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Peace Is Israel's Best Security Guarantee

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should look back to the peace agreement with Egypt, which proves that compromise strengthens Israel's borders and guarantees its security.
Destroyed Egyptian armour lines the sides of a Sinai road after it was hit by Israeli jet fighters during the 1967 Six Day War. [In six days Israel took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai and the Golan Heights as well as "unifying" Jerusalem by capturing East Jerusalem and the Old City, thus increasing Israel's land mass dramatically. It also became burdened with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians along with the land it captured.] Israel celebrates its  50th Golden Jubilee anniversary on Apr
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Several days ago I happened upon a yellowing Haaretz newspaper clipping from mid-August 1973, less than two months prior to the Yom Kippur War. It reported that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had declared he was “giving top priority to the establishment of the town of Yamit in the Rafah salient (in northern Sinai), as he would to a top-rated defensive military line, to a front-line stronghold on the banks of the Suez Canal.”

The hero of the 1967 Six Day War explained that “the urban and agricultural settlement will constitute a partition between the Gaza Strip, with its 350,000 residents [who number more than 1.5 million today] and the Egyptian desert.” The senior politician attacked opponents of the Sinai settlement initiative within his Mapai (later to become Labor) party. “This whole show about Yamit is absurd,” lashed out the man who coined the saying “Sharm el-Sheikh without peace is better than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh,” a reference to the southern Sinai Peninsula town captured by Israel in 1967.

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