September will constitute a crucial junction for Israeli- Palestinian relations,
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin told MKs Tuesday during a
regular briefing of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee.
The month “will be a boiling point,” the Shin Bet head warned,
since at that time, the Palestinians intend to call on the United Nations to
recognize Palestinian statehood.
RELATED:Hamas: 'Konrad offered new ideas in Schalit talks'PA gives new names to historical Jewish sites“It doesn’t mean that that is what will
happen, but that is the goal that they have placed before themselves. If it
happens, it will place us in a problematic situation,” Diskin
explained.
To respond to that situation, Diskin asserted that “Israel
needs to create a situation in which there is a border, border crossings and
Border Police between us and the Palestinians, even if it is a temporary and
unrecognized border.”
He warned that “if we do not take care to do so, we
will find ourselves in a situation that will not allow us to make that
separation.”
As September approaches, he added, Hamas’s terror
infrastructure in the West Bank, and particularly in the Hebron area, is likely
to step up activities targeting Israelis.
The Palestinian move to gain
unilateral recognition of statehood is, according to Diskin, “a weak point for
Israel, and the Palestinian Authority takes advantage of that and tries to
create challenges for Israel mostly through delegitimization, legal proceedings,
economic boycotts and controlled diplomatic tensions.”
He added that
“this process is gaining momentum because the Palestinians have recognized gaps
between Israel and the United States, and ‘export’ their struggle to the
international community.”
Diskin also presented an alternate scenario in
which the collapse of peace talks could lead to the collapse of the PA and the
return of authority to Israel – although he recognized that this was an unlikely
outcome.
In Jerusalem, Diskin said, lines between where Israeli authority
ends and Palestinian authority begins are becoming increasingly
blurred.
The Jerusalem perimeter “acts like a Palestinian area, in spite
of the fact that its residents hold Israeli identity cards,” he said. “The level
of Israel’s governance in these areas is not high. There are municipal areas of
Jerusalem that are on the other side of the security fence, and there are places
where the municipality has difficulty providing municipal services, turning this
area into a no-man’s land.”
The security fence, he argued, had actually
worsened the situation, creating what he described as “a situation in which
illegal Palestinian workers flock around it.”
“There is immigration from
Judea and Samaria to these areas, which are in the municipal boundaries of
Jerusalem, and this has significantly increased the rates of illegal
construction,” he explained.
“This is an area in which there is a high
level of criminal activity, and it responds quickly to events in Gaza and Judea
and Samaria.”
In contrast, Diskin told MKs that there had been a
significant decline in terror activity throughout the West Bank in 2010 compared
to the previous year.
He noted an increase in the number of Israeli Arabs
arrested for terror activity, which jumped from 24 in 2009 to 46 in 2010. Diskin
emphasized that “the phenomenon continues to be relatively limited and outside
of the Arab Israeli consensus.”
He pointed out that the majority of the
increase was related to a terror mobilization in Nazareth that was ideologically
linked to Salafist jihadist strains in the Arab world.