Knesset Member Wants E.U. Task Force

By Tzippe Barrow

CBN News - Jerusalem Bureau

February 7, 2007

CBNNews.com - JERUSALEM - Traditionally, the annual Herzliya Conference has been a forum for presenting elements of the Israeli national agenda.

At last month's conference, Member of Knesset Shlomo Breznitz (Kadima), 70, a psychology professor and former rector of Haifa University, proposed his solution to the stalemated Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Time will tell if his presentation was meant to foreshadow an as-yet unannounced plan.

A few weeks later, Breznitz wrote an article titled, "Why not an EU-led trusteeship?" printed in The Jerusalem Post.

Referring to the outcome of Israel's August 2005 "painful" withdrawal from Gaza, he acknowledged that repeating such a scenario in the "West Bank" (Judea and Samaria) would be "suicidal."

"The Palestinian side has clearly demonstrated that unilateral withdrawal is not an option," he wrote.

The professor concluded that "there is hardly any central Palestinian authority capable of imposing its will. The Palestinian political landscape abounds in a variety of militias and is splintered to a degree that makes it ungovernable by any of the groups contending for leadership," he wrote.

No one would argue that point.

Following last summer's botched war in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that he'd shelved the main point of his pre-election platform to evacuate Jewish communities from Judea and Samaria.

Around the same time, Interior Minister Roni Bar-On told reporters that the plan was "on ice" and would be implemented in time.

'Withdraw without prejudice'

Breznitz's solution is for Israel to relinquish control of Judea and Samaria to a European Union task force, which he believes, will leave Israel free to "withdraw without prejudice" and facilitate the formation of a Palestinian state.

"Israel wants out," said Breznitz, but "yielding these areas to a chaotic array of groups without a responsible central authority is impossible."

Convinced that Israel's biblical heartland is destined to be a Palestinian state, Breznitz believes a European task force can move that goal forward.

An EU perspective

For the past several years, the European Union has repeatedly expressed its desire to play a key role in the Middle East conflict, especially in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

An article by David Bedein, bureau chief of the Israel Resource News Agency, posted on Arutz Sheva, referenced a December 2003 interview with European parliamentarian Graham Watson.

At the Geneva Initiative Conference that year, Watson spoke about the role of a Middle Eastern European task force.

Modeling the concept on Bosnia, Watson said an EU task force would perceive its role as the "exclusive protector of the Palestinian Arab entity."

As such, he said, this task force would view any Israeli presence beyond the 1967 borders as "illegal and criminal in nature," and no Israeli incursion in the area patrolled by them would be tolerated.

Watson further stated that the EU task force "would play an active role in the dismantlement of Jewish communities established by Israel since 1967, including within the city limits of Jerusalem.

The EU parliamentarian closed by citing the task force's dismantling of 40-year-old homes in Bosnia and the forced expulsion of the residents there.

Undaunted by such thinking among European parliamentarians, Breznitz concluded that "the only way forward to the stalled Israeli Palestinian conflict is "this sort of radical intervention that would create an incubator allowing the development of Palestinian statehood."

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