When I first saw the overwhelmingly positive reaction of the national-religious community to the so-called 82% sovereignty plan outlined by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, I was reminded of the saying that a starving man regards a stale breadcrumb as a feast.
This plan is - in a word - a disgrace. The fact that it was enthusiastically accepted by most of the National Religious camp came as no surprise. These people are clearly tired of fighting for 100% of the territory G-d exclusively bequeathed to us, the Jewish people, in favor of a half-baked plan that will simply prolong the day when we can finally declare the total liberation of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, their uncritical embrace of this plan represents the total political and moral bankruptcy not only of our settlement movement, but its Knesset advocates, as well.
From a security standpoint, the 82% plan represents a clear and present danger both to Jews living in the territories and those of us residing in pre-1967 Israel.
People just don’t seem to comprehend the fact that it is the brainwashed Arabs living in the remaining 18% of the West Bank who will be motivated by the UN’s recognition of a “Palestinian” state to increase their murderous behavior, and given the near impossibility of hermetically sealing off these “Palestinian” majority enclaves, the drain on our manpower and resources will be enormous.
The 82 percenters have also been reluctant to spell out exactly what will happen to the Palestinian Authority (PA) once their plan is implemented.
Are we going to disarm the Palestinian security and intelligence organizations? Are we going to allow the PA’s “pay for slay” and murderous incitement to continue? And how about all the PA ministers who’ve been supervising their terror state? Are we simply going to keep allowing them to continue their activities without either targeting them for liquidation or lifetime imprisonment?
The fact of the matter is that unless all the Arabs occupying the territories are expelled, say, to Syria, their threat to our people will remain, and it won’t matter how many of them are allowed to work in Israel, which I am adamantly opposed to.
Their religiously inspired lust to exterminate us will eventually manifest itself in stabbings, shootings, and bombings, either carried out in the territories or Israel proper.
This homicidal urge to murder Jews is in their blood, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to remove this poison, except to remove them from our midst - not by encouraging “voluntary immigration,” but by loading them up on trucks and dumping them in Syria.
But this is a policy Smotrich and the sovereignty movement can’t even bring themselves to contemplate, let alone execute. They’d rather let some “forced” voluntary transfer mechanism do the dirty work for them, while Jewish children are beheaded and burned by the overwhelming majority of “Palestinians” who’d like to see an October 7 type massacre occur throughout the territories.
Not willing to wait
Well, I’m not willing to wait for the supporters of the 82% plan to realize that their preference for Palestinian “Bantustans” just isn’t going to work, nor am I willing to have our military continue their Sisyphean “mowing the grass” operations while new terrorists are being created every day in the Mosques scattered about the West Bank.
I want this insanity to end now with the expulsion of every Arab from the territories and Gaza. Yes, the world will howl about the presumed “injustice” of our actions. But at least we won’t be afraid to drive from Hebron to Shilo. Or to get on a bus in Ramot, or to put our children to sleep in Sderot without worrying about whether or not they can make it to a bomb shelter in time.
The writer spent 30 years in American prisons after being convicted of spying for Israel. Now living in Jerusalem, he is an investor and cofounder in a handful of technology companies. He also writes and speaks about Israel’s need to be militarily self-sufficient.