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World Policy Journal
Volume XIX, No 2, Summer 2002
Maps of War, Maps of Peace: Finding a Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Question
David C. Unger
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President George W. Bush has declared that America supports a future Palestinian state, but will not help create one until the Palestinian people elect "new and different" leaders "not compromised by terror." The desirability of such a leadership change is clear. But making it a precondition for diplomacy could condemn Israelis and Palestinians to years, if not decades, of further death and devastation.
President Bush may now feel obliged to honor at least the spirit of his June 24 declarations. But if Yasir Arafat is reelected by the Palestinian people next year, as now seems highly likely, Washington cannot simply walk away. Nor is sitting on the diplomatic sidelines until those elections a realistic diplomatic option.
President Bush has already recognized the path that must eventually be followed. His vision of two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side, despite all the obvious problems, provides the only workable framework for peace. Movement down that path can begin today, looking beyond Mr. Arafat, but not waiting for his actual departure.
A number of constructive peace proposals are already on the table. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has won Arab League endorsement for full Arab normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to approximately the June 1967 borders. Important Arab countries stand prepared to pressure the Palestinian leadership for meaningful reforms.
More will be needed than declarations about returning to the 1967 borders or maps of potential land swaps. Finding the route to peace in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza cannot be reduced to some sort of abstract Cartesian puzzle to be solved by drawing a line midway between two positions, splitting this or that difference, or deciding one set of issues now and deferring another set for later. Mideast realities do not reveal themselves on a single plane, but are refracted by two lenses, one Israeli and one Palestinian. These two lenses, which are elaborated at the end of this essay, have each been shaped by a different view of history and justice. Understanding how to look through these two lenses simultaneously is essential to resolving the current deadlock and achieving a durable peace.
The Current Israeli Debate
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and now President Bush, refuses to deal with Yasir Arafat, a man Israelis no longer trust and whom they blame, with considerable justice, for the breakdown of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Sharon talks vaguely of a long-term "interim" agreement with a reconstituted Palestinian Authority no longer led by Arafat. More centrist Israelis hope to see Arafat step back from day-to-day leadership and act more like a chairman of the board. Some Labor Party leaders still see Arafat, with all his faults, as the only realistic negotiating partner for now.
But with the Sharon government uninterested in resumed negotiations, the hottest idea in Israel right now is unilateral physical separation from the Palestinians, principally through the building and armed patrolling of a country-long security fence dividing Palestinian areas from Israeli ones. The appeal of this idea to Israelis is two-fold. It promises to restore a lost sense of security and it does not require recognizing Arafat or any other Palestinian as a negotiating partner. The chief proponent of separation is former prime minister Ehud Barak, who is trying to rebuild the Labor Party on a platform of ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza without again having to exhort Israelis to trust Arafat. Separation also has support from Sharon, although it appears inconsistent with his implacable opposition to abandoning outlying West Bank settlements. Construction of a separation fence has already begun in some areas in Jerusalem and just inside the West Bank. A 30-mile long fence has separated the Gaza Strip from Israel since 1994.
Separation's appeal diminishes rapidly once hard decisions have to be made about where to draw the separation lines and how to patrol them. Separation can only be geographically workable if Israel is willing to withdraw from all outlying West Bank settlements and all of Gaza. Otherwise, the fence would be too long and isolated for Israeli troops to patrol as intensely as would be needed in the absence of a peace agreement. Separation may also require the creation of walled Jewish ghettos in parts of East Jerusalem. Territorially, Israel's withdrawals would be almost equivalent to those discussed during the last round of Oslo negotiations, held at Taba, Egypt, in January 2001. And while there would be no need to negotiate with Arafat, negotiating these changes within Israeli society with no Palestinian promise in return of an end to the conflict, would be extremely contentious.
Similar problems attend the idea of working out a deal with a post-Arafat Palestinian leadership created or promoted by the Israeli government. Obviously, Arafat is a large part of the problem. And just as obviously, Palestinians, not Israelis, will decide his future role and who, eventually, succeeds him. Even more unrealistic is the long ago discarded notion, now favored by some Israelis frustrated with Arafat, of returning the West Bank to Jordanian rule. Jordan's Hashemite kings have made clear that they have no interest in destabilizing their own rule by adding 2 million restive Palestinians to a population already finely balanced between Palestinians and Bedouins.
