Think the “From the River to the Sea” chant is something new? Bibi in this book (pp. 240-241, year 2000 ed.) quotes Palestinian Arab leaders themselves revealing it as their “Phased Plan” for Israel’s destruction. Abu Iyad 1987: “According to the Phased Plan, we will establish a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that the enemy will retreat from. The Palestinian state will be a stage in our prolonged struggle for the liberation of Palestine on all of its territory.” Arafat 1990: “The Palestinian people’s struggle ought to be assisted until the complete liberation of Palestine from the River to the Sea.”
Are you wondering where the Israel-emasculating goal, much touted here in the US by the Democrats, came from? Israeli Amb. to the US Michael Oren reveals in Ally (p. 115) that the “goal of an independent and viable based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps,” was originally “the Palestinian goal,” which the US initially tried “to square” with the “contradictory” Israeli goal “of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.” But “two-states along the 1967 lines with agreed swaps” became under Democratic administrations the US position.
But “two-states along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed swaps” isn’t the only plan out there. David Friedman, Trump’s first term Amb. to Israel, laid out in his book on his official time there, Sledgehammer, the peace plan worked out by the Trump team’s Mideast negotiators that was eventually sidelined by the broader Abraham Accords. This plan called for internal autonomy for Palestinian Arabs in larger areas of Judea-Samaria than they mainly occupy now, with Israel having external security control and applying Israeli sovereignty to the critical Jordan Valley and other areas.
Subtitled The Last, Best Hope To Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, David Friedman’s new book begins: “The book challenges the most widely accepted but fatally flawed concept in Middle Eastern diplomacy, the two-state solution.” In this book he goes beyond Trump’s first-term plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea-Samaria. He analogizes Palestinian Arabs, who will still have their internally autonomous areas to Puerto Ricans, who don’t vote for the US president. (But actually Palestinian Arabs have more choices. Puerto Rica is surrounded by ocean, whereas Judea-Samaria Arabs could join their fellow Palestinians in a Palestine Palestinian Arab state (comprising three-quarters of it) simply by crossing a River that’s as formidable a crossing barrier as Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek.)
