Israeli Foreing Minister Lashes Out at “Three-State Solution”
Avigdor Lieberman
Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman on Monday rejected the idea of referring to Jordan as Palestinian state, saying that such an idea would place the security of Israel in danger. Speaking in front of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Lieberman said that Jordan is an example of stability in the region and that the establishing of a Palestinian state on both banks of the Jordan river would be detrimental for the peace in the region, because such a state would be extreme and militant.
Lieberman said that discussion about Palestine as part of Jordan hurts Israeli interests, and also goes against the internationally recognized borders and the peace accords signed so far. His comments come as information surfaced that the government is entertaining the possibility of creating a Palestinian state as part of Jordan.
He praised the good ties with Jordan and expressed hope that the kingdom would have an ambassador sent to Tel Aviv as soon as possible, after a year and a half without ambassador.
The words of the Israeli foreign minister were on Monday accompanied by the statement made by Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, who said that the two-state solution for the Palestinians is incompatible with the continuation of the settlement policy in the West Bank.
Erekat made this remark in talks with the representatives of the Quartet, composed of the United Nations, the United States, Russian Federation and the European Union, which is acting in the Middle East in hopes to revive peace negotiations.
Erekat insisted that there shall be no negotiations unless the settlement policy was stopped, while Israel argues that it did stop the construction in 2010 and that it still did not obtain anything from negotiations with the Palestinians.
Israel made it clear that if there is to be a negotiation, it will not be conditioned by the settlement policies in West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Palestinians consider that the continuation of settlement policy in West Bank fragments their land and render the efforts of establishing a Palestinian state on that land useless.
The Palestinians insist upon the borders before the conflict in 1967, when Israel invaded the West Bank at the end of a Six Days War with both Egypt and Jordan. Israelis say that when they entered West Bank, in June 1967, they found it empty so they claimed it as their own.
They back that claim with the reports that the Jordanian army had pulled on the other side of the Jordan River and so the zone had no administration. The international community deemed the occupation by Israel of the West Bank as illegal and demanded the Jewish state to withdraw, which it did.
Between 1949 and 1967 West Bank was part of the Kingdom of Jordan while Gaza was part of the state of Egypt. Returning to that situation, a proposition entertained especially by the Jordanian authorities is considered the “three-state solution” and is said to have been gaining on the classical solution of two different states established side by side.
The Palestinian state in Jordan would also end the struggle by the United Nations, where the vote on the Palestinian bid for independence has been postponed because the cause has not been able to gather nine votes in favor in the Security Council so that it may go to the general assembly and be voted.
An advantage of the three-state solution, expressed a few years in the American press, is that it would stop the ascendance of Hamas, which, in case of a state of Palestine resulted from the two-state solution, could take over the new country, placing in danger the security of both Israel and Jordan.
Then, the return to the pre-1967 state would make it possible for the Palestinians to solve their statehood problem, since the admittance committee of the UN Security Council said that the Palestinian state was not ready to become a functional state and it was not a peace loving nation.
In 2010, in the Jordanian election campaign, politicians spoke out of the possibility that Jordan reabsorb Palestinians in the West Bank and grant them all Jordanian citizenship.
Most politicians in Jordan are concerned that since their state already has a Palestinian majority, with the inclusion of the West Bank in it would become the facto a Palestinian state. They fear that Israel itself, in spite of what Lieberman says, would favor the idea of the three-state solution.