Thus, the only realistic basis for a stable peace is the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, under a leadership of the Palestinians' own choosing. Most Israelis and most Palestinians, when they step back from the emotions of the current violence, accept that there must be two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side, and that their borders will closely approximate Israel's international boundaries at the start of the June 1967 Six Day War. Interested outsiders, including the Bush administration and Crown Prince Abdullah, understand this as well. They also know that before a two-state solution can be achieved, three contentious questions must be resolved: 1) In making equitable adjustments to the 1967 borders, which Jewish settlements will be annexed to Israel and what part of Israeli territory will be offered to the Palestinians in return? 2) How will authority over Jerusalem's intertwined Jewish and Arab neighborhoods and overlapping religious sites be divided? 3) What provisions will be made for the rights of some 2 million Palestinian refugees now living outside of Palestine, mainly in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan?
One additional, indispensable, requirement for a two-state solution is a firm new understanding about security. Given the history of the Oslo agreements and especially the past two years, flowery declarations by Palestinian leaders and paper agreements will not be enough. Israel cannot expect to police the West Bank and Gaza Strip itself. But it will not turn over that responsibility to a force that declines to arrest and detain border-crossing terrorists for internal Palestinian political reasons. A resolution on borders, Jerusalem, and refugees must mean a final end to the 54-year-old conflict. Israeli and Palestinian authorities cannot flinch in using their full police powers against anyone who refuses to give up the fight.
An External Solution?
Any hope for breaking the impasse probably must come from outside, namely from Saudi Arabia and the United States. Crown Prince Abdullah's proposal earlier this year briefly transformed the external dynamic of Mideast peacemaking. Only weeks after it was adopted at the Arab League summit, Abdullah visited Bush in Texas and seemed to have won his support for a joint drive to modify Israeli and Palestinian policies, and to push the two sides back to the bargaining table. Bush's June 24 speech put this strategy on hold. But before long the administration may be pressed to revive it.
Bush's original policy of letting the two sides fight it out until superior Israeli fire-power inevitably prevailed has not helped Israel, has undermined Arab governments friendly to Washington, and has complicated American strategy on other issues, including the search for an effective way to halt Iraq's drive to acquire biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.
Yet pushing for an international solution will confront the Bush administration with difficult challenges. The most immediate may be the domestic political uproar that would be touched off by any American attempt to lean on an unwilling Israeli government. Congressional resolutions this spring have demonstrated the deep support that the Sharon government and its policies enjoy in both political parties. Some of this support, particularly on the Democratic side, may be more for Israel than for its present government. An international solution that can clearly be shown to protect Israel's vital interests thus might be able to attract a degree of domestic political backing. But many of Bush's closest conservative Republican allies agree with Sharon's unilateral military approach to the Palestinian intifada and instinctively distrust international conferences and agreements.
An international solution may also require some kind of international monitors or peacekeepers, an idea Israeli governments have generally resisted, even though most of the peacekeepers are likely to come from the United States. Even if Israel agrees to peace-keepers, exposing American soldiers to the dangers of Middle Eastern conflicts could be hard to sell to Congress and the American public.
Most importantly, however much Washington and other countries promote an Israeli- Palestinian peace settlement, final approval must come from Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and perhaps voters as well.
That could mean that, for now at least, Israel will have to reconcile itself to dealing once again with Yasir Arafat, whom it has ample reason to distrust. It would help if Saudi Arabia, other Arab countries, and Palestinian legislators manage to reform the Palestinian Authority, making it more democratically accountable, its security forces more reliable and committed to fighting terrorism, and its negotiating strategy less erratic. If Arafat remains in power, his greatest virtue may be that he is perhaps the only man who can sell the Palestinians on the specific compromises that will be needed on boundaries, Jerusalem, and refugees and to finally end the conflict.
