Plan for Arab-Israeli Reconciliation
- The P.A.I.R. Initiative -

The Roadmap approach contains fatal flaws that must be examined. To pursue a true peace with justice it is necessary to first demonstrate the futility and danger inherent in pursuing this Roadmap and similar approaches, and to make way for fresh thinking.

CONTENTS OF PART II:

II-A There is no development plan to avoid a demographic time bomb.
II-B Arab hostility toward, and rejection of, Israel and Jews is not being addressed.
II-B.1  The Roadmap Approach Leaves Terrorist Organizations, Which Are Unalterably Opposed to Peace, In Power
II-B.2 The Roadmap and Similar Approaches Make No Provision for Reeducation for Peace.
II-C The Roadmap and Similar Proposals deprive Israel of sufficient territory for self-defense, which would create dire risks to everyone.
II-D The Roadmap approach would probably require the expulsion of 400,000-500,000 Israelis from Their Homes
II-E The nations have failed to recognize the historic rights of, and the immense debt they owe to, the Jewish People.

The Roadmap peace plan proposed by the U.S., European Union, Russia and the U.N. is inherently unworkable on a demographic basis alone and it contains other fatal flaws as well. It attempts to confine two conflicting parties within a space far too small to permanently accommodate even one of them. In a few years the natural growth of both Arabs in the disputed territories and Jews and Israeli Arabs inside Israel will generate bitter conflicts from competition for limited space and resources.

Modern infrastructure projects routinely come with comprehensive development plans to assure that long term needs can be met. If the Roadmap plan was truly feasible, its proponents would have already presented a comprehensive development plan along with it.

Proponents of the Roadmap propose to confine about 5 million Jews and about 6 million Arabs, including refugees from surrounding Arab countries, within only 10,165 square miles ( Israel, Gaza and the "West Bank") The initial density would be over 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm). The present densities of China and India are 360 and 930 ppsm, respectively, and they are considered crowded nations. Even America, with only 80 ppsm, has many pockets of high population densities, which are already causing infrastructure and transport-related problems due to overcrowding.

Any credible development plan should accommodate growth requirements for at least 100 years. In only 50 years the total Israeli population comprising Jews and Israeli Arabs is projected to become 20 million with 2,550 ppsm. The proposed Palestinian state would contain 19 million Arabs with 8,100 ppsm. Even if birth rates decline gradually there would still be a problem because birth rates would have to decline dramatically and soon to avoid trouble. Any viable plan must assure jobs, food, water, energy, a viable economy, infrastructure, etc. combined with rising living standards which acts as a multiplier on the demand for resources. These problems would exist even without an ethnic conflict. Simply put, the Roadmap announced on April 30, 2003 offers no practical development plan because none is possible given demographic realities. More details and references are available in Appendix I-B.

The Road Map and similar proposals fail to deal with the reality of Arab hatred for Israel, Jews and Judaism,  and the encouragement of and indoctrination in this hatred by nearly all Arab governments , the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And they fail to deal with the fact that the organizations which currently dominate the Palestinian Arab community, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and others, are terrorist in character and dedicated to the destruction of Israel. These supposed peace plans not only do not require an end to foreign financial and military support to the terrorist organizations and their diplomatic-political fronts, including the PLO and the PNA, but actually encourage or require such support.

Any agreement for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs with a chance to succeed requires, as a minimum

    a)  An end to foreign support, direct or indirect, for the Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations.

    b)  The election of a new Palestinian leadership without any involvement in, or support for terrorism, the destruction of Israel, or hostility to Judaism and Jews.

    c)  The reeducation for peace of all of the Arab and Islamic peoples, including but not confined to the Palestinian Arab community.

While it is true that the Road Map and similar proposals in theory call for an end to terrorist attacks on Israel, they assign all the authority for carrying out the suppression of terrorism to the Palestinian Authority, which is completely dominated and controlled by the very terrorist organizations that carry out the attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers. Not surprisingly, no progress whatever has been made in carrying out these provisions of the Road Map. Palestinian Arab leaders have promised Israel again and again in writing since 1993 to stop terrorism and other forms of violence. Yet no effort to carry out these promises has been made, and instead terrorism has  grown steadily worse and casualties from it have steadily increased.  The reason for this failure is directly related to the terrorist character of the present Palestinian Arab leadership and the climate of hatred for Israel, Jews and Judaism that their educational and media arms propagate.

