About Us

IMRA
IMRA
IMRA

 

Subscribe

Search


...................................................................................................................................................


Saturday, March 1, 2003
Anatomy of an Illusion: The Israeli-Palestinian Two-State Solution [IMRA: Jordan forever?]

Anatomy of an Illusion: The Israeli-Palestinian Two-State Solution [IMRA:
Jordan forever?]
by Eric L. Rozenman

Midstream, February-March, 2003

[IMRA: It is certainly tempting to consider dumping the problem of the West
Bank and Gaza on the doorstep of Jordan, but this is most definitely "out of
the frying pan and into the fire". It means extending a sovereign Arab
state - army and all - from Israel's backyard to Israel's bedroom. No one
can guarantee who or what will rule Jordan in another twelve months, let
alone twelve years or more. The coming years in the region, with the Arab
countries facing serious economic problems, water shortages and burgeoning
populations, are going to be tough. Israel doesn't have to make it harder
for its own security.]

The "two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict -- actually a
three-state solvent in which an irredentist Palestine, unstable itself,
would destabilize Jordan and Israel -- was stillborn in the 1970s. Renewed
advocacy of it late last year by "the quartet" of the United States, Russia,
the European Union and United Nations prior to Palestinian reform and
without realistic prospects thereof contradicted President Bush's June 24
vision of a post-Arafat, non-violent, democratic West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's acceptance, albeit qualified, of a
twenty-third Arab country on soil he himself long considered Israel's
strategic and national heartland confirmed a dangerous sense of
inevitability for the two-state plan.

But if armies can't resist the power of an idea whose time has come, then
diplomats cannot enforce a vision inherently out of focus. A fundamental
flaw in the two-state plan is oscillation of Palestinian Arab politics
between the thuggish corruption of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and
the murderous bigotry of Sheik Ahmed Yassin's Islamic Resistance Movement
(Hamas). A November public opinion poll showed that while 76 percent of West
Bank and Gaza Strip residents supported a mutual cessation of hostilities
between Arabs and Israelis, only eight percent supported a Palestinian
school curriculum teaching that Israel was legitimate and that peace could
be reached without Arab control of all the former British Mandate for
Palestine (Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza Strip).

So President Bush's "vision of two states, Israel and Palestine,
side-by-side and at peace" remains inapplicable. Worse, attempting to reach
it via "the road map" drawn by the United States with its other quartet
partners -- Russia, the United Nations and the European Union -- would prove
to be a highway to hell. Like the Oslo "peace process," attempting actually
to follow the road map and force such a state into existence during the next
three years (Bush's timeline) appears likely to provoke more, not less
violence.

Short of a U.S.-led trusteeship for the territories, proposed in December by
former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, echoing Allied occupation of
post-World War II West Germany and Japan, a peaceful Palestinian Arab
democracy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip seems improbable. Yet America that
assures one ally, Turkey, that it will not permit an independent Kurdistan
to arise from the ruins of a post-Saddam Iraq, that sent troops half-way
around the world to root out Afghanistan's Taliban and their al Qaeda
guests, would endanger a second ally, Israel, with creation of an Arafatia
or Hamastan.

Elements do exist for a compromise Israeli-Palestinian settlement. To
recognize them one should first clarify what doomed the "two-state"
approach. As adopted implicitly by the administrations of Presidents George
H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, this "vision" supported the 1993 - 2000 Oslo
process. President George W. Bush's explicit endorsement is meant to
resurrect that process from the ruins into which Arafat and the Palestinian
leadership consigned it. But Oslo, a response to the 1987 - 1992 intifada,
ended by encouraging the much greater violence of the al-Aksa intifada that
began in September, 2000 and in its first 27 months resulted in 680 Israeli
dead, mostly civilian, and 1,700 Palestinian dead, mostly combatants or
violent demonstrators. Attempting to force the two-state solution now could
likely transform the Palestinians' "war of independence and return" into a
regional war.