It is to these three outstanding issues that we must now turn, looking at some of the ideas suggested by Bill Clinton at the end of his term, by the Taba negotiators, and by Crown Prince Abdullah and the Saudi officials who elaborated on Prince Abdullah's plan to Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Boundaries — These should prove the most amenable to compromise. What is required is enforceable security for Israel, geographic integrity for Palestine, and minimum levels of involuntary population relocation for both peoples. That could be accomplished by a straight swap of the most concentrated Israeli settlement blocs just east of the 1967 borderline for equivalent land areas with largely Arab populations on the western side of that line. Such a swap could leave the Palestinians with a geographically contiguous territory on the West Bank equal in size to the area ruled there by Jordan prior to the Six Day War. The easiest solution in Gaza would be to follow the pattern set after Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1981 and resettle inside Israel the 7,000 Jews now living there amidst 1.2 million Arabs. The two sections of the Palestinian state, one in the West Bank and the other in Gaza, would be linked by one or more safe-passage routes. Palestinians could travel freely along these routes so long as they did not venture beyond the marked and patrolled perimeters of the designated roads.
Israeli negotiators at Taba proposed an approach that would allow Israel to modify the 1967 borders to include fairly compact blocs of close-in Jewish settlements where some 80 percent of the 170,000 West Bank Jewish settlers live, along with Jewish areas of East Jerusalem. No official Israeli map delineating this proposal has ever been published. But there have been plausible journalistic reconstructions, based on interviews with participants and observers at the Taba talks. The Palestinians have expressed a willingness in principle to consider such border modifications, provided Israel was willing to swap an equivalent quantity of land inside its pre-1967 boundaries to be included in the future Palestinian state. Saudi officials have indicated that such a swap could be incorporated into Crown Prince Abdullah's proposal as well.
The notion of a land swap is politically plausible, even attractive, to many Israelis. The idea would be to exchange Israeli areas near the 1967 border that now have a substantially Arab population, like the Taibeh triangle, across the border from the Palestinian town of Kalkilya. Doing so would actually strengthen Israel's Jewish demographic majority. It could also help ease resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem by permitting an unrestricted return of Palestinian refugees to those regions, currently in Israel, that would become part of the new Palestinian state. Such an approach has been proposed in a recent article in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2002) by Hussein Agha, of Oxford University, and Robert Malley, a former Clinton administration official.
If an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is to lead to full Arab recognition under Crown Prince Abdullah's plan, Israel's border with Syria will also have to be returned to approximately the 1967 lines as well. Here again, plausible land swaps have been proposed to satisfy Israel's concerns about possible Syrian tampering with the waters feeding the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main reservoir. But thus far, Damascus has insisted on reestablishing the international border exactly where it was in June 1967.
Jerusalem — Finding a solution in Jerusalem will require creative new definitions of sovereignty in the Old City, particularly regarding the platform on which the Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand. One side of this platform forms Judaism's sacred Western Wall. It will also require balancing of the requirements of open movement and airtight security, and will call for constructive cooperation in municipal administration to a degree that now seems unimaginable.
Each side demands Jerusalem as its capital and insists on control of physically overlapping religious sites in the Old City. Jerusalem's Western Wall, the only surviving element of the destroyed Second Temple, has been the spiritual center of Judaism for two millennia. The Haram al-Sharif, the platform that lies atop the Temple site and on which the Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand, is Islam's third-holiest site. To make matters even more complicated, some 200,000 Israeli Jews now live in parts of municipal Jerusalem formerly ruled by Jordan, along with about 85,000 Palestinians.
Solutions, or at least partial solutions, are nevertheless possible. One good starting point is the principle enunciated by Bill Clinton in December 2000, and endorsed by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators at Taba a month later: that the Arab areas of the city should come under Palestinian rule while the Jewish areas should remain ruled by Israel. Following this principle, capitals for both states can be located within the current confines of municipal Jerusalem. Movement within the city and the structure of its municipal administration will require special arrangements. Ideally, these arrangements should leave Jerusalem an open and physically unified city, not a new version of Cold War Berlin. Rigorous security arrangements will be required to protect Jewish areas of Jerusalem, and the rest of Israel, from unwanted and dangerous infiltration.
The competing claims to sovereignty over the Old City's religious sites will be hardest to resolve. The Palestinians do not consider themselves free to make compromises regarding the Haram on their own, since this is an issue important to the entire Muslim world. Saudi Arabia's position is particularly crucial. Riyadh felt sidelined by Washington during the Camp David summit two years ago and did nothing to encourage a deal. Now that the Saudis have thrust themselves into the center of peacemaking, they may take a more constructive approach. Clinton's final proposal called for Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall and Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram. There was movement in that direction at Taba, but the issue remains unresolved. Outstanding problems include defining the extent of the Western Wall and assuring that neither side authorizes archeological excavations beneath the Haram or behind the Wall without the other's consent.
