Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine – Bibi de Gaulle breaks silence

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Former Israeli Prime Minister and now Leader of the Opposition - - Bibi Netanyahu - has stepped up to the plate to answer the following claim made by the author of the 2022 Saudi Peace Plan – Ali Shihabi:

"They [Israel] can get a lot of what they want but have to give a bit to get a sustainable solution that will integrate them into the region permanently, but this will require an Israeli De Gaulle with guts and vision, and I don't see one on the horizon unfortunately"

France's President Charles de Gaulle granted Algeria independence in 1962 after 132 years of French occupation. In a riveting one hour interview on the same day Shihabi issued his above challenge – Netanyahu told Ben Shapiro:

 "If I'm elected now I'm going to have peace with Saudi Arabia. They trust me. They trust me to be the bulwark against Iran. And if we have peace with Saudi Arabia effectively the Arab-Israeli conflict is over. Yes – we don't have Yemen. Yes we don't have Iraq, Syria –that's not important"

Netanyahu committed:

"To do the things against Iran's nuclear program, and we did many things, I can't talk about them, but I can say I sent the Mossad into the heart of Teheran to pluck the secret atomic archives that Iran had and they brought it back"

Netanyahu has not publicly commented on Shihabi's peace plan since its release on 8 June - despite its implementation being the game-changer that could end the 100 years old Jewish-Arab conflict.

Shihabi's plan to merge Jordan, Gaza and part of the West Bank into one territorial entity called The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine – promises the following outcomes that Israel certainly wants:

• It would supersede two previous Saudi peace proposals in 1981 and 2002 calling for Israel to withdraw completely from the West Bank
• The two-state solution – the creation of a separate Palestinian Arab State between Jordan and Israel – promoted unsuccessfully by the United Nations for the last 29 years – is consigned to the diplomatic graveyard
• Amman – not Jerusalem – will be the capital of The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine
• The right of return to Israel is abandoned.
• Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and stateless refugees get full citizenship in the merged Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine with all the elements of sovereignty applicable to those Territories that belonging to a fully recognized state in the UN entail.

Netanyahu however wants one further outcome in the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine west of the Jordan River – telling Shapiro: 

"They can have all the powers to govern themselves but not to threaten us ... they can have their Parliament representatives, Executives, have their flag and their national anthem...  "...West of the Jordan River ... Israel and Israel alone controls security. We control the airspace, we control the ground security, underground security in case they want to do tunnels... We're not going to commit suicide for a favourable op-ed in the New York Times"

Essential – given: 

• the history of terrorist attacks on Israelis from Gaza and the West Bank and 
• the possibility that either Hamas or the PLO might use the West Bank and Gaza as launching pads to attempt to violently overthrow the Hashemites - designated as rulers of The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine under Shihabi's plan

Security control west of the Jordan River is to be negotiated under Shihabi's plan.  Netanyahu's demand for security control is not negotiable. I sought Shihabi's comment on Netanyahu's demand. Shihabi regrettably failed to reply. Netanyahu has made his policy clear to the Israeli electorate. Will Lapid and Gantz adopt Netanyahu's policy in the upcoming elections - branding themselves De Gaulles 2 and 3?

Author's note: The cartoon--commissioned exclusively for this article--is by Yaakov Kirschen aka "Dry Bones"- one of Israel's foremost political and social commentators--whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.

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