Israel should create 'Marshall Plan' for Gaza

At the recent UN General Assembly meeting, Palestinian and Israeli leaders spoke the words their followers wanted to hear. Their remarks also underscored an important point the international community should note: The old bilateral-negotiations-only model for reaching a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian agreement is dead.

Here in Israel we are realizing that force alone will not bring us security or maintain Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people. Instead, we need an approach that creates movement toward a reality of two states for two peoples — Jews and Palestinians. Regrettably, our leadership has not embarked on any course of action that could lead to that reality. That is the biggest failure of Israeli leadership in the last decade — bigger than any diplomatic, political or military blunder. Israel is paying dearly for this failure.

This absence of concrete initiatives by Israel’s leaders — demonstrated again by Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s UN address — has left a vacuum in which any scenario is possible, including violence. Once the violence starts, who can tell where it will lead and how long it will last.

In addition, we Israelis suffer from increasing international and diplomatic isolation, which gradually is being “upgraded” to sanctions and boycotts that can cause severe economic hardship, even collapse. Jews around the world, especially the young, are becoming alienated from Israel, while many Jewish communities are threatened by increasing anti-Semitism. Israel’s democratic attributes are being eroded, and these losses do not include the cost in lives and in money of fighting Hamas.