Refugees — This is the most difficult problem of all because it is intimately related to the two sides' different perspective on history and justice. "Land for peace'' is a formula for resolving the issues that arose in 1967. There is no such formula for addressing an existential issue like this, born out of Israel's contested creation in 1948. Solving the refugee issue will require statesmanship. Without such statesmanship, there can be no final end to the conflict, and no lasting two-state solution.
Clinton had it right when, in his final proposal, he reported his "sense that the differences are more relating to formulations and less to what will happen on a practical level." In other words, the differences are less about the actual movement of refugees than about the definition of a Palestinian right of return to Palestine. Palestinian leaders will have to find the courage to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of refugees will never be able to return to any part of present-day Israel, let alone reclaim their old homes, most of which no longer exist. Israeli leaders will have to be bold enough to accept at least a symbolic level of resettlement, perhaps initially restricted to the first generation of refugees who departed during the time of Israel's War of Independence. The youngest of these are already 54 years old.
Palestinian negotiators have insisted on the principle that refugees should have the right, if they choose, to return to their former homes, including those within Israel. Israeli negotiators insist on the principle that Israel must retain its sovereign power to control its own immigration policies and its right to exercise those powers to protect a strong Jewish demographic majority. These principles are not irreconcilable. At Taba, several options were placed on the table: a) compensation and integration into the countries where they now reside; b) help in resettling somewhere else; c) return and repatriation to the new Palestinian state (including territory currently in Israel but agreed to be swapped in exchange for the settlement blocs); and d) return and repatriation to Israel itself.
The Arab League plan, in notably flexible language, calls for "achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed on in accordance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194'' (emphasis added). That 1948 resolution, the cornerstone of Palestinian claims, upholds the right of refugees "wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors" to do so "at the earliest practicable date." The Arab League's wording clearly leaves the door open to a negotiated compromise.
To preserve its Jewish character, Israel would have to limit strictly the number of Palestinian refugees it annually accepted—a total of 25,000 to 35,000 for the first three years was reportedly discussed at Taba, although no formal Israeli proposal was offered. Refugees who wanted and qualified for future admissions might be placed on a waiting list, with the actual rate of admissions each year kept low enough not to threaten Israel's Jewish demographic majority. Priority within this list might be given, at Israel's discretion, to older refugees and close relatives of Palestinians already legally living in Israel.
Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian intellectual designated by the Palestinian Authority to represent it in Jerusalem, has suggested recognizing that a two-state solution, by its nature, means redefining the right of return as a right to resettle in the new Palestinian state, not in Israel. But this position has been emphatically rejected by the Palestinian Authority leadership.
Oslo collapsed before final agreement could be reached on any of these points. The Saudi plan assumes they can be solved but offers no details on how. Since Taba, Oslo's structures and timetables have broken down, along with all trust between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships. Today, to invoke Oslo is to risk derision and contempt among Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is understandable, given the way Oslo turned out. But bad feelings about Oslo should not be allowed to discredit either the idea of a two-state solution or the progress already made toward designing one. Oslo's failures were failures of implementation, not of conceptualization.
The Inescapable Logic of a Two-State Solution
Almost 10 million people, 5.5 million Jews and 4.5 million Palestinians (of whom a million are currently Israeli citizens), now live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Some Palestinians still dream of driving the Jews beyond, or even into, the sea. An extremist minority of Israelis dreams of driving the Palestinians beyond the Jordan. Those dreams are probably more popular on both sides since the latest violence erupted two years ago. But the moral and military costs of attempting to carry them out would be forbidding, and, one hopes, the outside world would not sit still for it. It is a prescription for endless war, not peace.
Other alternatives to a two-state solution are more respectable, but no more practical. Israel's Likud Party recently reaffirmed its opposition to the creation of any Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. That can only mean continued occupation or, to borrow the contemptuous term Arabs long applied to Israel, permitting some kind of Palestinian "entity'' that falls short of the usual attributes of statehood. Indefinitely prolonged occupation would be a prescription for more terror, more death, more economic pain on both sides, further radicalization of Palestinian opinion, and a widening schism between Israel's demography and its democracy. The occupied territories have been in near continuous revolt since 1987, except for the period when the Oslo peace accords seemed to be leading toward Palestinian statehood.
