ISRAEL MUST NOT GIVE UP MORE TERRITORY TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

Daniel Pipes counsels against Israel ceding more territory to the Palestinian Authority.  Giving up Gaza has had serious consequences and giving up more land will have even more serious consequences.   Pipes draws on Caroline Glick's study, Ehud Olmert's “Convergence” Plan for the West Bank and U.S. Middle East Policy.  She cautions that Olmert’s plan will likely harm U.S. security interests by destabilizing Israel and Jordan.  Pipes writes,

In painstaking detail, she documents how the 2005 Israeli retreat from Gaza radicalized Palestinian society, caused Gaza to descend into anarchy, opened it to global terror forces, jeopardized Israel’s national infrastructure, tied down Israeli troops, permitted the build-up of a substantial Palestinian arsenal, and created a range of new Israeli problems with Egypt.

She predicts that, in similar fashion, handing territory to the Palestinian Authority will destabilize the West Bank, harm Israel, and “directly threaten the survivability of the Hashemites” in Jordan. This damage will have many negative implications for the United States, she argues, by:

• Endangering U.S. military assets warehoused in Israel and Jordan.
• Enhancing the prestige of states that sponsor Palestinian terrorists.
• Strengthening the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority which, with its Syrian, Iranian and Hizbullahallies, will provide what Glick calls “a training, logistics and information warfare base” for terrorist groups at war with the United States.
• Threatening the land routes through Israel and Jordan that supply U.S. forces in Iraq.
• Enabling terrorists fighting American forces in Iraq to establish training bases in the West Bank.
• Creating a perception of U.S. weakness, given that Israel is so widely seen as an agent of Washington.
• Gratuitously handing a victory to Islamists and jihadists.