The al Aksa intifada should have been no surprise. Endorsements of the
two-state solution rewarded previous Palestinian violence and provided
incentives for more. Early last June the president and his spokesmen were
still promoting such a settlement in conjunction with visits of Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.
That made sense since American support for the quartet road map to a
two-state solution is meant to bolster the brittle regimes in Cairo, Riyadh
and Amman. These unrepresentative governments fear popular discontent --
including discontent inflamed by Israeli resistance to Palestinian
aggression and a U.S.-Iraqi war. So even with suicide bombers back in action
the European Union insisted again last summer that Israel concede
Palestinian demands. This reminded Israel's enemies that violence pays.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's December call for a conference of Arab
officials in London to advance the two-state plan acknowledged that
Palestinian reform was not a necessary condition.

Granting the Palestinian Arabs the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for
peace with an Israel back behind the pre-1967 "green line" possessed a
certain logic. But logic was not reality. As Benny Morris, an Israeli
historian sympathetic to the Arabs' sense of grievance, put it: "The logical
solution is partition. Unfortunately, it's a solution that the Arabs have
consistently rejected. If they continue to reject a two-state solution, one
people will ultimately prevail. There will be one state here. Whoever is
stronger will win."

Palestinian Arab leadership rejected partition of western Palestine
unfailingly, from the 1920s to the present. Those rejections included
massacres of Jews in 1921 and 1929; the "revolt" from 1936 to 1939
(rejecting inter alia the British Peel Commission two-state solution); the
war against the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 and 1948; terrorism against
Israel from 1948 to 1967 (before it gained the West Bank, or Judea and
Samaria, and the Gaza Strip); renewed terrorism after 1967 when a victorious
Israel initially proposed to return most of the territories in exchange of
peace; rejection of the 1979 autonomy provisions of the Egyptian-Israeli
peace treaty; refusal to halt terrorism during the 1993-1998 Oslo process
that otherwise would have yielded West Bank and Gaza self-rule after five
years; and rejection of a state on 95 percent of the territories and eastern
Jerusalem as well after the Camp David meeting in July 2000.

Attempts to impose peace between Jews and Palestinian Arabs by confirming
the former in possession of "Israel proper" and the latter in a sovereign
Gaza Strip and West Bank state consistently ignore widespread Arab rejection
of Israel in any boundaries.

After World War II, General Assembly Resolution 181 divided the remaining
British Mandate for Palestine -- the land between the Jordan River and
Mediterranean Sea -- into two statelets, one Jewish, one Arab. David
Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership accepted partition; the countries of
the Arab League and the Arabs of Palestine refused and invaded the new
Jewish state.

This refusal to concede the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in any form
remained the dominant Arab attitude. Hence the enormity of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat's transgression -- making peace with Israel in 1979
even while insisting that Palestinian claims would have to be met -- and
general Arab joy at his assassination two years later. Hence Arafat's
celebration of Sadat's death then and his assertion in 2000 that he would
not risk the Egyptian's fate by settling for a West Bank and Gaza Strip
state without Jerusalem and without the return of Palestinian Arab refugees
to Israel.

Israel's 1948 War of Independence had sparked a dual refugee problem;
approximately 800,000 Jews fled Arab countries and Iran, 600,000 immigrating
to Israel, and roughly 500,000 Arabs abandoned what became the Jewish state
for camps in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, Jordanian-occupied West Bank,
Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere.

The 1967 Six-Day War, caused by Arab rejection of an Israel without the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, ended with an additional impasse -- Israeli control of
those territories and eastern Jerusalem. The Arab League's Khartoum
conference met Israel's offer to negotiate with the "three no's": no
recognition, no negotiations, no peace.

To cut this knot President Richard Nixon's secretary of state, William
Rogers, suggested in 1969 that peace be reached based on the pre-'67 lines
"with minor border modifications." Israel would be recognized by its
neighbors and the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be granted to Jordan -- the
Arab state established on three-fourths of what had been the League of
Nations' British Mandate for Palestine. Jordan also would continue to
oversee Jerusalem's Islamic shrines.

