How Benny Gantz killed Israeli-Palestinian peace
Leftist leaders destroyed Israel’s chance of permanently securing its national and strategic interests in Judea and Samaria.
By Caroline Glick
JNS
September 29, 2022
Amir Eshel and Benny Gantz
In an interview with Maariv last week, former Israeli Air
Force commander Amir Eshel made several startling admissions about the
role he and other IDF generals played in scuttling former prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s most significant strategic policies. His most
startling admissions related to former U.S. president Donald Trump’s
Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
In 2019, then-Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz appointed Eshel
to serve as his interlocutor with the Trump administration and its
Middle East peace plan. In this position, Eshel accompanied Gantz to the
White House to meet with Trump on Jan. 27, 2020, the day before Trump
and Netanyahu presented the plan.
Trump’s plan called for Israel to apply its law and, through it,
sovereignty to 30% of Judea and Samaria. The other 70%, which includes
half of Israeli-administered Area C, as well as the areas governed by
the Palestinian Authority, would remain in their current state for
another four years. If the Palestinians abided by the conditions for
statehood set out in the plan, they would receive control over the
remaining Israeli-administered areas, which would be attached to the
Palestinian cities and villages the P.A. has controlled since 1996.
Netanyahu and the Trump team agreed that the plan would be presented
at the White House on Jan. 28, 2020 and that, at the Israeli government
meeting following the presentation, Netanyahu would pass a government
decision to apply Israeli law to the areas of Judea and Samaria
demarcated by the plan. Ahead of the ceremony, then-U.S. ambassador to
Israel David Friedman briefed selected Israeli journalists on the
details of the plan, including the planned implementation of Israeli
sovereignty.
Eshel told reporter Ben Caspit that, as he and Gantz departed the
Oval Office, Eshel corralled Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared
Kushner. Eshel claimed he told Kushner and Friedman that the peace plan
would be stillborn due to Netanyahu’s sovereignty policy.
Eshel then explained how he and Gantz proceeded to kill the peace plan.
“Jared looked at me like someone who had just fallen off the moon,”
he said. “I told him: ‘Listen, Bibi has a plan to bring the sovereignty
issue before the government for an immediate vote. … If this happens,
the [peace] plan will die.’”
Eshel added that Kushner “didn’t completely understand.”
So, Eshel explained it.
“I explained that no Arab leader will agree to this,” he recounted. “No one will support this.”
Kushner still didn’t know whether to believe Eshel or his own lying eyes.
“He told me: ‘What are you talking about? I spoke to every one of them. Everyone supports this,’” Eshel said.
Eshel told Kushner that he couldn’t believe anything the Arab leaders
told him; that Eshel knew better than the Arab leaders did what they
would or wouldn’t agree to.
“I said, ‘What were they for? That Israel will take its winnings up
front, in cash without giving anything in exchange? Can you see
[Egyptian President] Sisi supporting this? [Jordanian King] Abdullah?
You’ll be smashed by a rebound that you won’t see coming. None of them
will be able to support Israel getting something in cash and the
Palestinians getting a promise on credit that will never be paid,’”
Eshel stated.
Eshel concluded by saying that Gantz had two follow-up phone calls
with Kushner over the next several hours and together they ensured that
by the time Netanyahu and Trump presented the plan the following day,
Trump and Kushner already opposed the previously agreed-upon order of
events that had Netanyahu passing the sovereignty plan the following
week.
Leaving aside the legal aspects of what appears to be a case of
political subversion, the most stunning aspect of Eshel’s story is that
he was completely unwilling to consider the possibility that Kushner’s
eyes were telling him the truth and that Eshel’s conviction was based on
myths. And there is every reason to believe that Kushner’s eyes—and
ears—had seen and heard the truth.
Beginning with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012,
more and more Arab leaders and citizens began distancing themselves
publicly from the Palestinians and their bottomless pit of grievances
and demands against Israel. Arab journalists, former ministers and
unnamed senior officials from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain
began arguing that the Palestinians had captured the discourse for too
long. They received everything from the Arab world and from Israel but
were never satisfied, and all they did was expand their terrorism and
demands. The Egyptian military, which Sisi commanded, accused Hamas of
playing a key role in forcing former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak
from power and springing Muslim Brotherhood members—including Mubarak’s
successor Mohamed Morsi—from prison.
In 2014, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia acted as Israel’s unofficial
allies in Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza. Among other
things, they blocked the Obama administration from coercing Israel into
accepting Hamas’ ceasefire terms.
Their opposition to the Palestinians and support for Israel only grew
during Trump’s presidency. Many people who spoke with the Egyptians,
the Emiratis, Saudis and Bahrainis during this period understood that
they were no longer willing to stand with the Palestinians and were
willing to reach a pragmatic resolution of sovereignty in Judea and
Samaria that respected Israel’s rights and interests as well as those of
the Palestinians.
But blinded by ideology, and guided no doubt by Gantz’s political
interest in humiliating Netanyahu ahead of the third round of elections,
Eshel and Gantz ignored all of this. They insisted that nothing had
changed in the Arab world since 2002, when the Saudi king gave a fake
peace offer to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
demanding that Israel surrender to the PLO’s maximalist demands as a
condition for Arab-Israeli peace.
While Kushner seems to reject Eshel’s version of events in his
recently published memoir, in a way, the veracity of Eshel’s story is
less important than the fact that he takes so much pride in his version
of events that he chose to share it with the Israeli public. Eshel
clearly never considered that he may have been mistaken, and as a result
of his own ideological blindness and political interests, he had
destroyed Israel’s chance of permanently securing its national and
strategic interests in Judea and Samaria.
Eshel’s blindness is a testament to the most glaring and dangerous
characteristics of the left, both in Israel and throughout the Western
world today. For leftists from Tel Aviv to Washington to Paris, the
world is a static place where the 1960s anti-colonialist slogans that
blamed all the troubles of the developing world on the West and the
Jewish state are truths etched in stone—a progressive Ten Commandments.
And the tablets will never be broken. Anyone who rejects these slogans,
or permits reality to seep into their policymaking at any level are
enemies far worse than the likes of the PLO or the Iranian regime or any
terror group or regime that bases their claim to legitimacy on
anti-colonialist precepts. On the other hand, unelected elites who live
and die by these precepts are “objective professionals,” who protect our
societies from riff raff that actually take into consideration facts,
events, statements and political forces that stand these anti-Western
principles on their heads.
From the progressives’ collective slobberfest over Islamic terrorists
from Ramallah to Tehran, to their political and legal wars against
anyone who disagrees with them, all over the West, our ability to make
informed decisions, whether as voters or policymakers, is under assault.
Elites who insist that their catechisms to the anti-colonialist gods
are the beginning and end of all legitimate policymaking are damning us
to policies that cause our nations to fail perpetually.
The Trump peace plan, including the sovereignty plan, was the first
pragmatic blueprint for Israeli-Palestinian peace ever presented,
because unlike all of its predecessors it was not based entirely on
anti-Israel mythology. Eshel and Gantz didn’t just kill the sovereignty
plan when they scared Kushner with their myths. They killed the entire
concept that reality should form the basis of Israel’s policies towards
the Palestinians.
In his memoir and in subsequent interviews, former ambassador
Friedman has said that whatever one thinks of the Trump peace plan, it
was an opportunity for Israel to begin having a serious discussion about
what it wants to do with Judea and Samaria. Obviously, so long as
Israel’s left controls the discourse and blocks reality from entering
the discussion, no such discussion will be possible.