Three Peace Proposals

In my last column I tried to show how the vaunted two-state solution is impracticable, at least under current circumstances. Israel would be surrounded by enemies, similar to Poland in 1939; “Palestine” would be bifurcated, separated by an unfriendly power, the problem Pakistan had until Bangladesh seceded in 1971. I promised to provide a solution that would work. Instead, I propose three. Will any peace plan succeed? I frankly doubt it, but what I propose might, just maybe have a chance if there is a sudden eruption of reason and the stars are aligned just right.

Suggestion one: Restore the area as it was in 1967 with modifications re: Jerusalem and any settlements that are permanent. Jordan and Egypt re-absorb the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, and bits of Israel to compensate for Arab lands taken by Israel. Advantages include that Israel will negotiate with sovereign nations that recognize it, not with war lords who don’t, and it will be Jordan and Egypt which police the area, helping in the economic development, opening channels of food and communication. Advantages to the Arabs—taxes to flow to Amman and Cairo; the people of Gaza will have unlimited access to the outside world, subject no more to Israeli blockades, and the people of the West Bank would have access to the sea through Jordan proper. The principal disadvantage is that neither King Abdullah nor President Mubarak is likely to agree. Mubarak knows what happened when his predecessor Sadat made peace with Israel, and Abdullah would not want to suffer the fate of his great-grand father who was assassinated in 1951 for even considering a peace treaty with Israel.

Suggestion two: Not a two-state, but a three-state solution. Create an independent West Bank nation and an independent Gaza. This will double the potential Palestinian vote in the UN (not that they need that many more sympathetic votes) and grant sovereignty to the people who call themselves Palestinians. Each will be able to make diplomatic, economic (and inevitably military) alliances with others and it will avoid the highway across the dessert that the two-state solution presupposes. The inevitable dissolution of untied Palestine will be immediate without the hard feelings and angry parting of the ways caused by delay. Israel may still have two potentially hostile neighbors, but at least it won’t be a single hostile neighbor, as when the old UAR surrounded Israel from 1958-1961 until the Syrians had enough and left.

Would Palestinians accede to this? I don’t know. They might. They should. But will hatred of Israel blind them? It has in the past. They will have their nation states; they will not have all of Israel.

Suggestion three: The solution to the problem from Israel’s persctive is eternal vigilance. Isaiah tells us that when the Messiah comes the wolf will dwell with the lamb (Arabs will live peacfully with Jews?) but as those two great Jewish sages, Maimonides and Woody Allen have so succinctly put it, the lamb will still be very nervous. Israel should be very nervous.

Counting my suggestions, by rough estimate, there have been 500 approaches to peace since the First World War. Highlights include the Balfour Declaration (vague promise to Jews); the McMahon pledge (vague promise to Arabs); the Sykes-Picot Agreement (planned carving up of non-Turkish areas by Britain and France); The League of Nations’ Mandate; the Churchill White Paper (excluding Transjordan from the area designated as the Jewish National Home); the Peel Commission Report of 1936 (the first to suggest partition); the British rejection of the Peel Commission Report; the 1939 White Paper (limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine); the Anglo-American Conference of 1946 suggesting opening Palestine to Jewish refugees; the UN partition plan (three Jewish zones, three Arab zones, crisscrossing at specified points; the 1949 armistance agreement. Oslo; Madrid; Clinton Peace Plan. Need I go on? To paraphrase Golda Meir, peace will only come when Arabs love their children more than they hate us. (Hamas leader Nizar Rayan and his four wives and eleven children were killed in an Israeli air raid. That Rayan was a terrorist commander is indisputable. But his wives and children? Well, he’d already sent one of his sons to be a suicide bomber. So how much did he love them?)

If there is a sudden outpouring of reason, if the stars align just right, if Arabs start loving their children more than they hate Israel there will be peace. In the meanwhile we prepare for the next engagement we hope won’t come.