Is Israel reviving this 50-year-old land plan?
Recent land confiscations by the Israeli government appear to further the Allon Plan for securing permanent Israeli control of the West Bank.
In a March 18 statement, the Land Defense Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reintroduced to political discussion terminology no longer often heard. In the statement, the PLO accused right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu of reviving the Allon Plan, so named after the late Labor Party Minister Yigal Allon.
The Allon Plan, developed shortly after Israel began its occupation of Palestinian lands in 1967, proposed that Israel relinquish the main Palestinian population centers in the West Bank to Jordan while retaining land along the Jordan River under Israeli military control. In implementing part of the plan, Labor-led governments between 1967 and 1977 created 21 settlements along the length of the Jordan Valley.
