The latest Palestinian suicide-bombing ­ this time at Jamil’s restaurant in Herzliya, where a 15-year-old girl was killed and 18 people wounded ­ is the lead story in both of Tel Aviv’s mass circulation dailies.
Maariv and Yediot Ahronot also carry front-page items on the continued pressure on the national currency, the shekel, and highlight a new plan to reduce income tax on wages, while instituting taxation on the yields of saving accounts and stock exchange profits.
Maariv diplomatic reporter Eli Kamir reveals new details of Monday’s conversation between US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. According to Kamir: “Sharon produced intelligence material which showed that Syria recently transferred 400 rockets with a range of 75 kilometers to Hizbullah. ‘Syria has created in South Lebanon one of the most dangerous concentrations of terror in the world,’ Sharon told the president, adding that ‘it could lead to conflagration throughout the region.’
“The president responded that he was aware of Syria’s involvement in terror, noted that he has already sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to warn President Bashar Assad, and said that he would send another warning.”
In Yediot Ahronot’s editorial, Eitan Haber takes an ironic look at Sharon’s Washington visit, reporting that the prime minister and Bush were in close agreement on policy toward Palestinians.
“The clock is ticking slowly, and Sharon has returned with a little more time gained. Some Zionists have always said the main thing is to gain time. Another day, another year, and in the meantime we build the country, house by house, tree by tree. A million immigrants arrive from Russia, we win another war and then another one. The Arabs, in their idiocy, can’t see that time is on our side.”
Haber, who was a top aide to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, asks: “But is time on our side? Who are the real idiots here? Only this week, National Security Council (NSC) head Major-General Uzi Dayan officially reported to the Knesset what everyone already knew: In only a few years time, there will be a majority of Arabs in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Time is on their side.
“Gaining time is nothing but self-delusion. Look at all the time we gained during our period of illusory invincibility between 1967 and 1973 ­ time that cost us 2,800 killed in the October War.”
 “America’s support is tremendous,” Haber continues, “and we have Sharon to thank profoundly for this (not to mention Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat, if we may be excused for mentioning them in the same breath as Sharon). But in another week, or month, or six months … Bush will announce his Middle East plan, and we’ll suddenly find that he reminds us of his wicked father who was so unfriendly to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Like all good Americans, we’ll be telling mocking jokes about ‘George W’ and holding university symposiums on whether time was on our side or the Arabs’.”
Settler columnist Emuna Elon discusses the implications of the Uzi Dayan report ­ which predicted that in 2020 there will be 15 million people “between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea” and only 45 percent of them Jews ­ in Yediot Ahronot’s opinion page.
“To avert the disaster,” Elon writes, “the NSC proposes dividing the country into two states, without telling us how that will save us from those threatening statistics. Will it make the numbers of Arabs any smaller? Will the establishment of a hostile state make the Jews any more secure, just because they are the majority in the strip of land that’s left?”
Elon takes demographic heart from the Zionist past: “At the beginning, the Jewish settlements were a microscopic minority, and nevertheless registered magnificent achievements. Against all the odds, against logic and against gloomy prophesies, the Jewish population of the land of Israel increased steadily, mainly because of immigration, which has always come in sudden waves that surprised the gloomiest of prophets.”
In order to prevent Israel becoming a binational state “without endangering its existence by setting up a Palestinian state,” Elon argues “a bold solution is required for the 1948 refugees, who constitute a high proportion of the Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but do not really belong there.” Somewhat cowardly, Elon does not spell out what she has in mind; however, most people know that her husband, Tourism Minister Benny Elon, is the head of the ultra-nationalist National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu party that has “transfer” as the main plank of its program.
On Maariv’s opinion pages, MK Haim Ramon, who is challenging Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer for the leadership of the Labor Party, defends his plan for unilateral separation from the Palestinians. Rejecting recent criticism on these same pages by columnist Yael Paz-Melamed and former Israeli Ambassador to Egypt Moshe Sasson, Ramon argues that his plan provides political, security, economic and demographic answers for Israel’s most pressing problems.
“It is more than just the accelerated building of a sophisticated fence, which the defense minister has avoided putting up so far, for reasons no one can fathom,” Ramon writes. “Under my plan, the fence will be a temporary political border; Israel will seek international, especially American, backing for the separation plan but will not condition its implementation on such backing.
“The plan entails bringing isolated settlements into the large settlement blocs close to the (1967) Green Line and behind the fence; evacuating most of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip; a readiness to recognize a Palestinian state; and a declaration that this is only an interim move. In simple summary: We are here, they are there. And as soon as we have a peace partner, I will support peace negotiations on the basis of the parameters set out by former US President Bill Clinton.”
Responding to his critics, Ramon writes: “If he had followed all I said closely, Moshe Sasson would have seen that I expect the Palestinians to accept my plan. I am in touch with the moderates among them no less than anyone else. They and the Americans will not oppose a plan that could be seen as implementation of the third further redeployment Israel is committed to. And where Egypt is concerned, senior Egyptian officials, at their request, have heard me explaining the plan in great detail. They never said that Cairo opposes unilateral separation; on the contrary, they intimated that it shows great interest.”
Ramon writes that his plan could be tried in Gaza first: “The only people who oppose this are extremists on the right and the left. The general public will, in the main, be ready to examine the effects of full separation in Gaza on relations between us and the Palestinians.”
He argues further that his plan “leaves important territorial assets in Israel’s hands, including Jerusalem and the Jerusalem area, over which the other side will want to negotiate for a final settlement; while, at the same time, leading to the evacuation of all those territories that are a security, political, economic and demographic burden.”
Sasson, Ramon says, “accuses me of ‘a provocative and harmful ideology’ while Paz-Melamed accuses me of a ‘lack of ideology.’ They are both wrong. What I am proposing is precisely the difference between dogmatism and pragmatism. In the absence of a peace partner, Israel, not its enemies, will decide what’s good for it.”

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