The entity-versus-state debate boils down to little more than hollow semantics. Israel's own interests require that any Palestinian administration have both the military means and the international responsibility for suppressing terrorism emanating from within its borders. An entity with those powers and responsibilities is, whatever one chooses to call it, a state. It was Arafat's failure to live up to those responsibilities, not his ambitions for statehood, that aborted Oslo.
Another theoretically possible, but practically foreclosed, option is the creation of one state with two peoples, each enjoying equal legal and citizenship rights—the so-called binational secular state. This Western-sounding solution solves the central problem by denying it. It leaves no room for Israel as a Jewish state, a self-sufficient refuge from persecution, pogrom, and Holocaust. Centuries of tragedy have convinced the overwhelming majority of Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, that a Jewish state is a necessity for Jewish survival. Perhaps some day, an evolving Jewish national experience will make a binational secular state a more attractive idea. A very small minority of mostly secular, Westernized Israelis have long supported the idea of a binational secular state and some still do. But no major Israeli party endorses their views.
There has also been an important strand of Palestinian support through the years for a binational secular state. The Palestine Liberation Organization advocated it during the 1970s, though not very persuasively, given the PLO's lack of respect for anybody's legal or human rights and its general political opportunism.
But in the late 1980s, the PLO accepted U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and embraced the idea of partitioning Palestine into two separate national states along the pre-1967 lines. Arafat is now firmly identified with the idea of a specifically Palestinian state and so is the main Palestinian opposition party, Hamas. The difference is that Arafat continues to advocate Palestinian statehood within the parameters of a two-state solution. If he means that sincerely, he must support the reciprocal idea of Israel as a Jewish state, as he claims to do. The logic of such an acceptance bears directly on the issue of Palestinian refugees wishing to return to pre-1967 Israel.
The PLO's embrace of a two-state solution makes it Israel's most plausible Palestinian negotiating partner at this time. Unfortunately, Arafat's reembrace of terrorism since September 2000 has also rendered him an unacceptable negotiating partner in Israeli eyes. It is nearly impossible to imagine Sharon and Arafat sitting down with each other for productive negotiations. But it is unlikely that significantly more forthcoming leaders will soon emerge on either side. The existing leaderships, it must be acknowledged, accurately represent the hopes and fears of their constituents. If peace is to come any time soon, it will probably be necessary for these two leaders to learn how to accept and talk to each other again, if only to ratify and legitimate the compromises put forward by the international community.
Learning the Lessons of Oslo
Moving forward toward a two-state solution means moving beyond the failures and disappointments of Oslo and building on its successes. Oslo's details are familiar, but an unhelpful mythology surrounds its demise. What needs to be understood is the continuing validity of its underlying logic and the disastrous consequences of its stretched-out timetable.
Oslo was, at the beginning, a plan by two sides that did not trust each other but recognized they had to deal with each other to achieve a mutually desired goal. That goal was a negotiated end to Israel's military rule over a rebellious Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the mind of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Oslo was not about generosity or idealism or a newly benign view of Yasir Arafat. It was a way of extricating Israeli soldiers from the physical, moral, and political hazards of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza by transferring the burden of pacifying the Palestinians and suppressing terrorism to a Palestinian police force. It was also a way of strengthening the Zionist democracy Rabin believed in by rebuilding Israel's solid Jewish majority within a slightly amended version of the pre-1967 boundaries. In the mind of Yasir Arafat, Oslo pointed the way toward achieving his lifelong dream of creating and leading a Palestinian state. It was also a means to reassert, with Israeli assistance, the political dominance of the exile-based PLO over the more locally based groups who had organized and led the first intifada.
Amid the ruins of Oslo, it is important to recognize not only the utopian hopes, but the carefully designed safeguards, of the original plan. Oslo broke down not so much because the concept was fatally flawed, but because it was multiply abused. It failed to survive in part because it was never loved enough by the broad Israeli and Palestinian populations. It started out as a leaders' peace and never really became a peoples' peace. Thus episodes of terrorism on the one side and delay on the other were quickly cited by Oslo's political opponents as evidence that the deal was a dead end, a dangerous mistake, a betrayal of fundamental interests.
