Blue and White's Gantz sends a message to American liberals, but are they listening? by Jonathan S.Tobin

If they were not so blind to the reality of Palestinian intransigence, Trump’s would-be opponents might be listening to Gantz and his talk about the Jordan Valley. If they did, they’d realize that their plans to pressure Israel are based on magical thinking about peace that sensible Israelis from left to right abandoned years ago. Sensible Americans should do the same.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
22 January '20..

Heading into Israel’s third election campaign in a year, Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz seems to be in an even stronger position than in his previous two tries to topple Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The polls show him maintaining the small lead his party has over the Likud. More importantly, the bloc of left-wing and Arab parties that are likely to support Gantz’s bid to become prime minister looks to be running even with or ahead of Netanyahu’s bloc of right-wing and religious parties.

But if he has any hope of breaking the stalemate that has left Israel without a governing coalition for more than a year, Gantz is going to have to convince more centrist voters that he can be trusted with the nation’s security. That’s why he made a campaign pledge this week designed to win over voters who have supported Netanyahu, but might shock the majority of American Jews who hold negative views of the prime minister. Rather than promising to work for a two-state solution, Gantz proposed something that the Palestinians say would make such a deal impossible: annexation of the Jordan Valley.

The Jordan Valley contains a number of Jewish settlements, as well as Palestinian villages, and makes up about 20 percent of the land area of the West Bank. Gantz had issued statements prior to the September election about the need for Israel to hold on to the region, which separates portions of the West Bank that have a large Arab population from the Jordan River and the Kingdom of Jordan on its east bank. But this week, he explicitly promised annexation of the region.

It’s true that, as Netanyahu’s supporters quickly pointed out, the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces did include a condition that renders his promise meaningless. Gantz said that annexation of the area he called “Israel’s eastern protective wall” would remain part of the Jewish in any future peace agreement, and that the promises made by the governments led by Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert—who were prepared to give it up—were mistaken. He did temper his words, saying annexation would be carried out “in coordination with the international community” after he took the reins of power following the March 2 election.

As Gantz knows, the “international community” will never accept Israeli annexation of a single meter of the West Bank or even the reunited city of Jerusalem. Other than the administration of President Donald Trump, it’s not likely that any foreign government will be willing to coordinate such an endeavor.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate.