'Netanyahu and Ya'alon's freeze policy may have worked if we were a country like Qatar'
Photo: EPA
Tami Arad
Photo: Vardi Kahana
Netanyahu's stalemate policy based on a fantasy
Op-ed: Prime minister sees no solution to the Palestinian problem apart from easing the pain. But standing in one place while continuing to manage the conflict is a dangerous gamble.
The one and only solution which could have, it seems, solved most of our problems is a Palestinian state somewhere in Sinai,
out of sight and mainly out of mind.
If we would like to build a story out of this idea, we could write that it’s the reason why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is forced to continue the freeze or no-way-out policy. According to the perception of Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, there is no solution to the Palestinian problem apart from easing the pain. And ice, as we know, eases pain. Not necessarily a headache.
It's a fantasy which could have been fulfilled if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wouldn't have made such a big issue out of the West Bank and Jerusalem and if Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi wouldn't have denied the plan he allegedly proposed.
Al-Sisi's 'Initiative'
Smadar Perry
Analysis: Proposal for Palestinian state in Sinai was basically aimed at getting rid of Hamas leadership. But just like they are stuck with Gaza siege, Israel and Egypt are stuck with military wings and missile launchers.
Unlike Netanyahu, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett isn't resting on his laurels and is from time to time suggesting creative solutions taken from an inexhaustible arsenal. The latest idea has to do with Iran and Qatar, and on the way he is also attacking the Israeli left which supports the establishment of a Palestinian state.
According to Bennett, the left is caught in a dangerous conception, like the one which led to the Yom Kippur War. The Bayit Yehudi leader, who often uses catchy metaphors, is ignoring the prosaic fact that if then-prime minister Golda Meir had accepted the challenge, which was accepted by prime minister Menachem Begin six years later, the Yom Kippur War would have been avoided.
In his position as economy minister, we would have expected Bennett to understand the security situation out of an economic perception of profit and loss, but he is driven by an ideology which sees the Palestinians as shrapnel in the national rear end, and so as long as we fail to find the tweezers to pull out the shrapnel, we will have to continue using ice.
Until then, Bennett says we must deal politically and economically with the head of the octopus (Iran) and with the neighborhood thug (Qatar). But that idea suffers from a slight problem of pragmatism. Who exactly will hit the thug and the octopus? "The lands of Israel" or the wide coalition it leads?
Bennett slammed the leftists for living in the 1990s, but according to that same paraphrase, he is living in the 1960s, although he was born five years after the Six-Day War. Those days, Israel woke up one summer morning and discovered that it was an empire. Quite a few mornings have passed since then, and it seems that we have gone back to seeing things in the right proportions.
Netanyahu and Ya'alon's freeze policy may have worked if we were a country like Qatar. Then we would be adding to the defense budget NIS 30 billion a year, a sum the defense establishment needs in order to start dealing with the threats posed by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS and the organizations that haven't been born yet.
According to that same fantasy, we could have also kept in our closet a complete wardrobe of Iron Domes and Active Trophies and created numerous "fashion lines" which would defeat the tunnels and the mortar shells and string the ISIS mujahedeen on belts with dissolving sequins. We run our lives from one budget to another, with a constant overdraft, and all that is left for us is to pay up every time a hidden missile goes out on a blind date with a Grad missile.
If I may go back to reality, we are a small country with limited resources, and honesty would do no harm in this case. Even if we cut career soldiers' pensions and put the defense establishment on an extreme low-fat diet, Israel doesn't have the economic ability to fully deal with all the threats.
It's true that during a peace process no one promises us a rose garden, but the gamble of standing in one place while continuing to manage the conflict is as dangerous, and could also be economically expensive and alarming.
