TO ALL AM ISRAEL
Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly offered to “economically empower” the 1.4 million Arab residents of Judea and Samaria. The Arab world, including our ostensible “peace partners” in Jordan and Egypt, have flatly turned down the offer.
It doesn’t require an advanced degree in international diplomacy to figure out why.
The last thing an Arab world dedicated to Israel’s disappearance wants to see are 1.4 million West Bank Arabs so captivated by the material success they’ve achieved that they’ve lost their appetite for becoming part of a Hamasian “Palestine”.
Nobody appears to be more disturbed by this prospect than King Abdullah of Jordan. “Any notion of economic empowerment outside a political solution leading to an independent and viable Palestinian state is rejected,” he declared in a statement following talks with Mr. Netanyahu in Amman.
Having rejected economic empowerment as a step toward peace, the Jordanian monarch offers in its stead a unilateral Israeli retreat to its pre-June 1967 “Auschwitz” lines, an immediate end to all Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, the lifting of the Gaza “embargo” and a halt to all Israeli archeological excavations and other “unilateral steps in Jerusalem that threaten the holy places [and] aim at changing its identity and emptying the city of its Arab Muslim and Christian populations.”!!
In brief, our Jordanian “peace partner” has presented us with an engraved invitation to self-immolation.
We need to more than merely say no to that invitation. In addition to pushing all the harder on the concept of “economic empowerment,” the Netanyahu government should, with all due respect, strongly urge King Abdullah to become a partner to a genuine peace effort by restoring to the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria the Jordanian citizenship revoked by his father King Hussein in 1989. Israel has no intention of separating these people from their “West Bank” homes, but their right to recover their “national identity,” including the right to join their compatriots in Jordan if they so choose, must be granted them.
With even the best of intentions, the path to an Arab-Israeli rapprochement will be fraught with difficulties. But if it has any chance of achievement, it will have to be grounded in solid realities, not Utopian illusions. To the economic empowerment and restoration of the Jordanian citizenship of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, we vote a resounding YES!. To the jeopardizing of Israel’s existence in pursuit of a bogus “peace process” the answer must always be NO!
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