Reply #20: The Operative Element In Ms. Bennis' Comments, Sir

[The Magistrate]

Is that it is the best that could be negotiated in the present climate. That is true, and the strongest grounds possible for acceptance, as the climate is hardly likely to improve, and has in some ways deteriorated even since the private negotiators worked out these arrangements.

The rest of this does not really mean much. None of it would be of the slightest importance if there actually were a cessation of attacks by Arab Palestinian militant bodies against Israel and its citizens, and if these do not cease, there is not going to be peace anyway. To me, stating something gives the U.S. a 'dangerously high level of control', as if U.S. influence in this matter were a bad thing, discredits not the thing being so characterized, but rather the person employing that characterization, and inclines me to view that person as, at best, something of a crank, and that regardless of any credentials that might be mustered in her favor. An extra layer of Israeli security at crossings into Israel through a period of trust-building strikes me as quite appropriate, and complaint there is no reciprocal Arab Palestinian presence is mere formalism: the great killing problem in the situation has been the infiltration into Israel of Arab Palestinian militants bent on attacking Israelis, not any infiltration of Israelis into Palestine bent on killing Arab Palestinians; when the Israelis go in, it is as formed military forces wholly under state control, that no customs shed is going to halt. Items such as early warning stations and aerial exercises do not truely compromise sovereignty, particularly if agreed to by the hosting state. The presence of substantial Israeli military forces in the Jordan valley is more problematic in my view, and always has been in considering this formula. Insistence on it seems to disregard the likelihood that a genuine peace between Israel and Arab Palestine would greatly reduce the potential threat to Israel from the Arab world at large. Were the Geneva formula to actually be put into practice, this element certainly ought to be the object of further negotiations after a space of a few years, by which time the Israelis might well be disposed to dispense with it.