Saturday, January 11, 2014

The "pain" of withdrawing from occupied territories: was it "painful" for Nazi Germany to withdraw from occupied France, I wonder?

"Mr Netanyahu moves only when cornered, says Aluf Benn, editor of Israel’s leading liberal newspaper, Haaretz. Mr Kerry has made it harder for Israel’s prime minister to say no by proposing that any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would be a slow process, to be completed long after Mr Netanyahu is likely to have left office: perhaps five years to prepare for a military withdrawal, ten for a final administrative handover to the Palestinians. American-led monitors will provide further guarantees, much as they have helped keep Egyptian and Israeli forces apart in the Sinai peninsula. Land swaps should ease the pain of withdrawing from the settlements, enabling Israel to retain the largest, such as Modiin Ilit, now home to 65,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose high birth rate ups that number by 3,000 a year."