Israelisch Expansionisme 15

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. In American Prospect schrijft hij: 'Olmert is at best a recovering right-winger, and his plan for withdrawal carries the baggage of his past. It involves imposing a border on the Palestinians rather than negotiating one, and keeping a chunk of the West Bank under Israeli rule. At first glance, the obstacle to negotiations is the Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority, which refuses to recognize Israel. But even if moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas manages to reassert control, don’t expect real peace talks. Sharon and Olmert made no effort to negotiate with Abbas before Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January. In 2003, when Olmert first announced his backing for a pullout, he made clear that he did not expect agreement with the Palestinians, and that Israel would have to set borders on its own. The Gaza pullout demonstrated the price of that approach. There was no peace agreement, and no orderly turnover of authority in the area Israel left. A negotiated pullout would have boosted Abbas’s authority. Instead, Palestinian public opinion interpreted the withdrawal as a victory for Hamas’s terror attacks. But past diplomatic experience also shows that a negotiated agreement would place the border between Israel and independent Palestine very close to the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and Jordan. Olmert rejects that possibility. He hasn’t said exactly where he would put the line. But the best indication is the security barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank. Indeed, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s closest political ally, has said publicly that the barrier “will have implications” for the border.' Lees verder: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11464