When Oslo ran into severe challenges, no powerful leader on either side had the will or the arguments to defend it. One of its two principal Israeli sponsors, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated, while the other, Shimon Peres, was politically marginalized. For three crucial years, Oslo was left in the custody of Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli leader who hated it. On the Palestinian side, the situation was even worse. Yasir Arafat never really took responsibility for the commitments he had both explicitly and implicitly made. Rather than try to bring his people along, he remained silent while others incited violence. Then, increasingly, he turned to incitement himself.
Rabin deliberately deferred his most politically difficult decisions—Jerusalem, settlements, and Palestinian refugees—to the final phase of Oslo to be concluded in five years' time. That is one major reason settlement building continued unabated during Oslo, as did construction of new Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Israel claimed to be negotiating in good faith to remove the elements of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. But, as Palestinians could see, it was simultaneously creating new ones.
Arafat accepted the five-year timetable because it allowed him to defer his most difficult political problems as well. He would not have to explain for now, to the refugee families that had always been central to his political constituency, that he would be obliged to negotiate away any realistic chance that most of them would be able to return to their homes in the 78 percent of historic Palestine that would remain under Israeli rule. Nor would he have to explain to the rest of the Arab world any agreement to accommodate a continued Israeli presence in the Muslim religious center of Jerusalem. And, most importantly, until these issues had been resolved, he would not have to declare an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
In retrospect, it is clear that Arafat exploited these ambiguities to sustain hopes for an outcome beyond what Oslo promised, and that he authorized the assembly of a Palestinian arsenal that could be used to fight for these more ambitious goals by means Oslo itself expressly prohibited. It is not yet clear whether Arafat actually decided to wage that fight before the breakdown of the second Camp David summit meeting in July 2000. Neither is it clear whether he directly planned and launched the second intifada or merely threw his own forces behind it once it began. In the latter view, his paramount concern may have been to prevent his leadership being swept away on a wave of public anger over his corrupt administration of the West Bank and Gaza, and the failure of Oslo to bring an end to Israeli occupation and create a Palestinian state.
What is clear is that Arafat's behavior, especially since September 2000, has discredited Oslo and perhaps permanently destroyed his own credibility as a peace negotiator in Israeli eyes. He has plainly broken his promise to recognize and uphold Israel's security and combat terrorism. Even if he now agrees to renew that promise, few Israelis will trust him to keep it. President Bush's call for a new Palestinian leadership points to one appealing solution to that problem. Yet it is not in America's or Israel's power to replace Arafat. He is, at least for now, the only man with whom Israel can make peace, and it is in neither counry's interest to pretend he isn't.
Oslo reached its culmination, and near fruition, in the talks at Taba, Egypt, in January 2001, which built on proposals made by America's lame-duck president, Bill Clinton, several weeks earlier. There, many of the issues which had held up agreement at Camp David were worked out and some optimists felt a full agreement was only weeks away. But by then, popular Israeli faith in Oslo was shattered. The Barak government was only days from an election it was about to lose decisively. Bill Clinton was about to leave office. The Al Aksa intifada, and Yasir Arafat's violent embrace of it, helped catapult Ariel Sharon, who had always opposed Oslo, to Israeli leadership. It also strengthened radical forces in the Palestinian community who do not believe in peacefully negotiated solutions and whose demands for a final settlement stretch beyond Oslo's basic formula of two states separated by a redrawn version of the June 1967 borders.
Oslo was undone by its seemingly reasonable strategy of postponing fundamental political decisions. The PLO had opportunistically traded in terrorism for a seat at the peace table, not really renounced it. And it never honestly told its people that negotiating a two-state solution would mean that millions of refugees would never be able to return to their ancestral homes. Israel, for its part, failed to acknowledge that negotiating in good faith with the Palestinians about the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip required, at the very least, freezing all further building and expansion of settlements there. Instead, the number of settlers rose by more than 50 percent during the years of the Oslo negotiations from 1993 to 2000. Settlement building, which undermines Palestinians hopes, cannot be morally or legally equated with terrorism, which destroys real lives. Israel's settlement policy was clearly permitted under Oslo. What must be noted, however, is that in the agreed-upon bargain of "land for peace," one side took unilateral liberties with the land, while the other took unilateral liberties with the peace.