But King Hussein, who crushed Arafat and the PLO's "Black September"
insurrection in 1970 -- killing approximately 4,000 in three weeks -- lost
primacy on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1974, the Arab League punished
him for largely sitting out the 1973 Yom Kippur War waged by Egypt and Syria
against Israel and declared the PLO "the sole, legitimate representative of
the Palestinian people." Soon after the "two-state solution" in its present
form took hold among self-styled progressives in Israel, Europe, and the
United States. This despite Arab support limited to the occasional,
unrepresentative Palestinian interlocutor like Issam Sartawi or distant
non-Palestinian Arab leader like Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba.

The two-state illusion was codified in the Palestinian autonomy provisions
of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty -- themselves understood as a
preliminary stage. Yet the Palestinians under Arafat furiously rejected
autonomy, not only for what it did not give them immediately, but also for
what it granted Israel, recognition and legitimacy.

Israel's failure, with Sharon as defense minister, to destroy the PLO in
Lebanon in 1982 kept the two-state solution alive. (Proponents insisted on
seeing the PLO as a Palestinian version of the Jewish Agency, a state in the
making.) Eventually the two-state approach calcified into conventional
wisdom. As a result, former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski could write in The Washington Post (Dec. 24, 2001) that "there
can be only one outcome if there is to be genuine peace: the coexistence of
the state of Israel with the state of Palestine, in a setting in which the
former is secure and the later is viable. The former means not only
Palestine's unambiguous acceptance of Israel's right to exist but also
special security arrangements beyond Israel's final frontiers, which ...
would in the main correspond to the 1967 lines. These arrangements also
should involve a prolonged U.S. security role as well as the formal
demilitarization of the Palestinian state."

The staying power of this establishment superstition was such that Brent
Scowcroft, national security advisor to presidents Gerald Ford and George
H.W. Bush, would echo Brzezinski and plug the quartet's road map in his own
Post Op-Ed (Nov. 21, 2002).

But Brzezinski's conditions highlight the impracticality of his proposal,
itself a neat summary of two-state dogma. Arafat's Palestinian Authority
bristled with militia and weaponry illegal under the Oslo Accords. Neither
the United Nations, European Union nor United States insisted on
confiscation nor could Israel undertake it without open warfare far beyond
Sharon's sweeps through Palestinian territory in March and April (Operation
Defensive Shield) and in June and July (Operation Determined Path). Gal
Luft, an Israeli reserve lieutenant colonel completing doctoral work at
Johns Hopkins University, explained that "all the talk about
demilitarization is simply hot air." Improbably demilitarized, "Palestine"
just as improbably would be barred from alliances with neighbors such as
Syria and Iraq. Further, Israel and its new neighbor somehow would share
Jerusalem.

Likewise for "a prolonged U.S. security role." GIs as either buffer targets
for terrorists or as an extension of the Israeli military might be little
more dependable than the U.N. peacekeepers who fled Egypt's remilitarization
of the Sinai Peninsula before the 1967 war or the compromised U.N. troops in
southern Lebanon from 1978 to the present.

Two-state assumptions also underlay the 1982 Reagan plan, itself stimulated
by Saudi Crown Prince Fahd's 1981 repackaging of Rogers, echoed last year by
Crown Prince Abdullah. But Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Menachem
Begin, respectively, rejected the Rogers and Reagan proposals. They
conformed too closely with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's post-'67 dictum
to the Arabs: "liquidate the consequences" of the Six-Day War with no
Israeli gains.

The two-state solution faced its moment of truth when former Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak, in concert with President Bill Clinton, offered Arafat
95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip at Camp David in July 2000. The
Palestinians refused. Throughout the Oslo process they did not negotiate,
preferring to alternate violence with talks at which the Israelis outbid
their own previous concessions. As Barak's dovish foreign minister Shlomo
Ben Ami acknowledged later, the Palestinians never made counter-offers.
Criticized by both Clinton and Egyptian President Mubarak for spurning the
deal at Camp David II, Arafat changed the topic by launching the violence of
intifada II. Barak then concede even more at Taba, making it nearly 98
percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with unprecedented Palestinian
authority in eastern Jerusalem.

