Danny Ayalon continues to advocate Lieberman’s plan for a territorial exchange with the PA, which would transfer Israeli Arab towns to the Palestinian state. Ayalon says that the Arabs would only gain from such an exchange.
Wrong. Palestinian leaders are not stupid, and they understand that Israeli Arabs are their fifth column, a demographic time-bomb ticking underneath the Jews. They will fight Lieberman’s territorial exchange much harder than any other issue.
Israel’s only hope is to abandon the Arab towns unilaterally, just as Jordan abandoned the West Bank. There is nothing sacred about them being incorporated into Israel: the towns lie behind the 1948 armistice line rather than any internationally recognized border. If Israel can entertain abandoning the Golan Heights, which were annexed, we can even more easily abandon Israeli Arab towns that were never formally annexed at all.
