No Good Deed . . . .

Here is a hypothetical: refugees fleeing genocide and civil war arrive in a small country, uninvited, seeking asylum.  Although the refugees have no connection whatsoever to the host country, the host country takes in a number of refugees close to 1% of the pre-existing population.  With school districts overcome by sudden population influx, that country spends its own money to build new schools to accommodate the children of these refugees.  Yet, so-called liberal pundits proceed to condemn the new host country.

Sounds crazy, I know.  Except it's not hypothetical, it's real, and of course, the host country is the one country on the planet that can do nothing right, ever -- Israel.

That is the gist of last week's Open Zion column claiming that Israel has set up apartheid schools for children of refugees from war-torn Eritrea and Sudan. Of course, all one has to do is google translate -- well, and read down to the very last paragraph -- the supposed source of Lisa Goldberg's piece to see that "The municipality said: 'Kindergartens are established according to the needs of the neighborhood. [The] Municipality considers its duty to provide adequate education to every child everywhere, so the children of the foreign community in Tel Aviv - Jaffa integrated in all schools in the city."  http://www.mynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4420418,00.html.  

To the columnists of Open Zion, of course, this does not matter.  Neither does the report in the Jerusalem Post, which states: 

The Tel Aviv Municipality has not enacted any policy of segregation that would see local preschools exclusively for the children of asylum-seekers and other preschools for the rest of the children, the city said on Monday.

A municipality representative said that no such policy has been enacted, and that the only determining factor for where a child attends preschool is their place of residence.

The representative said that in order to accommodate the 2,716 new preschool students in the city, Tel Aviv has opened 70 new kindergarten classrooms ahead of the new school year, and that a large number of these are in neighborhoods with a high concentration of children of African asylum-seekers.

 http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Tel-Aviv-denies-policy-of-segregation-in-pre-schools-for-new-year-324319

With almost 3,000 new students, the city has a choice of overcrowding it's schools, or building new facilities.  So it builds new facilities.  Only in Israel would such an action be labelled "apartheid."  

Of course, no one at Open Zion is crying for the children of the 2 million Syrian refugees, who are living  in tents in Jordan and Turkey, who are not going to school at all this fall.  

Israel's Plan B

A few days ago I wrote that one thing that is very different about the negotiations currently underway between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is that Hamas has been considerably weakened by the downfall of its Egyptian allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by Iran's and Hezbollah's current preoccupation with Syria.  There is another difference as well: Thanks in part to Hamas, Israel now has a Plan B.  

Seth Mandel speculated in Commentary a few days ago as to whether or not Israel has a Plan B, and if so, what the effect of that would be on the negotiations.  http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/08/02/doomsday-diplomacy-and-the-middle-east/#.Uf0GtRG6LYY.twitter  Since Israel's most recent incursion into Gaza, in November of 2012, Israel's Plan B has emerged.  

Prior to last November, unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, similar to what occcured in Gaza in 2005, was not widely discussed as a viable option.  This was because Israel's major population centers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were considered too close to the would-be West Bank border.  Watching the barrage of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, withdrawal from the West Bank without a peace agreement was considered too dangerous.  Iron Dome, however, has changed that.  

It is thanks to Hamas that we saw how well the Iron Dome missile defense system worked.  Even the longer-range missiles that Hamas aimed at Tel Aviv were rendered ineffectual.  Now that we know that Israel can protect its major cities from a close and hostile enemy, disengagement without a peace agreement seems viable.  In December, the Jerusalem Post reported that 45% of Israelis supported unilateral withdrawal.  http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Poll-45-percent-of-Israelis-support-unilateral-withdrawal  This option was seriously considered at the Jerusalem Post conference that I attended in April of this year, and appears to have been seriously discussed at the Herzliya Conference in March (which I did not attend).  

What would such a move by Israel mean?  To start, it would mean that Israel alone would decide on the borders of the land it would cede to Palestine.  Israel could theoretically keep a presence in the Jordan Valley, and keep as many of the settlement blocs as it chose.  Jerusalem would not be up for discussion at all.  And certainly, no descendants of Palestinian "refugees" would be allowed into Israel.  

The threat of putting Israel's Plan B into action could be what finally pushed Abbas back to the table.  Either way, let's just hope he stays there.