Irrelevant, it turned out. The Palestinian leadership determined that its
war of attrition was necessary not because Israel refused the two-state
solution, but because it had insisted on it. At Camp David, Arafat refused
to declare the conflict over because he refused to yield two key points.
First was the "right-of-return" of the Palestinians' self-induced, vastly
inflated (ranging from three million to five million) multi-generational
"refugees." (They are, more accurately, internees held by fellow Arabs.)
Second, exclusive Arab-Islamic claims to Jerusalem, including but not
limited to the Temple Mount.

After that, only denial underpinned the consensus on which the two-state
solution rested. The al-Aksa intifada and its "good-cop, bad-cop" routine
between Arafat's Palestinian Authority and the suicide bombers of Hamas and
Islamic Jihad became unsustainable -- from Washington's viewpoint if not
Brussels' -- after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. As National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said of
Arafat early in November, "you cannot help us with Al Qaeda and hug
Hezbollah" and Hamas. "That's not acceptable."

But September 11 also was the day an editorial in Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the
leading Palestinian newspaper, declared that suicide bombers in Israel were
in the "noble tradition" of those who bombed the U.S. Marines in Lebanon in
1983. Arafat's symbiotic relationship with Hamas and Islamic Jihad became
transparent with Israel's seizure of the Karine A in the Red Sea on Jan. 3,
2002, a PA vessel loaded with 50 tons of Iranian-supplied, Palestinian
purchased weapons, all illegal under Oslo. The Palestinian leader's denial
of responsibility insulted the White House and furthered speculation about
the possibility of a more credible successor. By the time Powell visited the
besieged Arafat in his shattered Ramallah headquarters, the latter's
relationship with Hamas was not covertly symbiotic but visibly
cooperative -- many of the more recent homicide bombings in Israel were
claimed not by Islamic fundamentalists but by the "al-Aksa Martyrs'
Brigade," an arm of Arafat's own Fatah movement. After Bush echoed Sharon's
insistence on Palestinian reform, Arafat streamlined his cabinet -- and
offered seats to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein has covered the Palestinians for more
than three decades, and not without empathy. Yet even before the Karine A,
he observed that "the widespread Israeli assumption is that there's nothing
to be done with Arafat. My far more painful assumption is that we can't make
an agreement with the Palestinians in general."

The reason, Rubinstein says, is rejection of Jewish national legitimacy. "I'
ve been reading the Palestinian papers for 30-plus years. Their approach is
not necessarily incitement, but Israel is always presented as something bad
... not just. I have never read anything positive about Israel, not once in
30 years." Not even a thank-you for caring for Arab patients at Jerusalem's
famed Hadassah hospital. "That's not by chance," he adds. The Palestinians
have perpetuated two false identities -- of themselves as victims, of the
Israelis as aliens.

Even if Palestinian leaders accepted a West Bank and Gaza Strip state for
the three million Arabs in the territories, what about all those
self-perpetuated "refugees" in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan? Says Khaled Abu
Toameh, an Israeli Arab journalist, "for over 50 years, they have been
teaching their children, 'This is the key to your house in Jaffa. You will
go home.' How can you tell them now, 'You can go to Ramallah [in the West
Bank]? They don't want that. Read the literature. Listen to the poems and
the songs. Look at the documentaries on Palestinian TV and elsewhere ....
What do they talk about? The fig trees and olive trees in Jaffa and the
Galilee."

The Palestinian Arab war of independence reaffirms that the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, with a shared Jerusalem, is to be a way station, a big but
hardly final step in the PLO's 1974 "phased plan." After the failure of
conventional Arab armies in 1973, the Palestinians fashioned an alternate
course, the classic aggressor's blend of war and diplomacy. Point eight of
the phased plan, for example, declares that "the Palestinian national
authority, after its establishment, will struggle for the unity of the
confrontation state for the sake of completing the liberation of all
Palestinian soil ...." Nothing about the Oslo process as practiced by the
Palestinians contradicted the 1974 strategy, as Arafat confirmed on
Jordanian television soon after signing the first accord.

For the Palestinian leadership, "peace" also would require fulfillment of
the non-negotiable right-of-return for the "refugees," at least tens of
billions of dollars in indemnity, and Israel's relinquishing of "other
occupied Arab territories." The latter refers not only to the Syrian Golan
Heights but also to land not allotted to Israel in the '47 U.N. General
Assembly partition plan, including Jaffa -- now part of metropolitan Tel
Aviv -- the western Galilee and much of the Negev Desert.

