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Gershon Baskin is the Israeli director of the Israel-Palestinian Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI).
For many years, the peace camp in Israel has been divided over the concept of "separation". There are those who have spoken about separation to describe the process of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and in this context the meaning of "separation" was political. Political separation refers to the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Palestinian Jerusalem and the creation of an independent sovereign Palestinian state. There are others, even from the "peace camp" in Israel, who have referred to "separation" not only in political terms, but also in demographic and economic terms: separation for them means the removal of Palestinians from Israel by creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel and constructing a "hard" boundary that would end Palestinian physical presence within the State of Israel.
According to Dan Scheuftan in his book on Separation 1, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak are the primary proponents of the concept of "hard separation" (minimizing Palestinian presence in Israel to the lowest possible levels) while Shimon Peres would be considered the primary proponent of the first viewpoint - political separation with wide ranging cooperation, particularly in economic relations and economic development. Ehud Barak's 1999 campaign slogan summarized his point of view: "We are here and they are there".
Ehud Barak's Vision
Before the 1999 elections, I spoke with Barak about his vision of peace. He told me the following: with the establishment of a Palestinian state, over a period of up to three years, all Palestinian labor presently employed in Israel would be employed within the Palestinian state. Barak's view was not based solely on the security concerns that have become the primary impetus for the establishment of the dividing wall today, rather it was based on his overall view of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, deeply rooted in classical Labor Zionist ideology. Through their advocacy of "normalizing" the Jewish people by transforming them into workers of the land, second aliyah (second immigration wave) ideologues preached the philosophy of "Jewish Labor Only" and fought against the land owners of the first aliyah (first immigration wave) who relied heavily on local Arab...