Options and Strategies for Israel/Arab Peace Today
Daniel J. Elazar
The volatility and the unpredictability of the Middle East are not
only legendary but have become cliches -- till we are reminded
just how true these cliches are. The Iraqi invasion and
occupation of Kuwait and the chain of events it set in motion is
the most recent such reminder of how rapidly things change in that
part of the world.
Barely seven months ago Israel had a national unity government
whose premier and deputy premier were fighting over who's the
boss, about to fall in part because of subtle and not so subtle
American intervention on behalf of Shimon Peres in an effort to
bring Israel to accept negotiations with the Palestine Liberation
Organization defacto.
Five months ago United States was forced to break off talks with
the PLO in the wake of an unambiguous terrorist attack on Israel's
coast masterminded by one of the principal PLO leaders.
Today, the preoccupation of the United States and the world
elsewhere in the region while Israel waits to see what Sadam
Hussein may have in store for it. The PLO and the Palestinians
have embraced the Iraqi tyrant, reenforcing the views of Yitzhak
Shamir and his Likud party, that Yasser Arafat and his cohorts
cannot be realistic partners for any kind of peace short of
Israel's surrender, while Israeli government still seeks to find
"kosher" Palestinians with whom to negotiate.
Under these circumstances, it is hard to talk about options and
possibilities for Israel/Palestinian or Israel/Arab peace. We do
so from a new understanding of the threat to Israel and Israel's
security needs. Nevertheless, we who are interested in such a
peace, like the Israeli government itself, must continue to pursue
the possibility relentlessly, guided only by the realities of
timing and by a realistic assessment of our situation and our
adversaries.
In doing so, we face certain imponderables. We still do not know
just how serious the now-ended PLO peace offensive was. Some of
the PLO leadership, who worked so hard to advocate it may have
been sincere in their efforts to change their organization's
stance as well as the stance of the Israeli government. Others
clearly, carefully at times, even brilliantly, used the peace
offense as a smoke screen to pursue what have been called the
salami tactics of getting Israel to weaken itself through a series
of withdrawals to earlier borders.
For all their presumed acceptance of the existence of the State of
Israel, the PLO spokesmen were careful never to recognize the Jews
as a people with the right of self-determination, a claim they
make unabashedly for themselves -- this despite the thirty five
hundred year long history of the Jews as a people.
It is far clearer how the Arab states, other than Egypt, made no
concrete efforts to show their support for the PLO initiative,
continuing their opposition to Israel on every plane everyway as
in the past, lending credence to Prime Minister Shamir's rejection
of the whole business as a ploy had they made even a symbolic
gesture -- for example, by abandoning their attempt to expell
Israel from the U.N. -- in support of peace, perhaps things might
have been different. But the matter does not end there, whatever
the final judgement of history or at least of historians about
these matters, it remains clear to most Israelis that some
settlement has to be made with the Palestinian Arabs, at least
with those in the territories, that will provide sufficient mutual
satisfaction to bring about the cessation of hostilities if not
"real peace". The persistence of the intifada alone tells us that
-- Even though principal success of the intifada has been in its
public relations, convincing the media -- the true arbiters of
opinion in the world today -- that the Palestinians are oppressed
underdogs and thereby encouraging them to emphasize a seperate
Palestinian identity for those Arabs west of the Jordon river,
something that "plays" better than their older Arab identity.
I do not mean to sound cavalier about the real pain and the real
aspirations of the Palestinians, quite to the contrary. They do
need some reasonable kind of political self-expression. But, as
long as they continue to make bad choices as they have at every
opportunity since 1917 including in the present crisis, others
cannot save them from themselves. Once again it seems clear that
Israel cannot make the kind of concessions that even the United
States was pressing for it to make a few months ago. I must
confess that up until the PLO resumption of terrorism and the
embrace of the Iraqi adventure I was beginning to doubt that
anything less than a "two-state solution" that actually means a
three-state solution with Israel, a Palestinian state and Jordon
all in historical Eretz Israel/Palestine was becoming unavoidable.
It is widely known that my way out of the dilemma was through
sound principles of federal management. Even my hopes and efforts to
encourage federal arrangements to link the Palestinians and Jordan
within one state and to link that state to Israel in limited but
critical ways and to be obsolete as the proposal that Israel could
simply annex the territory west of the Jordon river without regard
to the political aspirations of the Arabs living within that
territory.
Today that is not so clear. Hussein is caught in a vise between
his Arab neighbor to the northeast and his American patron, not to
speak of Israel's interest in the separate existence of Jordon as
a buffer state. Erroneous forecasts of Hussein's imminent
downfall have resounded for nearly forty years so I will make no
such forecast, but his situation looks more difficult than it has
at least since the days of Nasser. There is every possibility
that Jordon will become a Palestinian state either through
internal revolution or through an Israel - Iraqi war which would
lead to Israel's invasion of Jordon in self-defence, in an effort
to stop the Iraqis before they reached Israel's lines. In either
case, the King is likely to fall and a Palestinian-dominated
government to be installed.
That would change the situation dramatically. The issue would
become one of where to draw the border between Israel and
"Palestine", not whether there should be a Palestine and where, in
the process of drawing that border, to determine what should be
working in relations between the two states. In that case there
would be some flexibility. Conceivably there could be maximum
seperation between the two states and their peoples. Although,
there would undoubtly continue to be an Arab reality within Israel
and at the very least, the two states would have mutual problems
of control over resources, commerce and security, it might be
necessary to work out permanent appropriate arrangements between
the two states.
On the other hand, if Jordon does survive as something other than
a "pure" Palestinian state, the problem of political satisfaction
for the west bank Palestinians still will have to be accommodated
in connection with the east bank. Israel is likely to be even
more resolved to present Arab sovereignty west of the Jordon.
Then we may need limited confederal connections of the kind
pioneered by the European community as a means of linking polities
that recognized certain necessities of cooperation but did not
want to develop more ties than were necessary. While I believe
that there will be a need for cooperation between Jews and
Palestinians sharing the same land between the Mediterranean and
the eastern desert, it is clear to me that neither people wants to
be more linked than they need to be. Both want to develop their
own separate personalities in their own ways. Indeed this is a
laudable goal for both. Let us recall that federal arrangements
were designed to enable continual separation as much as linkage.
The alternative to that may not be separation but annexation by
one side or the other. Let us recall that Palestinian nationalism
is very much a part of the wider sense of being part of one Arab
nation. If ever the independent Arab state, see themselves as
part and parcel of the Arab nation, why should we treat the
Palestinians any differently.
Basically we are still faced with the situation whereby Eretz
Israel/Palestine is divided into three parts. One part is clearly
Jewish; the second clearly Arab, and the third mixed. Both sides
have important, legitimate and real claims. With the foregoing
scenario, the mixed part can be divided up in the matter of a
zero-sum game -- "I win, you lose" or vice versa. But it may
still be much better to devise ways to share rather than divide
that segment of the land and its population. To move in this
direction at this point, would require a new Palestinian
leadership that would recognize necessity.
Once
again, we may be standing at another point of stalemate in the
Israel-Palestinian Israel-Arab relations or we may be at the
beginning of a new chapter. In the Middle East it is folly to
predict.
