A Quote by Uri Orbach

This decree is very serious and we will not allow it to pass unopposed. (on Israel offers 10-month West Bank settlement freeze) — © Uri Orbach
This decree is very serious and we will not allow it to pass unopposed. (on Israel offers 10-month West Bank settlement freeze)
I've often made critical comments about settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and in east Jerusalem, and my position hasn't changed. At the same time, it's equally important to me that the two sides, both Israel and the Palestinians, work towards a durable peace settlement: that's to say a viable two-state solution.
Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.
I consider both the West Bank and Gaza to be colonised, even though Gaza is not occupied in the same way that the West Bank is. The Israeli government and military control all goods that pass in or out of that area, and they have restricted employment and building material that would allow Palestinians to rebuild homes and structures that were destroyed by bombardment.
I would like Israel to be a Jewish state, and therefore not to annex over 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to Israel, which will make Israel a bi-national state.
Based on the Gaza precedent, Israel should not simply be expected to withdraw from territory and let it devolve into a state of anarchy. The West Bank is simply too close to Israel's major population centers and infrastructure to allow it to become another launching pad for rockets.
When Israel says that it will recognise Palestinian rights and will withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and grant the right of return, stop settlements and recognise the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination - only then will Hamas be ready to take a serious step.
If you put too much pressure on the Palestinian Authority, it will collapse - it will disappear - and Israel will have to formally re-occupy the West Bank and assume responsibility for the Palestinians there. The United States doesn't want that. Israel doesn't really want that.
[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.
From the U.S. point of view, negotiations are, in effect, a way for Israel to continue its policies of systematically taking over whatever it wants in the West Bank, maintaining the brutal siege on Gaza, separating Gaza from the West Bank and, of course, occupying the Syrian Golan heights, all with full U.S. support.
The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple.
I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.
The solution is this: There will be a state of Palestine in all of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Green Line, the border that existed before 1967, will come into being again. Jerusalem will be the shared capital - East Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine, West Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel. All settlements must be evacuated. The security must be arranged for both people, and there must be a moral solution and a practical solution.
We can never totally return to the indefensible pre-1967 borders, ... We simply cannot afford to make Israel 14.48 km (9 miles) wide again at its center. We can't allow the Palestinians to be a couple of [miles] from [Tel Aviv's] Ben-Gurion Airport in the age of shoulder-fire missiles with the capacity to shoot down jumbo jets. But that doesn't mean we must remain in every corner of the West Bank or in Gaza, where fewer than 10,000 Jews, living next to 1.3 million Palestinians, have been protected by twice as many soldiers.
Any move by Israel to end the conflict with the Palestinians by unilateral moves - such as annexing the West Bank, delinking Gaza and declaring that there be no further diplomatic process - will lead to strong regional and global reactions, as well as intensify efforts at the UN and in civil society to brand Israel as an outlaw state dangerous to regional and world peace and guilty of criminal behavior.
Israel should withdraw from all the areas which it won from the Arabs in 1967, and in particular Israel should withdraw completely from the Golan Heights, from south Lebanon and from the West Bank.
The U.S. should support the historic Gaza withdrawal as a first step toward a final settlement: a permanent Palestinian state in Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank.
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