Deadlock
Repeatedly, the Sharon government has made clear to Washington and to everyone else that it is far more interested in extracting a cease-fire from the Palestinians than in recommitting Israel to the Oslo agenda. That attitude contributed to the failures of Gen. Anthony Zinni's two missions, in late 2001 and early this year. For their part, the Palestinians rejected any approach that did not clearly link a cease-fire to movement on Oslo. And with Palestinian suicide bombers rattling Israeli society, Arafat has shown little interest in a cease-fire, period. Undoubtedly he expected Israeli military retaliation, but he also expected the scenes of Palestinian civilians suffering and dying at the hands of Israeli troops to rally international support to the Palestinian cause.
Sharon, after being criticized by Washington for offering no formulas for peace, now talks about very long-term "interim" arrangements to be negotiated without Yasir Arafat at the table. The idea that any credible Palestinian leader could agree, nearly a decade after Oslo, to a new plan offering no more than limited autonomy over no more than half the West Bank, stretched out over another 15 to 20 years, seems absurd. But Sharon, whose thinking appears frozen in the pre-Oslo past, seems deadly serious.
Arafat, with his popularity among Palestinians again falling and America and Israel trying to write him out of the script, now seems to place his hopes in the Arab League peace plan. Except for the very important new element of Arab recognition, that plan sounds a lot like Oslo, in both its original concept and Taba details. If Sharon seems determined to forget that Oslo ever happened, Arafat seems equally determined to forget that it collapsed, and even though he played a substantial part in its breakdown, he has the more realistic view.
With these two leaders so far apart and frozen in their positions, the only way forward at this time is a concerted push from outside, led by the United States, starting as soon as possible. There is no guarantee that such an effort will succeed. But one new factor may help. Under the impact of a communications revolution that has brought satellite television images of West Bank clashes into every Arab city and village, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt seem slowly to be coming around to the view that the long-term stability of their own regimes depends on peacefully resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arab leaders may be able to deliver changes in the Palestinian Authority and its negotiating positions, though probably not including the departure of Arafat. But only Washington can persuade Israel to take such changes seriously and return to the table. For that to happen, George W. Bush will have to commit the full power and prestige of his presidency to a determined new peacemaking effort.
In the absence of peace, separation may proceed. But there should be no mistaking it for peace. Peace will come only when Israelis and Palestinians have reached agreement on a two-state solution. We already know pretty much what that agreement will look like. What we don't know is how many more Israelis and Palestinians will die before it is achieved.
- July 12, 2002
The Two Lenses: History and Justice Through the Israeli Lens
Most Israelis, along with most of Israel's supporters in the Jewish diaspora, feel that the Jews' unique experience of persecution in foreign lands, especially the Holocaust, makes the preservation of a Jewish state the first condition of the survival of the Jews as a people. Because the issue is survival, extreme means, like military force and defiance of allies like the United States must be considered justified.
That clearly applies, they believe, to the problem of the 1948 refugees, all the more so since many (though not all) of the Palestinians who fled at that time did so voluntarily, heeding the calls of Arab political and religious leaders who rejected partition and assured the refugees they would be able to return home after victorious Arab armies had crushed the new Jewish state. In this view, the refugees made bad choices and now they and their descendants must live with them. History isn't always fair. It hasn't been fair to the Jews. Why should it be fair to the Palestinians? For other Israelis, it is simply enough that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 stood in the way of the dream of a Jewish state of Israel and had to give way. These Israelis find it hard to understand why, with Arabs talking all the time about Arab unity and with 22 independent Arab states already in existence, the Arabs of Palestine could not have found new homes elsewhere in the Arab world, just as displaced Jews did by moving to Israel.
A very different view applies to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, although the terrorism of the Al Aksa intifada has left Israelis fearful of almost the entire Palestinian population there and little inclined to make distinctions between civilians and terrorists. In a war where ordinary Palestinian teenagers wrap explosives around their chests and blow up pizzerias and discos, ordinary Palestinian teenagers become indistinguishable from terrorists.
Nevertheless, most Israelis continue to favor pulling out of the entire Gaza Strip, most of the West Bank, and most of the settlements if this would bring peace. Uprooting the more outlying West Bank settlements and all the Gaza settlements would give Israel far more defensible borders. Israelis generally consider the pre-1967 borders inadequate for their national security. That is why they insisted that United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338 not specifically mandate withdrawal from all the occupied territory and include references to the right of all countries in the region to secure borders. But if the 1967 borders were modified by a land swap that annexed the close-in West Bank settlements to Israel, many of those national security concerns would evaporate. Such a modified border could be made into a real border, not like the current imaginary line crossed hundreds of times every day by Israeli motorists traveling to or through the West Bank and West Bank settlers traveling to pre-1967 Israel.