Numerous members of the Palestinian "police" and "Presidential guard" double as active members of the terrorist actions. Hundreds of members of the Palestinian ‘police" have carried out terrorist attacks. Several thousand terrorists are on the payroll of the Palestinian National Authority.

 The constitutions or covenants of Fatah, Hamas and all of the other Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations all call explicitly for the destruction of Israel. The Hamas Charter also calls explicitly for the extermination of the Jewish people (links).

Palestinian television and radio, the print media, and the PNA-appointed preachers in the mosques regularly and insistently call for the destruction of Israel, the extermination of the Jews, and terrorist attacks ("martyrdom operations."). Small children, including kindergartners, are given military training and told that it is their duty to carry out terrorist attacks on Jews and Israel. School textbooks describe Israel as an illegitimate entity and teach Palestinian Arab children that it is their  religious and patriotic duty, to war against and destroy.

Similar lessons are taught to Palestinian Arab children in the schools of "refugee camps" (actually Palestinian Arab towns and urban or suburban neighborhoods) run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This agency is totally dominated and run by the Palestinian terrorist organizations, which exploit it as a source of funding for their propaganda, child indoctrination and "military" training programs

Any genuine peace settlement will absolutely require the end of all international funding, whether from Arab countries, Iran, the United Nations, the European countries, or the United States, to the Palestinian and other Arab terrorist organizations and their diplomatic-political front organizations, including the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian National Authority. Diplomatic recognition of these organizations will also have to be withdrawn if peace is to be achieved. The Palestinian Arab community will need to choose a completely new leadership, free of the taint of involvement in terrorism, aggression and anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred, to negotiate peace with Israel.

The climate of hatred which created and continues to sustain the Muslim-Israel conflict, and which is the root cause of the Palestinian Arab’s problems, is hardly confined to the Palestinian Arab community. In the Arab states, Iran, and other Muslim countries, Israel and Jews are vilified in schools, the government-financed and controlled press, and books by respectable academics. Children in school are taught that jihad, or holy war against the n0n-Muslim world, is their sacred duty. Vicious anti-Semitic forgeries, such as the notorious anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been widely circulated and endorsed by respected scholars, and even placed on exhibit in libraries as "authentic" Jewish documents. Another widely circulated book, The Matzah of Zion, by Syria’s Defense Minister Mustapha Tlas, repeats the  medieval "blood libel" that Jews practice human sacrifice and cannibalism of non-Jews in their religious ceremonies.  Hitler’s Mein Kampf  is also a best seller. Serials on government television in Egypt ,  Syria and Iran depict Jews as conspiring to take over the world,  killing and consuming the blood of Gentiles as a part of their religious rituals, poring molten lead down the throats of Jews who marry Gentiles, and scores of other vicious lies. These programs are also broadcast by the widely viewed Al-Manar television station broadcast by the Lebanese terrorist organization Hizbullah. Saudi Arabian television programs for toddlers teach them that Jews are "bad" and "the sons of pigs and monkies." Three-year old toddlers are even forced to repeat such lies on these television programs. The list of examples of massive indoctrination in hatred of Jews, Judaism and Israel, pervading the educational systems of the Arab countries, Iran and several other Muslim countries, could go on and on.

Any peaceful and just solution to the problems of the Palestinian Arabs, and to the larger conflict between the Islamic nations and Israel, of which the Palestinian Arabs’ problems are a by-product, absolutely requires an end to this indoctrination in hatred, and its replacement by education for peace and co-existence. This process of re-education must include the accurate information about the Jewish people, Judaism as a faith, the positive statements about the Jewish people and Judaiism in the Qaran, and the actual history of the Jewish people, the state of Israel and the conflict over Palestine that we have summarized above. It will also mean an end to the teaching of the distorted and hostile perceptions of  Israel and Jews that currently dominate Arab and Muslim schools and the government-controlled media of  the Arab and Muslim countries.

 In the absence of such a re-education process, any promise by the leaders of the Palestinian National Authority or other Arab regimes to put an end to terrorism and other forms of warfare against Israel will not be made in good faith and will not be carried out.

II-C The Roadmap and Similar Proposals deprive Israel of sufficient territory for self-defense, which would create dire risks to everyone.

The Road Map and similar proposals in the same vein would severely weaken Israel’s defenses by forcing Israel to withdraw to the June 4, 1967 borders or something very close to them. Far from bringing peace, this enclosure of Israel within what former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once memorably called the "Auschwitz borders" would inevitably result in a huge increase in Israeli and Arab casualties from terrorist attacks and the unavoidable Israel measures of self-defense.

