Sunday, January 13, 2013

This Will Be Ver-r-r-y Interesting

Israel Is Destroying Itself With Its Settlement Policy



IF SETTLEMENT EXPANSION CONTINUES ISRAEL WILL HAVE NO FUTURE
Tuesday January 15 2013, 6:45pm | Royal Geographical Society

Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy

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Patriacide. Nationcide. Whatever you want to call it, that is what Israel is doing with its settlement policy: it is killing itself. If ever greater numbers of Jewish settlers are installed on land regarded by Palestinians as the basis for a state of their own, the possibility of a two-state solution grows ever more remote. Yet the single state alternative, involving annexation of the West Bank, would result in a country where Arabs vastly outnumber Jews and then you won’t have a one-state or a two-state solution: you’ll have a no-state solution. For those who love Israel and wish to preserve a democratic Jewish homeland, as much as for those who hate it, the settlements must stop. That’s what many left-wing Israelis and their friends say. But defenders of the settlements see things very differently. The two-state solution has long been a dead letter in their view: why stop building settlements in the name of a peace plan that is frankly unattainable? Whatever the eventual solution – it could even be a West Bank jointly governed by Jordan and Israel – there is no good reason why both Israelis and Palestinians shouldn’t both expand their settlements in the interim before an eventual peace deal.

Doors open at 6.00pm. The debate will start at 6.45pm and finish at 8.30pm.


Speakers for the motion

Daniel Levy
Director for Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, a former adviser in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and member of the Israeli team negotiating with the Palestinians, and a Board member of the New Israel Fund

William Sieghart
Founder and Chairman of Forward Thinking, an NGO which works with the leadership of all parties on both sides of the divide in the Israel/Palestine conflict


Speakers against the motion

Dani Dayan
Chairman of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria.

Caroline Glick
Senior contributing editor, Jerusalem Post, director of the Israel Security Project, David Horowitz Freedom Center, senior adjunct fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs, Center for Security Policy


Chair

Tim Franks
Former BBC Middle East correspondent and currently a London-based correspondent and presenter for the BBC

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