TORONTO — A Palestinian state is quietly and steadily emerging with the knowledge and cooperation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, charges a member of an organization categorically opposed to territorial compromise.
“Unfortunately, Netanyahu has done a great deal to lay the ground work for a Palestinian state,” claimed Yisrael (Izzy) Danziger, the director of operations of Mishmeret Yesha, a grassroots activist group based in Jerusalem that believes not a single “grain of sand” in the territories should be relinquished to the Palestinians.
Danziger, a 59-year-old resident of a settlement in the West Bank, said that Netanyahu has adopted this position against his will due to international pressure.
The Israeli government is allowing the Palestinian Authority to establish the infrastructure of a state under its very nose by permitting the PA to build a police force, schools, industrial zones, roads, water pumping stations, quarries and the like.
A two-state solution would not only jeopardize Israel’s existence but lead to its destruction, he warned in an interview during a recent visit to Toronto.
By ceding strategic high ground and vital water sources to the PA in any future agreement, Israel would be undermining its own security.
Judea and Samaria, as he prefers to call the West Bank, belong legally to Israel, he said, adding that Palestinian refugees can be resettled in any of the more than 20 Arab countries.
Jews living in the West Bank face a war of terror, with tens of thousands of terrorist incidents having occurred since the 1993 Oslo accords, Danziger declared. “Since Oslo, the security situation has deteriorated.”
For the past few years, Mishmeret Yesha, a division of the Movement for Jewish Sovereignty in Israel, has been training and equipping Jewish rapid response teams in the West Bank with armoured combat vests. These vests, each worth $1,250, offer a high degree of protection from bomb blasts and shrapnel.
“Many people have been saved by these vests,” he noted.
Danziger, a former New Yorker and an Orthodox Jew, claimed that the dire security situation in the West Bank is a microcosm of the problems Israel currently faces on all fronts.
Israel’s already cold peace with Egypt will become colder now that Egyptians have voted to elect a new president, Mohammed Morsi, a member of the anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood movement.
Morsi will not openly cancel the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, but will allow the complete radicalization of the Sinai, Danziger said.
With terrorists establishing themselves in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Israel may be forced to mount retaliatory raids into the Sinai, prompting Egyptian military responses, he predicted.
He said, “Egypt will be fighting us from the border of the Negev.”
Danziger fears that Islamic forces will overthrow the monarchy in Jordan and supplant Syria’s secular Baathist regime, turning Syria into “another Lebanon.”
In the event of an Islamic takeover in Amman, Israel may have to invade Jordan for its own self-protection, he said.
According to Danziger, Israel is neither militarily ready to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities nor prepared to defend itself against an Iranian counter-strike.
In his view, Israeli Arabs, comprising 20 per cent of Israel’s population, cannot ever be loyal citizens and are a “cancer” in Israel’s body politic. “They are a cancer because of who they are and what they believe,” he observed, saying they owe their religious and national allegiance to the greater Arab world.
“Basically, they are intrinsically disloyal to Israel. They have to be transferred to an Arab country. It will have to happen in the course of a very major war.”
Surveying these scenarios, he concluded, “Israel’s basic security is threatened.”
Israelis are generally too complacent about these looming threats to Israel’s national existence, Danziger said.
“The Israeli psyche, the Israeli mindset, has to change,” he said, pointing out that a large proportion of able-bodied Jewish men and women do not even serve in the armed forces.