Chance for State
“Has Expired”

NEW YORK- A prominent Israeli journalist known to be a close confidante of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reports that in the wake of the latest Palestinian Arab terrorist massacres, Sharon now opposes creation of a Palestinian Arab state.

Uri Dan, writing in Ma’ariv on September 11, 2003, stated that the latest attacks have convinced Sharon that the Palestinian Authority must “disappear from the map” and that “The Palestinian leadership will not get to see a Palestinian state—at least not in this generation. The chance that they were given has expired.” Dan, accompanying Sharon back to Israel from the prime minister’s official visit to India, wrote: “In India, the State of Palestine was buried” —an ironic reference to the famous statement by the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, “In Basel [at the First Zionist Congress], I established the Jewish State.”

The ZOA notes that fifty prominent Jewish and Christian leaders, as well as former U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, former U.S. Senators Connie Mack and Rudy Boschwitz, and former Republican presidential candidates Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes recently signed a full-page ZOA newspaper advertisement headlined “President Bush, creating a Palestinian Arab state means creating a new terrorist state.”

The ad appeared recently in the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, the Israeli newspapers Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post, and Jewish newspapers throughout the United States.

A national poll by McLaughlin and Associates earlier this month found that by a margin of 71% to 13%, Americans oppose the creation of a Palestinian Arab state.