T. Belman. This may be a plan but why just annex the Jordan valley and a small strip of land. We must annex a wide strip of land akin to all of C in order to make sure the highlands over looking the airport and Tel Aviv remain in our hands.
The Palestinians will start building rockets just as the Gazans did. We can’t stop this. When the rockets rain down on us, as they will, we will have to contend with them as we do with the rockets from Gaza.
Perhaps this is better than annexing it all and trying to avoid giving citizenship or paying $200 bullion to them to get them to leave.
By LIEL LEIBOVITZ, TABLET
You can call the recent onslaught of Palestinian violence against Israelis—six attacks on Wednesday and eight on Thursday, adding to the wave of bloodshed earlier this week—whatever you’d like. You can call it a new Intifada or the same old holy war; it hardly matters. What is obvious is that the situation demands resolution.
Where to begin? Not, sadly, with yet another round of negotiations. Even those who are, for some reason, still inclined to trust the despotic, corrupt, obfuscating and deeply illegitimate regime of Mahmoud Abbas would begrudgingly admit that bilateral talks can only work when there’s someone at hand to guarantee any agreement. The theater of carrots and sticks used to be an American production, which is why the Oslo Accords, having begun in secret in a chilly European capital, could only be made official with a handshake on the sunny White House lawn. But now that President Barack Obama has handed off regional hegemony to Iran and handed over Syria to Russia, no one in his or her right mind would pay a nickel for American guarantees. Vladimir Putin seems more trustworthy, in a horrible way, but with no strategic assets to be gained—the recent oil strike in the Golan notwithstanding—Putin has no conceivable interest in stepping in. The EU? The UN? Please.
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