the time those tribesmen figured it out, the game was more or less over and they had lost everything.

    But all that is long-term thinking. What Israel must do now is to undertake annexations that will give the Jewish state permanent control over the Jordan River and Dead Sea defensible borders, while breaking up the Palestine Authority by cracking what would remain of their would-be ministate into numerous small pieces and negotiating separately with the traditional leaders of the main Arab local communities.

    Divide and conquer, Yidvocate. And never feel sorry for your enemies.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  4. @ Yidvocate:
    Yidvocate, I think both Professor Kedar and Uzi Dayan are correct in what they propose. My own contribution to this is to link their separate proposals.

    On the other hand, I probably am only one of a very small number of persons who think that the Jewish state of the future will require borders extending from the Gulf of Suez to the Syrian Desert, which, with additional lands taken from southern Lebanon, parts of Syria and possibly parts of the northwestern-most desert area of Saudi Arabia, would encompass some 100,000 square mailes, about ten times the size of present Israel, including Shomron and Yehuda.

    Ancient Israel in the millenium following the reigns of Kings David and Shlomo was in fact too small to be defensible in the face of assaults from the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. And nothing much about the geography of the Middle East has changed in 3000 years.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  5. @ yamit82:
    Yamit, I am well aware of Rav Meir Kahame’s calls to expel the Arabs from Israel. I was the editor and publisher of Kach Newsletter for the USA and Canada for the last three years of his life during 1987-1990 and for a year afterward while the Kach organization was splintering.

    But under circumstances of the present and at least the immediate future, no such mass expulsion will be agreed upon by any Israeli governing coalition. So you will have to think about getting rid of the Arabs in driblets, starting with those who take great pride in their intractability.

    Even if some sort of Middle East peace could be arranged, such an outcome is never long-lasting in Israel’s part of the world. For military and strategic and local defensive purposes, Israel can accept no eastern border closer to the Mediterranean Sea than the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. And in the long run — but before the end of this century — with a Jewish population about quadruple the size of the that which is now in place in the Jewish homeland, Israel must have regained control over the Sinai Peninsula lands east of the Jordan River extending out to the Syrian Desert. As those territorial needs become evident, a significant question will focus on how to handle the existing Arab populations.

    I am a trained and experienced urban and regional planner, but not a prophet. Obviously, the vital territorial needs of the Jewish nation and the Jewish state must develop a solution for dealing with the non-Jewish populations that come with these territories — in other words, getting rid of the bride but keeping the dowry, as Levi Eshkol once described it. I think the correct English word is “conundrum”. I suspect some sort of solution can be worked out as Professor Kedar has suggested, of permitting strictly local autonomy to the main Arab communities, but with no Israeli citizenship or voting rights, but possibly with Israeli citizenship offered to Arabs resident in the smaller communities of Area B in Shomron and Yehuda, but only for those who commit to keep the peace with the Jews and with the State of Israel.

    If you have a better and possibly more thoughtful answer to this problem, I’d be glad to read it.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  6. @ ArnoldHarris:

    ArnoldHarris and Professor Mordechai Kedar have the only remaining realistic solution as Israel is too gutless to complete the transfer that the Arabs started in 1948.

    No other solutions are worth any serious consideration.

  7. The Jews are at a great disadvantage against the Palis.: besides personally thinking they are all nice guys and profitable business partners of many of our top ex politicians and top security heads. When BB, Sharon and Barak all praised Arafat and his men for being those they all believed they could do business with, few at the time equated that statement or took it to mean Business literally. The Son of Abbas is heavily invested in Israeli companies and owns several outright. The Palis Mafia controls monopolies on every major import from cement to fuel: (Everything imported from or through Israel).

    They are all partnered with Israelis who have monopolies to supply. A neat arrangement that the American Robber Barons or Paraguayan colonels would be proud of today. Our politicians and security people have gotten too close and too personal with their Pali counterparts to effectively deal with them as enemies because they are not viewed as enemies but fellas we can do business with and why kill their golden goose?

    The Palis know and understand the Jews but the Jews have never really understood the Arabs. That’s why the Arabs are winning and the Jews losing the battle and we are losing and yes terror pays. Without terror would Israel have released any terrorists? Given up any land to the PA? Would Israel have even allowed no less recognize the PA? Terror pays because we allowed it to pay. The Arabs keep selling us that bridge and we keep on paying for the same bridge over and over again. No Joke, it’s real and it’s happening to us.

    The combination of not understanding our enemy, being too familiar with them personally and becoming business partners with them have all contributed to Israels’ defeat and the Arab victory albeit a long drawn out process where we forgot where we started from and why we began to lose by capitulating and devaluing every value the state was built upon.

    You can’t defeat an enemy that is also your business partner and who you believe is also your ‘partner for Peace’. The Arabs understand that game and the Jews who never learned the game of Poker or brinksmanship don’t understand the Arabs or the game.

  8. @ yamit82:
    Hear ! Hear!
    Now is the time to hire 12 Paraguayan colonels to lead our excellent soldiers into destroying the enemy within and out. I suggested tongue on cheek that some 12 years ago and now it is not longer just a pun.
    Get rid of the intentionally losing garbage that has been infiltrated into military functions here since Oslo and hire the above now… Will give be far better results, will not attack only Jews and is far cheaper…

  9. Friday, August 16, 2013
    Israelis oppose withdrawals in exchange for dropping right of return

    Poll: Most Israelis oppose withdrawals in exchange for dropping right of
    return
    Dr. Aaron Lerner – IMRA 16 August 2013

    Maagor Mochot poll commissioned by Ma’ariv and published 16 August:

    57% believe that the Oslo agreements hurt Israel on a political, security
    and economic level.

