E

ighteen years have passed since I would daven Maariv at the Bayit Vegan shtibel known as “99” (Bayit Vegan Street), often sitting face-to-face with Rabbi Avraham Ravitz a”h, who then was a Knesset member from UTJ.

I was then working in public relations, not journalism, so I wasn’t looking for an interview the night I asked Rabbi Ravitz if he wouldn’t mind answering one burning political question on my mind.

This was at the peak of the second intifada. Opposition leader Ariel Sharon had just made an ill-advised visit to Har Habayis, which provoked the Palestinians. Not that they needed the pretext, but Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat took advantage of the wrath on the Arab street to unleash a new wave of terror, including suicide bombings, roadside shootings, and mortar attacks on the Gilo neighborhood in south Jerusalem. Bayit Vegan, where I was living at the time, is not far from Gilo, and the sounds of the mortars and IDF retaliation via helicopter gunships would shake my bed at night.

I approached Rabbi Ravitz because earlier that day Mishpacha’s Hebrew-language newspaper quoted his Knesset colleague Moshe Gafni as saying that if peace negotiations were to resume, then the fate of Beitar Illit and Kiryat Sefer — the two largest chareidi communities situated just over the Green Line — would be up for grabs.

“I’d like to know if this is just MK Gafni’s position, or if this also represents the position of the gedolei Yisrael?” I asked.

Rabbi Ravitz replied without hesitation: “It’s not the position of the gedolim, and in fact, Rabbi Gafni already has expressed charatah [regret] that he said this. You know, the Arabs read Mishpacha too. If negotiations resume, they will say, ‘You’ve already given us Beitar and Kiryat Sefer, so what other concessions are you ready to make?’ ”

As the conventional wisdom goes, when the Trump administration releases its long-anticipated peace plan next month, the Palestinians will reject it automatically, so Israel has nothing to lose by greeting it with a fond embrace.

My conversation with Rabbi Ravitz 18 years ago shows just how risky that pat answer is.

While it’s hard to believe that a plan devised by Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman, with input from Prime Minister Netanyahu and Nikki Haley, would be unfavorable to Israel, the Arabs will pocket anything Jerusalem accepts as a binding concession, and that will serve as the starting point for future negotiations. Netanyahu knows this well, but he owes Trump for Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and America’s unrelenting defense of Israel at the UN.

Bibi’s strategy should be a return to the policy of reciprocity that he crafted while campaigning in 1995 for his first term as prime minister, when the PA was violating every agreement they made under the newly minted Oslo Accords and Israel’s territorial withdrawals from Judea and Samaria could not be rolled back.

Peace is a two-way street. If the PA and Hamas show interest in the Trump plan, then Israel can display reciprocal measures. If they reject it, as expected, there is no reason for Israel to make unilateral concessions that its enemies, and even its well-meaning friends, will pocket, or hold as a down-payment on a mortgage against Israel’s future security.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 760)