Israelis see Oslo as an honest offer of land for peace to a Palestinian political leadership they neither like nor trust. They feel that Arafat, who spent most of his career directing terror against Israel, hasn't kept his end of the bargain nearly as well as successive Israeli governments have kept theirs. Most, but not all Israelis see Arafat's rejection of American and Israeli offers at Camp David and Taba as proof that he never really wanted a negotiated two-state solution. These days, Israelis make little distinction between Islamist opposition groups like Hamas, who have always openly rejected Oslo, and Arafat, who has always claimed to support it. Arafat himself has done much to blur the difference over the past two years, with his speeches to Arab audiences calling for a thousand martyrs and the liberation of holy Jerusalem.
Most Israelis and Israeli politicians are secular and tend to see Jewish identity as an ethnic characteristic, rather than a religious choice. They see Zionism as a modern national liberation movement, not an ideology of religious or ethnic discrimination. They see Jerusalem as central to Jewish national identity over the millennia. But this Jerusalem centers around the Western Wall and need not extend to the newly enlarged boundaries of municipal Jerusalem drawn after the 1967 war. Most Israeli Jews have no interest in traveling to, let alone ruling, Arab residential areas of the city. Jerusalem as Israel's eternal and indivisible capital was a powerful political slogan in Israel for years. But once the Barak government dared to shatter that taboo two years ago, it lost much of its power.
What does remain politically powerful is the swing vote represented by the settler households. Settler voters in the West Bank and Gaza, even excluding the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, represent about 5 percent of the electorate in a country where elections are usually decided by far narrower margins. Labor Party politicians have rarely dared to challenge the settlers even though most Labor voters would readily trade the settlements for peace. This timidity has historically hobbled Labor's peacemaking efforts and helps explain why the settler population continued to grow rapidly even during the Barak government. Likud leaders like Sharon count the settlers as an important part of their political base. The Palestinians have a markedly different view of history and justice. As they see it, no authoritative voice existed to speak for Palestinian interests before the PLO was created in 1964 and recognized by the Arab League as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974. Justice, especially for the pre-PLO period, is defined by a series of United Nations resolutions, which, to the Palestinians, represent international law. This international law, in their eyes, entitles them to rights, which they would be foolish to give up. One relevant example is the right of the 1948 refugees to return to their original homes, as recognized in General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. Palestinians also refer to what they consider Israeli violations of the legal obligations placed on occupying powers by the Geneva Conventions. For many years, and even today, the Palestinians have been far more successful at assembling U.N. majorities than in influencing facts on the ground in Palestine. This imbalance has left Palestinians with an unrealistic regard for the power of United Nations resolutions and Israelis with an abiding distrust in the fairness of the world organization.
The Palestinians see their struggle as comparable to other modern national liberation struggles. Correspondingly, they see Israel acting as one of the last remaining colonial powers, trying to hold on to the West Bank and Gaza Strip with an army of occupation and hundreds of thousands of colonial settlers. Palestinians understand Oslo as an implicit Israeli promise to turn over 100 percent of the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, and thus they view Barak's Camp David offer of some 90 percent of those territories not as generous but as an effort to extract 100 percent of the peace for less than 100 percent of the land. In this view, Arafat's rejection of this offer was a reasonable negotiating tactic that led to a more acceptable Israeli territorial offer at Taba. For many Palestinians then, Taba was not the end of the Oslo road, but the closest step yet to a final agreement and the point from which any new negotiations should resume.
West Bank and Gaza Palestinians see Arafat as a historic national leader, but also as a corrupt and authoritarian ruler. They are suspicious of his close associates who returned with him from exile in Tunis and would like to see more power go to local West Bank and Gaza leaders. These include some of the people who have emerged as leaders of the Al Aksa intifada, like Marwan Barghouti. The chances of Palestinian voters rejecting Arafat at the polls were never great, and have probably grown slimmer since Bush's June 24 speech. Arafat has never allowed potential rivals to emerge and has constrained free political debate and expression. As things now stand, however, he would be the heavy favorite to win even a fairly run contest followed by a scrupulously honest vote.
Endnotes
Note *: David C. Unger is a member of the New York Times Editorial Board. Back.