Likud Debates a Palestinian State to Save Israel

In this place that often seems burdened by the past, it is the future that is suddenly bearing down.

Within the Likud, the dominant right-wing party, leaders who once advocated holding every inch of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and who for three years argued that Israel could make no concessions because it lacked a Palestinian peace partner, are now debating how quickly to concede how much of that territory.

The Likud is publicly grappling with a prospect long raised by Israel's left: that within a few years Arabs are likely to be the majority in Israel and its occupied territories, and that they may switch from demanding their own state to demanding the right to vote in Israel, threatening its Jewish identity.

The result is a breathtaking inversion: Though the Likud's platform opposes a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River as a threat to Israel, some members of the party say they have concluded that only the creation of such a state can save Israel as a Jewish democracy.
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The Weathercocks Are Turning
by Uri Avnery

It is not yet a tidal wave. But it is more then a ripple. It is a wave in the process of formation.

During the last few months a realignment of Israeli public opinion has started to become noticeable. It has several causes: public tiredness of the endless cycle of bloodshed, the perception that there is no military solution, the worsening of the economic crisis, the untiring activity of the radical peace movements.

The list of the accumulating symptoms is getting longer: the movement of the young men who refuse army service in the occupied territories, the revolt of the airforce pilots, the Ayalon-Nusseibeh initiative, the statement of the four former Secret Service chiefs, the criticism voiced by the Chief-of-Staff, and, this week, the public attack of the reserve officers on the continued existence of the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip.

The Geneva initiative gave this change a great boost in Israel, as well as an impressive echo abroad. The participation of international personalities in the solemn ceremony in Switzerland lent it status and prestige. The decision of the US Secretary of State and the General Secretary of the United Nations to receive the leaders of this initiative was a gesture of public support for the peace movement. (So was the warm personal message conveyed by the President of Germany, Johannes Rau, to the ceremony in which a Peace Prize was awarded to Sari Nusseibeh and me.)

When the wind changes, the weathercocks start to move. That is happening these days. The most sensitive ones, like Yoel Markus in Haaretz, already began attacking Sharon some months ago. Now this is becoming a fashion in the media. The very same commentators who served for three years as propagandists for the government and the army high command, have suddenly discovered that everything done during the last three years was, after all, a terrible mistake.
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One democratic state might be the solution