By P. David Hornik FrontPageMagazine.com | January 5, 2007

“The security border of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”

Those words were spoken by Yitzhak Rabin in his last address to the Knesset in October 1995, only a month before he was assassinated. Rabin is now regarded by many as a patron saint of peacemaking. But in that last speech he made clear that he had not forgotten about Israel’s security needs—which, according to all professional military assessments, must include control of the Jordan Valley.

Ariel Sharon, also regarded by many as an Israeli hawk who saw the light, stated in an interview on April 24, 2005, “The Jordan Rift Valley is very important and it’s not just the rift valley we’re talking about [but]…up to the Allon Road and a step above the Allon Road.” He was referring to the mountain ridge that towers over the valley to the west, and forms a natural barrier to invasion and weapons smuggling from the east.

The arid, sparsely populated Jordan Valley is home to about twenty Israeli communities, most secular and some religious, with a total population of about five thousand. Mostly set up by Labor governments from 1967 to 1977, these communities are regarded as within the Israeli “security consensus.” Although the U.S. and European governments have never been enthused about Israeli settlements of any kind, the Jordan Valley communities were never in the limelight and the Labor governments of those days were able to establish them with little diplomatic fallout.

Those, however, were the days before the “Palestinian cause” became a near-universal obsession. Last week, the Israeli government approved the building in the tiny Jordan Valley community of Maskiot of thirty additional homes for families that were evacuated last year from the Gaza settlement of Shirat Hayam. In response, the State Department and the European Union are coming down so hard on Israel that Defense Minister Amir Peretz is reportedly reconsidering.

State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos declared last Wednesday: “The establishment of a new settlement or the expansion of an existing settlement would violate Israel’s obligations under the road map” and “could be viewed as predetermining the outcome of final status negotiations.”

The EU also chimed in: “such unilateral actions are . . . illegal under international law and threaten to render the two-state solution physically impossible to implement.”

The “illegal under international law” canard alludes to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was drafted immediately after World War II and was meant to prohibit forced displacements of population, Nazi-style, from countries under foreign military occupation—not the peaceful, voluntary building of dwellings in territory conquered in a defensive war and officially recognized by the conqueror as disputed.

To say that such acts as building thirty homes for Jews in the Jordan Valley “threaten to render the two-state solution physically impossible to implement” or could “predetermine the outcome of final status negotiations” is to indicate that the presence of Jews in the disputed areas renders the conflict insoluble while the presence of Arabs—and their continued, widespread construction of housing and communities—does not.

As for the road map, its Phase 1 calls on Israel to “freeze all settlement activity” only in response to the Palestinians “immediately undertak[ing] an unconditional cessation of violence”—something that has not yet transpired. It is unfortunate that the road map stipulates a halt to Jewish housing construction in the biblical heartland as part of the supposed recompense for the ending of Palestinian mass-murder attacks. But what is clear in any case is that the latter has not occurred.

But we’re far from the days when there was some official understanding—even if tacit or implicit—for Israel’s security needs in the territories, if not for its unique historical connection to them.

Nowadays, instead, the Palestinian view of all matters is embraced with numbing reflexivity. The EU continues to lavish funds on them, and the U.S. president and secretary of state express constant fealty to their supposed need for a state in addition to Jordan, even as the Palestinians practice and inculcate jihad ever-more intensively and their territories become a haven for international-terror heavyweights like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Not even the Palestinians’ mourning for Saddam Hussein dents this apparent affection for them.

Israel, meanwhile, is supposed to hold land for the Palestinians in perpetuity even if it is vital to Israel’s security and has a deep, special Jewish resonance. Any act that might offend Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims must be avoided in deference to the delicate feelings of a civilization stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. But in the sixty miles between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, allowing a few displaced Jewish families to settle in designated Jew-free places—that is, any place where Jews do not already live, even adding a new wing to an already-existing community—draws sharp rebukes from the U.S. and Europe.

Someday if there were ever a moral renaissance in the West, people would celebrate the beauty of Jews living in places like the Jordan Valley instead of condemning it as a crime.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 and is filed under opinion. You can leave a response.