The Palestinians (and Syrians) in particular have been tenacious, if little
acknowledged, in this regard. Today, as in the 1970s and '80s, when
Palestinian Arabs refer to Israel's "international legitimacy," they mean
not only U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 -- the touchstones of
successful post-'67 Arab-Israeli diplomacy -- but also U.N. General Assembly
resolutions 181 (the '47 Partition Plan) and 194, and a host of subsequent
anti-Israel international declarations.

General Assembly Resolution 194 -- which would have been unnecessary, had
the Arabs not violated Resolution 181 -- called for the return of Arab
refugees who wished to live in peace with the Jewish state or compensation.
At the time, Arab spokesmen refused compensation and rejected peace. So
current appeals to 194, like invocations of 181, are moot.

But tone-deaf American and Israel policy makers long heard in Palestinian
references to Israel's "international legitimacy" that a deal based on 242
(mischaracterized as "land-for-peace" rather than territorial compromise as
a component of peace) could be negotiated. References to 181 and 194 were
dismissed as "for domestic consumption" or "opening bargaining positions."
Hence the sense of betrayal felt by the Israeli left, which long promoted a
pacific interpretation of Palestinian strategy if not tactics, and
befuddlement in the Clinton administration over Arafat's rejection and
Palestinian irredentism as manifested in the second intifada.

The al-Aksa intifada reaffirmed that although Arafat and the Palestinian
Authority grudgingly acknowledged Israel's existence, neither Palestinian
nationalists nor Islamic fundamentalists accepted its legitimacy. Peace
treaties with Egypt and Jordan notwithstanding, rejection of Jewish
statehood is a commonplace throughout much of the Arab-Islamic world. If
not, King Abdullah II of Jordan's statement to The Times of London in
November 2001 that recognition by the Arab world of Israel's right to exist
"will be necessary for the creation of a Palestinian state [emphasis added]"
would have been superfluous. That rejection, abetted by elites in Egypt and
Jordan as well as Saudi Arabia to deflect internal unrest onto the Jewish
state and the Jews, ultimately destabilizes those governments as well as
chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

By word and deed Palestinian leadership, whether that of Arafat or Sheik
Yassin made clear it cannot or will not be a partner to a settlement
according to the letter and spirit of Resolution 242. The measure, adopted
after the 1967 war, calls for an end to states of belligerency among the
parties to the combat (including Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel),
the right of all states to secure and recognized borders, Israeli military
withdrawal from territory (not from all the territory) taken in the
fighting, and, among other things, a just solution to the refugee problem
(Arab and Jewish refugees).

Resolution 338, adopted after the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Egypt, Syria,
and Israel, calls on the parties to begin negotiations to implement
Resolution 242. Unlike non-binding General Assembly resolutions, Security
Council measures carry the weight of international law.

Given that demography and geography circumscribe diplomacy, a West Bank and
Gaza Strip state -- even if accepted by the Palestinians -- could not
satisfy Israel's minimum requirements. First, it could serve as a
springboard to renewed Palestinian assault, as intifada II demonstrates.
Second, even with full compliance regarding limitations on police and
weaponry and requirements to eradicate the terrorist infrastructure, a
two-state solution would not provide Israel with minimum necessary
defensible borders in the event of another general Arab-Israeli war.

After the fighting in 1967, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff advised President
Lyndon Johnson that, absent peace, Israel would have to retain the western
half of the Golan Heights, the western slopes of Samaria (the northern West
Bank), much of Judea (the southern West Bank), the southwestern Gaza Strip
and most of the Sinai Peninsula (returned in phases under the 1979
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty). After the '73 Yom Kippur War, a U.S. Army
analysis by Col. Irving Kett revisited the problem and came to a similar
conclusion.

