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Israel's Oslo paradox

Dismantling the Palestinian Authority will bring neither security nor order, will cost Israel about $2.7 billion a year and will add more injustice in construction zones allotted to Palestinians.
Houses can be seen at the Jewish West Bank settlement of Maale Efrayim in the Jordan Valley January 1, 2014. A panel of Israeli cabinet ministers endorsed proposed legislation on Sunday to annex an area of the occupied West Bank likely to be the eastern border of a future Palestinian state. The Jordan Valley region of the West Bank which Israel captured in a 1967 war and Palestinians seek as part of their future state, has been a focus of recent disagreement. Palestinians reject Israel's demand to maintain
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This is not the first time, and perhaps not the last, that the idea of dismantling the Palestinian Authority (PA) and “returning the keys to Israel” is being bandied around in the diplomatic vacuum. Already in August 2008, in the days of the Ehud Olmert government, Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, told me the following: “I suggested that the [Palestinian] Authority announce that if we don’t reach an agreement by the end of the year, it will dissolve itself and return the keys to Israel.”

Nusseibeh, who partnered with former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon in the agreement termed “The People’s Voice” (two states based on the ‘67 borders, with no right of return for the Palestinians), asserted, “We have 160,000 civil servants. Half of them are security personnel who don’t provide us with any security. We spend a fortune on rifles that are used to fight each other.” He also said he had begged European leaders to stop financial assistance to the PA, since it had turned out to be leveraging the continued occupation instead of ending it. He said that according to international law, on the day after the PA is dismantled, Israel will have to go back to funding the occupation on its own, the way it did during its military rule in the territories that preceded the Oslo Accord.

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