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URI ELITZUR:
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Defeat terrorism

The "vision of a Palestinian state" is something we have already tried. In the 10 years since Oslo, particularly the last three, we have seen what the Palestinians intend to do with the tools of independence and statehood, if they are given them.

They already had a state-in-the-making, and they used it to build a huge terrorist base and a society mobilized and incited to hate Israel.

The Palestinian Authority did nothing to promote its own people’s economy and welfare. It used all the tools of government in its hands in order to cultivate the terrorist capabilities of many systems and organizations, and in order to educate masses of people from kindergarten to old age towards war, hatred, and suicide terrorism.

If the PA has been a swamp of terrorism, corruption and incitement, then the Palestinian state will be a whole lake. It will grow a center of international terrorism, and will be totally mobilized towards war over the next phase of "liberating Palestine."

This also has objective reasons: the Palestinian state — the one from the Bush vision or the Beilin dream — is a dwarf country, territorially splintered, and devoid of any economic infrastructures or resources. You cannot squeeze two states into our tiny land, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. There is hardly room here for one state; you have to be blind not to see that.

Why are there so many blind people among us, some of whom are intelligent and wise in every other area?

Because we are living under terror. Terror is a first rate cause of political blindness and of the phenomenon of hallucinations and illusions. Terror distorts its victims’ judgment, it makes them feel as if they share the guilt, develop dependency on the aggressor, and have baseless faith that a simple solution to the situation is hiding around the nearest corner. Every terrorist knows that, and all terrorism is built on that.

THEREFORE, THE first step of any political plan has to be defeating terrorism. It is not a security but a political matter. It is a precondition for the very existence of political judgment. No political plan has any hope unless it is preceded by a decisive defeat of terrorism, not just militarily but conceptually.

No peaceful solution has any chance unless every child in Gaza and every analyst in every news media in the world knows that terrorism has been militarily defeated, and caused the Palestinian people only harm, and that every person and every organization that engaged in terrorism has disappeared from the political map.

And this solution is not hiding around the nearest corner. It is far away, and the path to it is strewn with obstacles, mines, internal divisions and pain. It requires the courage to say: No, my friends — there is no political horizon right now and no negotiating table, because there is terrorism.

The idea that a political solution can appear instead of defeating terrorism is the illusion that keeps the political horizon infinitely distant.

The road cannot be shortened. A political solution will come only after terror is defeated.

That is the first step in a three-phase political plan. The second phase is a long interim period during which Palestinian self-rule will be established under Israeli responsibility; the third phase is a region-wide permanent settlement, in which not only Israel but also Egypt and Jordan will be required to allocate land towards resolving the Palestinian problem.

I am sure that is the solution that will come at the end of the process, but the process might last 50 years. Therefore the question that matters to our own lives, and our main role towards a solution, is the first phase: defeating terrorism — unequivocally, without compromise and without illusions.