(JNi.media) Bayit Yehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett told Israel’s Army Radio on Monday that Israel should launch “Operation Defensive Shield 2″ and move to annex Judea and Samaria. The hosts, meanwhile, referred to a quote from a private conversation Bennett held with party activists from the settlements, of him saying, “Anyone who thinks we’re sitting in a right-wing government is wrong.” The same hosts also confronted Bennett with another, not-for-publication quote from the same private conversation: “While abroad, Bibi [Netanyahu] had talks about a unilateral move [towards a 2-state solution] and retracted only after I shot a bullet between his eyes.”
Minister Uri Ariel (Bayit Yehudi) who attended the meeting then immediately turned to Bennett and told him, “Be careful what you’re saying,” to which Bennett replied: “Don’t get me wrong, this is a metaphor, and of course if you leak it out of here there won’t be any more such meetings.”
In the studio on Monday the Minister responded: “I am responsible for the security of Israel and I won’t comment on private conversations. There will be no unilateral withdrawal as long as I am in the government.” Bayit Yehudi officials told an Army Radio reporter that, indeed, “there will be no more unilateral moves, we have no intention of behaving nicely when it comes to Israel’s security.”
Following the stabbing attack in Gush Etzion which killed Hadar Bucharis of blessed memory Sunday, the security apparatus on Monday banned the entry of Arab workers into Gush Etzion settlements, but did not restrict Arab traffic on the roads. Bennet’s reaction in the interview was that there is only one solution, “Operation Defensive Shield 2.”
Coming on the heel of a March 27, 2002 suicide bombing during a Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya that killed 23, Defensive Shield was the largest military operation in Judea and Samaria since the 1967 Six-Day War. The results, were an initial drop of 46% in the number of suicide bombings and a 70% drop in executed attacks between the first and second half of 2002. In May 2002, the IDF pulled out of PA cities, but maintained cordons of troops around Judea and Samaria towns and villages, and continued carrying out raids on Arab suspects to this day. The main result has been the effective collapse of the PA sanctioned terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, which remains broken, according to security reports, even as the new “knives intifada” is raging, perpetrated by individual Arabs who are exposed to social media.
“You have to enter with very big forces into Hebron, and into the cities around it — there is no escaping from executing a kind of Defensive Shield in this area,” said Minister Bennett, “The original Defensive Shield, in 2002, was not pleasant, but we did enter the cities as well as the villages and we cleaned them up, and terrorism dropped 80% within one month.”
The drop was more modest as we mentioned above, and it took much longer than one month, but Bennett was correct on the essential facts.