Weekly Commentary: No to independent state in temporary borders

Dr. Aaron Lerner Date: 23 May 2013

So what's the big deal about having a sovereign independent Palestinian
state inside temporary land-locked borders in the West Bank?

We are strong, they are weak and we can always clobber them if things get
out of hand.

And what would be the big deal if the Palestinians actually ended up having
tens of thousands of rockets? After all, as Yossi Beilin argued this week
in an interview on Israel Radio, Israel is not concerned about the tens of
thousands of rockets held by Hezbollah - Israel’s concern is only if
Hezbollah actually shoots the rockets.

The above many sound pretty silly to you.

Unfortunately, there are all kinds of people recommending policy with some
pretty silly ideas.

There is every reason to expect that the same reluctance to act against
Hezbollah as it armed to the teeth over the years would gain expression in
the case of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Come to think of it, we already see this philosophy in play in the Gaza
Strip where in the last round we opted to restore "deterrence" rather than
wipe out the rockets.

But does any of this really matter?

After all, we are strong and they are weak.

Well, who is "they"?

Is "they" a force challenging Israel on one front or are we talking about a
multi-front conflict?

Now if the way that you manage to sleep at night is by always making
one-on-one comparisons of the capabilities of the IDF against the
capabilities of the armies of other countries in the neighborhood you may be
well rested. But your analysis is dangerously overoptimistic.

It certainly doesn't require much of an imagination to come up with various
scenarios under which a multi-front conflict develops. In fact, it doesn't
require much vision to think of scenarios in which a multi-front attack is
launched against Israel for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the
Jewish State (for example, Arab leaders desperately seeking to divert the
street’s focus from their domestic failures).

We aren't in a position to determine what happens in Egypt, Jordan, Syria
and Lebanon.

But we most certainly can still dictate what transpires in the West Bank.

And the very last thing that we can afford to do is to further exacerbate an
already extremely dangerous situation by taking steps that could readily
transform the West Bank into another serious threat in the event of a
multi-front conflict.

Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
(Mail POB 982 Kfar Sava)
Tel 972-9-7604719/Fax 972-3-7255730
INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il
Website: http://www.imra.org.il