Israel should put the Clinton parameters from 2001, or the Olmert proposals from
2008, back on the table to avoid “losing the world,” even though it is clear the
Palestinians will not accept them, former Military Intelligence head Amos Yadlin
said Tuesday.
Yadlin, speaking in Tel Aviv at the Calcalist conference,
said putting forward these proposals – both of which call for generous
territorial concessions and the division of Jerusalem – would allow Israel to
refill its “battery of legitimacy.”
“Unfortunately, as a Military
Intelligence head who knows the Palestinian strategy, they will reject it, but
it will return to us the moral leadership and the legitimacy that we lost,” he
said. Then, he added, Israel can take the steps it feels it needs to determine
its borders.
According to Yadlin, today the director of the Institute for
National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, the diplomatic defeats Israel suffered in
2012 could lead to a “first degree strategic problem, both economically and
politically.”
Yadlin, who is not identified with any political party,
said he was not among those who maintain that if only Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas was strengthened, then “the messiah will
come.”
“I think we have difficult problems with our neighbors,” he said,
noting that the Palestinian strategy is not to reach peace with
Israel.
“They listen to what we say – that if there is no peace, and no
two-state solution, then the country will be destroyed.
They say, ‘Why
not, that is a good idea for us, let’s go there.’ So Israel needs to take its
destiny in its hands, not be dependent on whether the Palestinians agree. I
suggest putting on the table in 2013 the proposals that [US president Bill
Clinton] and [prime minister Ehud] Olmert put on the table.”
Yadlin said
the Palestinians will reject the deals because their strategy is to get a state
roughly along the pre-1967 lines, with Israeli concessions on Jerusalem – not
from Israel in negotiations, but rather from the international
community.
That way, he said, they will not have to give Israel what it
wants: an “end of conflict” declaration, an end to demands of a Palestinian
“right of return” and security arrangements.
Turning to Iran, Yadlin
praised the US for its current strategy, and predicted that US President Barack
Obama would in his second term put a compromise proposal on the table for
Iran.
According to Yadlin, the proposal would obviously not give Israel
everything it wanted to see – the destruction of the Iranian centrifuges, the
closing down of all enrichment plants and the export of the enriched uranium –
but it could contain elements that would set the Iranian nuclear clock back two
years, and is something Israel should support. Currently, he said, Tehran could
build a bomb within six months if it made the decision to do so.
Yadlin
said that the American strategy of “going for something that might not be the
best thing in the world, but which gives you a strategic achievement” is a good
one, especially since if the plan does not work, then it would provide Israel
“with the legitimacy for the actions” it might want to take.
Recalling
that every year the head of Military Intelligence provides the government with a
strategic assessment, Yadlin said that if he were preparing the report this
year, he would say the chances of Israel’s enemies launching a war against it in
2013 were low. Israel’s deterrence, he said, is very strong against Syria,
Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran.
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