By Caroline Glick ——Bio and Archives--August 12, 2016
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The practical irrelevance and strategic irrationality of the army’s recommended course of action make it hard to avoid the conclusion that the generals went into their meetings with Liberman with the goal of preventing him from developing a relevant strategy for contending with the elections specifically and the Palestinians in general. Fishman implied that this was the case when he noted that COGAT has been lobbying for two years to give up planning and zoning powers and legalize tens of thousands of illegal Palestinian structures in Area C. It is no secret that the IDF General Staff continues to support the strategic goal of Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria either in the framework of a peace deal with the PLO, or if necessary with no deal. So it makes sense that they use every perceived crisis as a means to advance this goal, even though both the two-state policy and the unilateral withdrawal policy failed completely years ago. The main objective motivation for the IDF’s arguably insubordinate behavior is the generals’ desire to avoid dealing with Israel’s demographic challenge. This is a challenge Israel has worked to avoid facing since it ended Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria in 1967. Israel has a dilemma with regards to Judea and Samaria. It needs to control the areas for security reasons. It wishes to control the areas because they are the cradle of Jewish civilization. But it fears retaining control over them because it wishes to retain its massive Jewish majority. Israelis worry that adding the Palestinians to the population registry will destroy that three quarters majority. If that happens, so the thinking goes, Israel will lose its international legitimacy on the one hand, and end the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty on the other. Regarding the issue of international legitimacy, events over the past 16 years have shown that international sentiment towards Israel is not positively impacted either by Israeli concessions to the Palestinians or by the Palestinians’ open rejection of Israel’s right to exist. To the contrary, ever since the Palestinians rejected statehood in July 2000 and opted for perpetual war with Israel, the level of international support for them has continuously risen, while support for Israel, particularly in the West, has consistently eroded. This state of affairs indicates that there is no direct correlation, and there may indeed be an indirect correlation between Israel’s international status and its willingness to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Consequently, Israel should not take the issue of international legitimacy into account in its strategic discussions of its long-term policy goals in Judea and Samaria. As for our genuine domestic concerns, the truth is that if adding the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria to Israel’s population registry as permanent residents or citizens destroys Israel’s Jewish majority, then we will need to suffice with something less than complete sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. The problem with determining how to proceed is that we simply don’t know what will happen. We have no idea how many Palestinians live in Judea and Samaria. All we have are competing unofficial estimations of that number. The Left ascribes to the demographic doomsday scenario. Based entirely on PA population data, the Left insists that Jews will cease to be the majority west of the Jordan River almost immediately if we aren’t already the minority. Consequently, leftists charge that anyone who recognizes that the two-state formula and the unilateral withdrawal option have failed is the moral equivalent of an anti-Zionist. The Right argues that the Palestinian population data are deliberately fabricated. In 2005, the independent American-Israeli Demographic Research Group published its first in-depth assessment of the Palestinian data. That study, and follow- on studies in subsequent years demonstrated that the Palestinians exaggerated their population size by 50 percent, adding some 1.5 million people to their population rolls that simply do not exist. Based on the AIRDG’s data, and on the fact that Israel’s fertility rates are higher than Palestinian fertility rates in Judea and Samaria, and that Jewish immigration rates to Israel are rising steeply while Palestinian emigration rates remain high, the Right has concluded that far from being a threat, demographics are a strategic asset for Israel. Unfortunately, none of this is the least helpful to Liberman, or anyone else, frankly. So long as we don’t have official, accepted Israeli data on the size of the Palestinian population, we cannot have a real debate about our strategic options going forward. And as Liberman insists, we need such a debate. We need to conduct a reassessment of our relations with the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria regardless of the results of the municipal elections. To this end, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should appoint a team to find out just how many Palestinians there are, and, no, Israel won’t need to send census workers to knock on doors in Ramallah or Jenin to accomplish this goal. We won’t even need to rely on PA data. All we need to determine the size of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria is a team of researchers capable of analyzing aerial photographs of Judea and Samaria, of interpreting Palestinian electricity and water usage data, and of collecting emigration data from the crossing points to Jordan and from Ben Gurion Airport. To minimize the danger that the data will be politicized, Netanyahu should appoint representatives of the warring demographic factions to the study group where they will be joined by analysts from the National Security Council. There are no magic solutions to our problems with the Palestinians. But there are options other than repeating let alone expanding on failed policies. To develop these options, Israel needs to know the dimensions of the demographic threat. Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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Chicago-born Caroline Glick, Center for Security Policy], is deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post. A former officer in the Israel Defense Forces, she was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians and later served as an assistant policy advisor to the prime minister. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the widely-published Glick was an embedded journalist with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division. She was awarded a distinguished civilian service award from the U.S. Secretary of the Army for her battlefield reporting.