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November 8, 2015 7:18 am
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Rabin Memorializers Pretend Separation From Palestinians Never Took Place

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avatar by Benyamin Korn

Opinion
Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat at the Oslo I signing ceremony, September 13, 1993. Photo: Wikipedia.

Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat at the Oslo I signing ceremony, September 13, 1993. Photo: Wikipedia.

American Jewish peace activists sponsored a full-page advertisement in The New York Times last week, complete with a large photograph of the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, urging implementation of Rabin’s dream of “separation between Israel and the Palestinians.”

They are either living in some kind of time warp or intentionally distorting Rabin’s legacy. Under the Oslo Accords, Rabin already implemented that separation, 20 years ago this autumn. And it’s still in effect.

The Nov. 4 ad in the Times was sponsored by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, an institution that has long advocated Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Invoking the memory and image of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, they headlined their ad with his words: “Separation between Israel and the Palestinians is the best solution for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Pretending that no such separation ever took place, the ad goes on to demand the immediate creation of “a demilitarized Palestinian state” next to Israel.

Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that Palestinian leaders have said, again and again, that they will never accept genuine demilitarization.

Leave aside the fact that “demilitarized Palestinian state” is an oxymoron, because a state that is “demilitarized” one day can quietly and gradually become militarized, and Israel would face world condemnation if it tried to intervene.

Instead, let’s consider the fantasy that Israel and the Palestinians need to “separate.”

On Sept. 28, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo II Accords, also known as the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement. It provided for Israel’s withdrawal from the cities in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank), where 98 percent of the Palestinian Arabs reside. And in the weeks that followed, Israel did just that. Israel’s forces retreated from the cities of Nablus (Shechem), Jenin, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Jericho and almost all of Hebron. Later, they withdrew from 100 percent of the Gaza Strip. A new entity was established, the Palestinian Authority, which took over all those areas. For the past 20 years, the PA has policed the streets, collected the garbage, issued the building permits and administered the elections — that is, when the PA deigned to have elections at all. In Gaza, the PA ruled at first. Today, Hamas is in charge there. Israel and the Palestinians separated 20 years ago. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinians ended 20 years ago. Anybody who claims otherwise is either deluding himself or trying to delude the rest of us. The problem is not that Rabin’s vision of separation was never implemented. The problem is that it didn’t work. For decades, peace activists insisted that separation would lead to peace. “Stop occupying the Palestinians and they will live in peace with us,” they insisted. Prime Minister Rabin gave it a try.Instead of peace, Israel finds itself living next door to a Palestinian Authority regime that is actively inciting the murder of Jews, sheltering terrorists and hiring them for its police force, paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists, and naming its streets and parks after killers of Jews and Americans.

Separation? Been there, done that. Look where it got us.

Mr. Korn, chairman of the Philadelphia Religious Zionists, is former executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent and the Miami Jewish Tribune.

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