As Yitzhak Rabin declared to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) on June 3,
1974 during his first term as prime minister, "it is essential that the
leaders of the neighboring countries realize that Israel is entitled to
defensible borders. Israel will not return -- even within the context of a
peace treaty -- to the June 4, 1967 lines. These lines are not defensible
borders, and they constitute a temptation for aggression against us, as has
been proven in the past." Rabin said the same thing 20 years later, a year
after the handshake on the White House lawn, and Housing and Construction
Minister Natan Sharansky more recently made the same point: the pre-'67
lines prohibit peace based on deterrence.

Former Israeli chief of staff and foreign minister Yigal Allon proposed to
meet Israeli security needs, escape the demographic dangers inherent in
ruling over large numbers of Arabs, and open the way to a regional
settlement (Foreign Affairs, October, 1976). Among other things, Allon
recommended that, to retain minimum defensive depth, Israel (less than 10
miles wide at several points along its populous coastal strip before 1967)
do the following:

* Annex the sparsely populated Jordan Valley, a deep, narrow, natural tank
trap;

* Annex the small but strategic Etzion bloc (held by Jews before 1948) just
south of Jerusalem;

* Thicken the coastal strip north of Tel Aviv with a contiguous sliver of
westernmost Samaria;

* Annex southwestern Gaza; and,

* Retain Jerusalem in enlarged city limits as Israel's united capital.

He envisioned that most of the territory, and nearly all of its Arab
population, would be returned to Jordan in exchange for recognition,
diplomatic relations, and peace. In 1986, Saul Cohen, a political geographer
and president emeritus of Queens College of the City University of New York,
in "The Geopolitics of Israel's Border Question," for Tel Aviv University's
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, proposed an intricate, reduced update
of Allon. It required annexation of 20 percent of the West Bank, 19 percent
of the Gaza Strip, and long-term arrangements short of annexation in the
lower Jordan Valley and connecting corridors through the West Bank (as well
as half the Golan Heights). Rabin's 1992 campaign platform reaffirmed Allon'
s guidelines.

Since it came under Israeli control in 1967, the Arab population of the West
Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem has surged to more than three
million. Israel, with a population of five million Jews and 1.3 million
Arabs, cannot annex populated portions of the territories -- even if
necessary for military purposes -- without endangering its status as a
Jewish state. Neither can it build a wall unilaterally separating itself
from the territories, as now being done in fits and starts, and assure its
Jewish future by huddling inside that barrier. Certainly not while a
militarized Palestine rockets it from the other side and Israel itself
retains a radicalized Arab population of 21 percent (up from 16 percent in
1967 and growing faster than the Jewish majority, even after the immigration
influx from the former Soviet Union).

As for Palestinian Arabs, much less than the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip
(an area a little larger than Delaware, as Israel pre-'67 approximates
Massachusetts) would yield a stunted sovereignty. Lacking a hinterland, it
would of necessity eye both Israel and Jordan, the former with its Arabs
increasingly identifying as Palestinians, the latter with Palestinians
comprising nearly three-fourths of its 4.5 million population.

What then is the alternative? Perhaps a real two-state solution in Mandatory
Palestine, Allon-minus for the Jews, Oslo-minus for the Palestinians.

As minimal as Allon's ideas seemed to Israelis, they never came close to
winning approval of even moderate Arabs. The latter's interpretation of
Resolution 242 -- instigated by the Soviets in contradiction to its
diplomatic history -- was "all the land for any peace." But such a
settlement would then and now have contradicted 242's insistence on borders
both secure and recognized.

The key, as Allon noted, is "fair political compromise .... likely to be
painful in the short term to both sides." To both sides -- Jews and Arabs,
not three sides, Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians.

Anyone who has stood in Ariel, the Israeli "settlement" (a modern town of
14,000 Jews) just before sunset and watched the Dead Sea fade into shadow
below and to the east and the lights flicker on along Tel Aviv's shoreline
below and to the west understands: There is no room, geographically,
demographically, economically, militarily or otherwise for two sovereign,
equal states in the 40- to 45-mile wide, 180-mile long strip west of the
Jordan River between Lebanon and the Negev Desert. Definitely not when the
people of one state cheer their children's murder/suicides in the other.

