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Last update – 01:54 10/02/2009
Border Control / Washington vs. Bibi II
By Akiva Eldar

If Gilad were home

It’s hard to know how Gilad Shalit would be voting today, had he come home in time. It is doubtful that he would be casting has ballot for any of the politicians who have been in on the secret of the contacts with the enemy concerning the Shalit deal. Upon hearing the true story, it is quite possible that Shalit would in fact be voting for the Green Movement-Meimad, of which one of the founders is Gershon Baskin.

For the past two years and more, the co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information has put his energy and his connections with some of the heads of Hamas at the disposal of the Shalit family.

“Two weeks before the war,” relates Baskin, “I passed along to the prime minister, the defense minister and the foreign minister a proposal that I had received from it to open a direct and secret channel with Hamas. The proposal was aimed at advancing agreement with regard to renewing the cease-fire for a long period, opening the crossing points, including Rafah, and Shalit’s release in return for the release of Palestinian prisoners. None of them responded. Two days before the ground operation began I transmitted the proposal to them again, and again I was not granted a response.”

Since then, Baskin has been living with the feeling that the Gaza war was not really a war of no choice aimed at protecting the inhabitants of the south. He is not the only one. Very senior people in the professional echelons who were in on the secrets of the process of the decision to attack Gaza are prepared to tell a commission of inquiry that the government did not make any real effort to renew the cease-fire. And that is putting it mildly.

Making the trespassers pay

Last week the Defense Ministry made public an agreement with the Yesha Council, the body that represents the Jewish settlers in the territories, to the effect that the settlers in the Migron outpost in the West Bank will be moving to 50 houses that will be built for them in a new community to go up within the municipal boundaries of the settlement of Adam. At Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s bureau, they are promising that this time the trespassers, who have become accustomed to free housing, will have to pay both for the land and for the construction. Anyone who refuses to participate in this arrangement within a few months will be evacuated by force along with his mobile home.

Insiders confirm that by law they can authorize only the complete plan that consists of 1,400 housing units, but this is just a formality. They promise that the Defense Ministry will not approve more than 50 units.

It’s possible that this very night, once all the votes have been counted, these lines will no longer be relevant. The West Bank is sown with settlements on the basis of plans that one government authorized “just as a formality.” Sooner or later the government of Israel will explain that it is just implementing a plan that had been approved by a person who was once the leader of the Labor Party.
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