I hope this finds you all well in these uncertain times. Someone
from Baltimore
asked me, about five weeks ago, to explain about President Trump’s “Deal of the
Century.” Below is what I knew then, with a few words at the end about what we
know now. I tried to provide my answer without badmouthing anybody. The truth
is that Trump and Kushner and Friedman and Netanyahu all seem like fine people,
although I’ve never had a Shabbos meal with any of them, that being my main way
of meeting new people. They’re all welcome to join us for Shabbos and receive
my Chevron tour (after Corona
is over).
In the meantime, the Deal seems to have
fallen out of the news in Israel,
replaced almost entirely by a preoccupation with Israel’s returning Corona virus. Still, it could come back at
any time, in the format I describe below, for better or worse, with Trump or
with another president. After you read what I wrote, perhaps you will be able
to formulate an opinion about whether or not you want it to return.
* * *
Something has happened for the first time in the past 53 years:
An American government has said it’s okay for Jews to live in Judea and Samaria,
it’s not against the law, and we’re going to let at least some of that be
permanent.
To the extent that an American
government’s opinions about the Land
of Israel are important
or relevant to us, this is amazing. All the other peace talks that have taken
place during that time – and there have been many deals and attempted accords
and agreements – have said that Israel has to leave all of Judea and Samaria,
including neighborhoods in Jerusalem such as Nevei Ya’akov and Ramat Eshkol or
give up some other part of the country in exchange.
If those agreements didn’t immediately
demand that condition, as with Oslo,
it was because there was never a discussion of a final agreement. All the
talks – Oslo,
Wye, Annapolis,
and Camp David Two, etc. – were interim agreements. In all those deals,
the Americans in essence said: "In exchange for leaving area-X over the
next four years, the Arabs will not shoot at you during the next four years."
That was it. This is the first time an American government is saying, "You’re
in Judea and Samaria, and you can stay there forever, and
you can annex it as part of Israel,
and if the Arabs like it, great, and if they don’t, you can ignore them and do
it anyway.”
Add
to this the fact that Netanyahu has said over and over throughout three
elections during the past year-and-a-half, before we knew any of the details of
the Deal, “I will not evacuate any Jew from his home.”
* * *
So, what’s the problem? Why did Chabad and most of the mayors of
towns in Judea and Samaria threaten to protest the Deal
vociferously? Why did the Yemina party, the closest thing there is right now to
a Religious Zionist party, not go into the government?
There were two problems, based on a
single provision of the Deal. The provision takes two large pieces of land
with a large population of Arabs – one in Judea, south of Jerusalem, where I
live, and one in Samaria, north of Jerusalem, where my sister lives – and declares
those two places to be an Arab state which Jews cannot drive through. In order
to accomplish this, the Deal divides the areas where Jews live in Judea and Samaria
into three categories.
The first category one might call “first
class” settlers. This includes everyone in the Jordan Valley,
Ma’alei Adumim, Kiryat Sefer, Gush Etzion, Beitar, and the Ariel Area. These
people all become part of the State of Israel exactly like someone in Tel Aviv.
This is amazing and wonderful, and it relates to hundreds of thousands of
people.
The
second category includes me, in Kiryat Arba, and maybe 100,000 other people – maybe
60,000, I don’t know yet. These towns will be annexed by the State of Israel
and never be given to the Arabs. But if the Arabs accept the Deal, then, in
four years, we may be limited in where we can drive. In Kiryat Arba, we live a
half-hour south of Jerusalem,
and half the people of Kiryat Arba work in Jerusalem (my wife, for example). If the
Arabs accept the Deal, they get a Palestinian state north of us, between us and
Jerusalem, and
anybody in Kiryat Arba who wants to get to Jerusalem has to drive south to Beer Sheva,
then north, via Kiryat Gat, to Jerusalem.”
That turns the half-hour trip to Jerusalem
into a three-hour trip. Half-a-million visitors, tourists, and daveners come
from Jerusalem
to Hebron every
year. If the Arabs accept the Deal, that will stop. Who is going to go from Jerusalem to Beer Sheva
(via Kiryat Gat) and then north to Kiryat Arba and Hebron? Who will want to do that?
Another example: My sister lives in Elon
Moreh, just outside of Shechem, where Joseph’s Tomb is. At present, she can
travel south to Jerusalem
or west to Tel Aviv. If the Arabs accept the Deal, someone in Elon Moreh who
wants to get to Jerusalem
or Tel Aviv has to first travel east to the Jordan Valley.
From Elon Moreh to Tel Aviv, would be like this: East to the Jordan Valley,
north to the Galilee, south to Tel Aviv: four
hours instead of one. To Jerusalem,
it would be three hours instead of one. In other words, life in Kiryat Arba and
Elon Moreh could become undoable in terms of what we have known until now. Here
is an example of the solution being a lot worse than the problem.
The third category of settler includes
all the young and not-so-young people who have started neighborhoods outside of
recognized towns. The Israeli government never recognized those neighborhoods
as totally legal, even if the government did pay for their plumbing
infrastructure and roads, and funds their kindergarten. One of my sons lived in
Esh Kodesh for a while, a suburb of Shilo. When he arrived, his was the 16th
trailer home. Today there are 70 families living there, many in individual
homes that they constructed. These young people long ago asked to be legal, and
it is taking many years for that to happen. They are not recognized by the
Americans as existing, and their towns are plumb in the middle of the “Palestinian
state.” Maybe this is 600 families, maybe 4000 people – it isn’t clear. If a
moment comes when the Arabs say, “Yes! We agree to the Deal,” that third
category of people will have to be evacuated. Netanyahu, or someone after him,
will have to evacuate them. Netanyahu said he would not evacuate anyone, but he
will do exactly that. It will be like Gush Katif all over again.
* * *
In March of 2017, I wrote an article for the Where What When about the Arrangements
Law, which proposed to legalize all those places so no Jew could be thrown out
of his house. The problem is that the law was passed by the Knesset but then rejected
by the Supreme Court six weeks ago!
So, where does all this leave us? Only
this: The Arabs have a lot of reasons for rejecting this accord. It annexes
Gush Etzion, the Jordan
Valley, and all those
other places, without demanding any replacement from the “Old Israel.” This has
never happened, and the Arabs are flabbergasted. They are not even willing to
talk to the Americans about this Deal. If they reject it, great! Everything is
then okay. We get to annex and to continue driving from Kiryat Arba to Jerusalem just as before. Netanyahu
has even been talking about the Deal out of both sides of his mouth, telling
the Americans, “Yes! The Deal is great!” and telling the settlement mayors, “Don’t
worry! The Arabs will never accept it.”
Well, is Netanyahu right? Is this a good
idea? Should we accept it? Ben Gurion did such a thing in 1947, accepting a bad
deal which he knew the Arabs would reject – declaring independence in the
middle of Israel’s
worst war, in which 6,000 Jews died – and ending up with a cohesive state.
Or should we reject it, as Chabad has
already done? (“You don’t divide up G-d’s land...”)
Or, should Netayahu accept it, and
everyone else reject it?
What do you think?
* * *
Since I wrote all of this, five weeks ago, a lot has happened.
Netanyahu seems to have chickened out, unlike Ben Gurion. After an Arab tantrum
and some whining from his "Corona emergency government national unity partners,"
he first said he would leave the Jordan Valley out of the Deal, which should be
the most obvious area to include in the Deal in terms of being part of the
Israeli consensus. Then, everyone in the government stopped talking about it. So
Chabad and the mayors from Judea and Samaria seem to have “won.”
Simultaneously the number of active Corona cases in Israel
has gone from 4,000 to 29,000, and America has not fared too well
either, going from 1,160,000 to almost two million.
Some say that Corona, an act of G-d, killed the Deal, and so,
I ask one more question: Is all of this a coincidence?
