Israel shot down any notion of putting an international security force in the region as a condition of forging and maintaining peace with the Palestinians, saying history proves such security measures don’t work.
“Some people are speaking about international forces, maybe [in] the Jordan Valley or hills and border areas, that will take care of Israel’s future security,” said Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of strategic and intelligence affairs, in a report in The Jerusalem Post.
But that won’t happen, he said.
“The Palestinians should be able to control their lives, and we should be able to control our security in our own hands,” he said, as United Press International reported. “For us, security means survivability and we have had very negative experiences with international forces so far.”
He gave two examples: After the 2006 second Lebanon war, a large contingency of U.N. interim forces deployed in southern Lebanon. During their watch, thousands of missiles were transferred into Hezbollah hands, he said. And in 2005, the security forces deployed by the Palestinians, Egypt and the European Union to the Gaza Strip failed to keep Hamas from taking over and building up a cache of weapons.
Israel will make several concessions to forge peace with the Palestinians, but bringing in the United Nations or an international security team is not on the table, Mr. Steinitz said in the UPI report.
“A two-states-for-two-peoples solution, but we want genuine peace, real peace and real security that we can trust,” he said in the UPI article.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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