In this week's issue of Up Front, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert talks bluntly in a way that has incensed his own political camp.
He points out the hypocrisy of his fellow ministers who oppose a Palestinian state and yet sit in a government that is formally committed to this end.
Olmert says the Right is divided in two: those who went along with Oslo or the road map on the bet that the Palestinians could always be relied upon to torpedo their own state, and those who sincerely believe that separating from the Palestinians is in Israel's best interests.
Olmert's honesty has produced much gloating on the Left, yet for decades the salient question has been not whether to separate from the Palestinians but how. The idea of transfer has rightly been relegated to the extreme fringe, and autonomy has long ago been rendered unrealistic. This leaves statehood, whether independent or a confederation of some kind, but this approach depends on a Palestinian leadership that has abandoned terrorism and wants peace with Israel.
Now that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is beginning to speak of "moving" settlements and other unilateral steps, what he and Olmert argue is that such a Palestinian partner will not emerge in the near future. Therefore, banking on a comprehensive agreement (as the Left does) or on keeping all the settlements forever (as the Right does) is not in Israel's interest.
The irony here is that even as the Left is right in saying that a full peace treaty with an acceptable Palestinian partner is the preferable option, this same Left keeps ensuring that we'll never get there. Why would the Palestinian leadership end terror or drop their demand of "return" when the Left's finest are willing to sign a deal that requires them to do neither? Why should the Palestinian people oust their rejectionist leaders when neither President George W. Bush nor Israel seem to take his demands for "new Palestinian leadership" seriously?
We do not particularly like Olmert's defeatist attitude on the questions of demography and of regime change on the Palestinian side. If the Zionist movement had listened to those projecting demographic doom over the past century, there never would have been a Jewish state. And it is strange that just when Bush is calling for Palestinian regime change that Sharon would act as if the current leadership is immutable.
Yet once demographic trends and the current Palestinian leadership are taken as givens, the question is whether any form of unilateral action can improve Israel's position.
The answer hinges on whether the action taken strengthens or weakens our position. The withdrawal from Lebanon was perceived as a pure retreat, regardless of Israel's claims that it had strengthened its strategic position. That retreat helped lead the Palestinians to embrace the "Hizbullah model," with devastating consequences for Israel.
If we define a temporary border with a security fence that leaves Israel holding about half of the West Bank, the effect would be different. The Palestinians would be faced with a choice: Make peace in exchange for a better deal than that marked by the security fence, or continue to fight and watch as the Green Line disappears as a potential border.
Such a strategy would at least force the Palestinians to pay a price for their refusal to make real peace with Israel. Not ideal, we know, but such a path could prove much better than the bloody utopianism of the last decade.