But already there are, as there have been for more than half a century, two
states -- one Arab and one Jewish -- in old Mandatory Palestine. This is not
to say, as some on the Israeli right, including Prime Minister Sharon, used
to, that "Jordan is Palestine" but rather to note that not only was Jordan
Palestine, but so also Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and,
initially, the Golan Heights). To be precise, Jordan comprises 77 percent of
the old mandate, Israel inside the pre-'67 "green line" 17 percent, and the
West Bank and Gaza the remaining six.

The Jewish state in Palestine requires borders more expansive than those of
June 4, 1967. This is especially so since a demilitarized West Bank and Gaza
Arab Palestine, isolated from Syria, Iraq, and Iran, as stipulated by
proponents of the two-state solution, is a fiction, as noted above. Israel's
own failures and international futility regarding Hezbollah in the
ostensibly U.N.-patrolled south Lebanon "security zone," Arafat's illegally
enlarged, illegally armed "police" and Palestinian militia, and the nearly
two and a-half year siege of Israeli cities and towns by gunmen, bombers,
mortar crews and rocket launchers testify to that.

Meanwhile, the Arab population on the remaining West Bank and Gaza Strip
will require territorial and economic depth on which meaningful sovereignty
can be exercised. An arid, over-crowded entity the size of four smallish
American counties cannot suffice.

Therefore, the remaining unallocated portion of Mandatory Palestine -- the
West Bank and Gaza Strip -- must be divided between two states, Jordan and
Israel, Arab Palestine and Jewish Palestine. The shape of this territorial
compromise also is relatively clear. Before launching intifada II the
Palestinian Authority already controlled or shared control with Israel of 54
percent of the territory (which includes the vast majority of the
Palestinian population). Prior to his Camp David II proposal, fears of which
sundered his own government, Barak insisted on a "red line" minimum of 10
percent of the disputed territories. Roughly splitting the difference, one
arrives an 80-20 percent compromise approximately along the lines of Prof.
Cohen's 1986 proposal.

This cannot be implemented, of course, so long as Arafat and Sheik Yassin
represent the two poles of Palestinian Arab politics, so long as Palestinian
Arabs in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan believe they are "going home" to Israel.
As in post-Taliban Afghanistan, or perhaps a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq,
positive developments require the defeat -- military and diplomatic -- of
rejectionist Palestinian nationalism and emboldened Islamic terrorism.

Real nation building in the West Bank and Gaza Strip probably must await, as
the Wall Street Journal editorialized in "Arabs and Democracy," April 3,
2002, the replacement of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime. "That means,"
the editorialist noted, "not merely toppling Saddam ... but staying long
enough to underwrite an election under United Nations auspices. The Iranian
people, already restive under the mullahs, would then take heed and liberate
themselves. Arab leaders throughout the Middle East would have to adapt to
the same lesson, including the Palestinians .... The violence in Palestine
doesn't need another mediator; it needs an outside shock that changes Arab
assumptions about what is possible. It needs a pro-Western Iraq on the road
to democracy."

A "three-state solution" to the problem of Palestine -- for that is what an
arrangement of Israel, Jordan and West Bank/Gaza Strip Palestine would
amount to -- resembles the tinder of post-Tito Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia,
waiting for a match. A real two-state solution -- one Arab, one Jewish --
based on changed assumptions all around about what is sustainable, would
contribute to regional stability, lessen the chances of regional war and
promote U.S. interests. President Bush's June 24 shocked the Palestinians,
the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Saudis. It did the same to the
Europeans and the Israeli left. The quartet's road map -- to be followed
regardless of Palestinian reform or geographic and demographic reality --
dissipates that healthful shock and returns to a deadly cul-de-sac.

The author, former executive editor of B'nai B'rith's International Jewish
Monthly, has written for Middle East Quarterly, Policy Review, Middle East
Insight and other publications. The opinions expressed above are his
own. -30-

Search For An Article

....................................................................................................

Contact Us

POB 982 Kfar Sava
Tel 972-9-7604719
Fax 972-3-7255730
email:imra@netvision.net.il IMRA is now also on Twitter
http://twitter.com/IMRA_UPDATES

image004.jpg (8687 bytes)