Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Congress speech, where he declared that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria may remain beyond Israel’s borders in the future, requires new thinking on the Left and Right. The time has come to put the cards on the table.
Since the 1990s, Israel’s leftist camp has produced contingency plans for settlement evacuation. Every leftist politician has his dreams, and every party has its diplomatic plans and boundaries. At the end of the day, the plans are similar and all of them refer to the eviction of people from their homes.
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Ariel Sharon’s last gift to the settlement enterprise was the fact that since 2005, any notion of massive eviction is doomed for failure. Only 8,000 people were evacuated from the Gaza Strip, and we almost experienced a national catastrophe around here. The great praise lavished at the security establishment concealed an immense rift and great chaos that persist to this day.
Another mass evacuation is impossible not because of the risk of a civil war, but because Israeli society and Israel’s army are incapable of doing it. As one who believes in honoring any democratic decision, even if it means shooting ourselves in the foot, I do not wish for me and my rivals to experience the eviction of 50,000 to 100,000 settlers.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4079820,00.html