Every military specialist who has ever examined these borders, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces of the United States, have concluded that they are indefensible. It would leave Israel only nine miles wide at its narrowest point—or less than the distance from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House in Washington, D.C.! The Jewish sections of Jerusalem, with a population of some 400,000 people, and many more than that including the city’s suburbs, would be literally a stone’s throw from, not to mention within easy rifle and pistol range of, m potentially hostile forces in eastern sectors of the city. An ugly defensive barrier would have to be built right in the middle of a major urban center and holy place for three faiths in order to create even a small modicum of everyday safety for the city’s now-divided inhabitants. This is exactly what spokesmen for the Palestinian Arabs say they wish to prevent at all costs.

The proposed "old-new" borders would place the mountains of Judea and Samaria, as well as those of the Golan Heights, all of them immediately adjoining Israel’s population centers, in the hands of enemies or potential enemies who could use them to shell Israel’s major cities and urban areas at will, and sweep down to occupy them within a matter of minutes. In the event of another war, reoccupying these mountains, now once again in the hands of enemies, could only be done at an immense cost in Israeli lives, if it could be done at all.

By stripping Israel of the territorial depth that is absolutely necessary for its successful self-defense, in the event of a major attack on it by still-hostile, or at the very least potentially hostile, neighbors, the Road Map and similar proposals increase the danger that Israel might be forced to choose between utter annihilation on the one hand and the use of nuclear weapons as a last-ditch act of self-defense on the other. Therefore it is necessary to contemplate the unthinkable and point out that any existential threat to Israel’s survival could provoke Israel to unleash her maximum response, with dire consequences for other countries as well.  Any genuine peace settlement, in order to protect the interest of Israel, the Arab and Iranian peoples and the entire international community must avoid placing Israel in such a dilemma by allowing it sufficient territorial depth to defend itself if need be.

By insisting that the June 4, 1967 lines, which were never intended to be anything except temporary military ceasefire lines, form the basis for the future "permanent" borders between Israel and its neighbors, the proposed borders of the roadmap plan would force the uprooting of the 400,000 to 500,000 Israelis who now live outside the 1967 lines. Such an uprooting would  cause massive suffering to hundreds of thousands of people, would utterly bankrupt a small country that is already overburdened with huge defense and humanitarian expenses, and would force an already overcrowded country, the size of New Jersey and two-thirds nearly uninhabitable desert, to suddenly accommodate a huge influx of refugees. The demoralization, confusion, anger and vast increase in poverty would be enough, in and of themselves, to cause the collapse of Israel, or at the very least so lower its people’s morale as to make them extremely vulnerable to invasion and conquest.

Even the unilateral evacuation of 9,000 to 10,000 Jews Gaza and parts of Samaria (in the "West Bank") by Israel’s own government in 2005 has caused immense suffering and hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses to Israel’s people. Far from bringing peace to Israel’s frontier with Gaza as Israel’s leaders hoped, this unilateral concession by Israel has led to the daily shelling and rocketing of Israeli towns and villages near Gaza, including the city of Sderot with its population of 20,000 people. Today, half or more of the population of this unfortunate town, now on the "front line" for terrorist attacks by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees and all of the other terrorist factions that control Gaza, have also become refugees. This experience has proven that Israeli withdrawals from territory and the forced evacuation of Israelis from their homes in this territory, only result in more terrorism and more refugees. Such forced evacuations of Israelis are definitely not the road to peace.  

Any just settlement of the conflict must respect full Jewish rights and also the unique contribution of the entire Jewish people to the world community over thousands of years. Recognizing Jewish rights does not diminish Arab rights nor conflict with them, provided we adhere to the whole truth. It is usual to hear people speak in support of specific "rights" of the "Palestinian Arabs". It is unusual to hear people speak equally in support of specific rights of the Jewish people in Israel. This type of anti-Jewish bias is reflected in one-sided ‘peace’ arrangements such as Oslo and now the Roadmap.

For this reason, an authentic and enforceable peace agreement must explicitly recognize the rights of the Jewish people to their national homeland, Israel, also known as Palestine, and must affirm all  the parties’ commitment to the rights of the Jewish people to return to, settle in, and acquire land in their national homeland, in accordance with the provisions of the  League of Nations Palestine Mandate. 

These issues are covered in more detail in the Appendixes to Part II, sections A through E, including maps, charts, graphs and illustrations.