    53% would not vote today in favor of an agreement that includes a withdrawal
    from Judea and Samaria, even if the Palestinians would recognize Israel as a
    Jewish state and give up the right of return.

    Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)

  10. To comment on the negotiations is like discussing about a tooth ache that never goes away. I put the blame on us and all the Israeli Governments in the past. We fell into the trap of the 1967 borders…If I was at the helm of the Government, this is what I would propose:
    There were never 1967 borders, these were just armistice lines of 1949. Secondly, we will start negotiation on borders that were set aside for us by the League of Nations in 1922 ( both sides of the Jordan River )
    Thirdly, the land we captured in 1967 were taken from Jordan and Egypt and not Palestinians. The so called Palestinians are the ones who are occupying our lands. The Arab countries that started the war of 1948 and created the refugees problem MUST address to solving the problem in their own countries. Period. We have nothing to offer, except we are willing to accommodate some Palestinians in our country.
    Steve

  11. This is indeed the only way Israel will get what it needs in a true peace agreement.

    However, I have my doubts that the “rest of the world” (let alone the Palestinians) will see it this way, and maybe the best we can expect is the status quo, in which case Israel should be willing to do what it has to do and endure the condemnation of the world. Frankly, if we are in the right, does it really matter what the rest of the world thinks?

  12. Addressing the specific points that Uzi Dayan has raised, relevant to the historic, present and future rights of the Jewish nation and the permanent security needs of the State of Israel, I have heard of only a single set of cohesive proposals that would satisfy nearly all those prerequisites.

    I refer her to the plan suggested by Professor Mordechai Kedar, who has called for outright annexation by Israel of Areas C and B of Judea with autonomy status for the important Arab municipalities in the territories, including Jenin, Tulkarem, Kalkilya, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, and Hevron. This would result in Israel offering citizenship to only a small fraction of the Arab inhabitants of Shomron and Yehuda.

    The afore-cited autonomous Arab cities would each be under control of their own traditional leading families, all of whom are still influential despite the pretenses of foreign-supported and corrupt Palestine Authority. In fact, if Israel were to undertake the annexation called for here, that action alone would all but force the dissolution of the Palestine Authority, and the local Arab leaders, in order to enforce their own autonomous status, would probably cooperate with Israel to establish the replacement system.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  13. Norman is right. But almost nobody touches the core of the problem: if all rational people with some minimal knowledge of Middle East history know that, on the one hand Arab leaders have never meant peace, and on the other hand Western leaders and Israeli leaders keep insisting on the impossible, then why don’t these very people point to those leaders for the liars and criminals they are? There is no one single media outlet doing it (not even A7). Why should this disgusting consensus be accepted as inevitable?

    What’s unique about Israeli politics is that its characters claim they act just like most politicians would anywhere else when defending their country, whereas those they’re addressing are not facing existential threats – and some of them wage wars for totally different reasons. This is of course suicidal and must be denounced as such before it is too late. For Israelis who don’t get it, it is suicidal for two reasons: first because it tells international bullies that all Israel does is wrong – otherwise why go out of your way to justify it? – and second because it tells ordinary Israelis that Israel is strong enough both in arms and diplomatically to keep on normal life indefinitely. This is all dangerously delusional. Israel is not a country like every other, because no other UN member state faces huge academic and media delegitimization attacks in all democracies as Israel does. And despite its relative military strength, Israel is not in the military position to face big powers like the US or Russia if and when delegitimization reaches a critical point.

    In order for Israel to survive as a country in the long run (maybe not so long), Israelis must demand from their leaders that they assert the truth about the origin of the concept of a “Palestinian state” to the world in no ambiguous manner – not the British-led idea of another Arab state west of the Jordan, which was unjust enough but even then utterly rejected by the Arabs – but rather the Arab-League-PLO concept of a “Palestinian state”, which is the one that’s been insisted upon by all parties involved, and yet has always called for the destruction of Israel. If done – and it is the only way out of doom – that demand will shake the entire edifice of current international consensus about Israel.

    Israeli leaders of all parties will never do it if not highly pressed in that direction by the Israeli people. Jewish leaders have a dark history of betraying their own people, as the failure of the Anti-Nazi Boycott in the US and Europe due to Jewish leaders’ “diplomacy” sadly reminds us…

    These are the the core issues that should have been addressed and acted upon for several decades, and yet never were and are not as I write these words.

  14. The same old crew of either stupid zombies and unJewish traitors, capos and renegades painted over is still there. Dayans, Peresites, Lapid’s filth and the newly aborted garbage all vetted by the ever there gang of unJews.
    Does anybody ever studied the platform and working principles of the Dayan Institute?
    I read that cesspool’s shouts of joy during the “disengagement” and expressed plan to eliminate the Jewish leadership.
    It is beyond my ability to understand how and why intelligent people still reads and propagates their screed rather than helping to shred the “combina” by selecting a special temporary government replacing completely the scum in there until true free elections take place. The military and people in Egypt are doing what is needed here as well.

  15. Dream on.

    Uzi Dayan knows as well as every one else in Israel, that the Arabs don’t want peace.

    Israel has nothing to offer them that they want, short of giving up its life!

    Any one who thinks peace is possible with people who consider the killers of Jewish children to be heroes – are living in a fantasy world.