The Palestinian Solution Is Independence--With Unity

Twenty-two years after the Six-Day War, there is little distinction when Israelis, Palestinians and Americans discuss nothing more than a procedural device for electing 10 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to negotiate with Israel.

The best moments in Israel’s career, from the historic breakthrough in the late ‘40s to the peace treaty with Egypt, were all achieved when Israeli and world statesmen were lending their minds to larger visions and more substantive issues. Today the fashionable trend is for small steps with a purely procedural connotation. We shall probably find that nations, invited to take short steps, have an irritating habit of wanting to know the general direction in which the steps are to be taken.

I hope the proposal for elections in the West Bank and Gaza can be developed into an agreed procedure. This will require American efforts to harmonize Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s important initiative with other views and interests. It is naive to expect that there will be an intellectual freeze on all exploration of future horizons.

I was the first to expound the “Benelux” idea. The reference is to communities that combine national independence with a large measure of integration and mutual openness, as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg did in 1948 when they established the Benelux Economic Union.

In European forums in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s I discussed the European Community experience as a structural model for solving the Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian equation. As long ago as the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East in 1973, I said: “The ultimate guarantee of peace lies in the creation of common regional interests in such degree of intensity, such multiplicity of integration, such entanglement of reciprocal advantage as to put the possibility of war beyond rational contingency.”

I recalled an occasion in the historic partition debate at the U.N. General Assembly in 1947 when a delegate from the Netherlands explained why a unitary state for the whole area of the former Palestine Mandate would not be just or realistic. He said:

“After the Napoleonic Wars, Belgium and the Netherlands formed one unitary state. Although our two peoples had very close ties, relations and interests of a cultural, historical, ethnological and economic nature, this unitary state ended rapidly and unsuccessfully. The differences between Arabs and Jews are much greater than those between Belgium and the Netherlands . . . . Now, together with Luxembourg, these countries are reunited not politically but economically, and what counts now is not our political separation but our union for other purposes.

Since 1947 the European attempt to reconcile individual independence with integration in many fields has made impressive headway. This principle now joins 12 nations for the only successful attempt in the modern age to moderate sovereignty without abolishing it. The trend has been inexorably toward widening and deepening the sectors in which community interest prevails against national separatism.

From 1967 until the Rabat summit conference of Arab leaders in 1964, it seemed possible that Jordan and the West Bank might form a single state along the lines of the previous Hashemite Kingdom, which existed between 1950 and 1967. But for Jordan’s decision to make war against Israel in 1967, this would probably have become permanent. Arab tragedies are usually self-inflicted.

The case for open boundaries and for common regional interests arises from the special character of the land. It would be incompatible with history, geography and human experience for the West Bank and Gaza to be cut off from a political relationship with Jordan and an economic and human relationship with Israel. These three entities can never be as separate from each other as are the traditional hermetic boundaries between sovereign states. Even when war rages and revolt flares up, thousands of people move across open bridges and border posts between Jordan and the Arab-populated West Bank--and between the West Bank and the sovereign territory of Israel as defined in Israeli legislation. How incongruous it would be if this human traffic were to flow in times of war, only to be stifled by the establishment of peace.

The peoples of this area need separation for the purpose of defining their juridical and cultural identity, but they need mutual accessibility and integrative habits for all other constructive ends.

There is good reason for opposing the idea of a Palestine state totally cut off from Israel and Jordan, but most objections would be alleviated if there were an integrative atmosphere in a peace accord involving Israel, Jordan and some densely populated Arab areas of the West Bank and Gaza, supplemented by an agreement on the demilitarization of the West Bank and Gaza that could be monitored by a vigilant Israel and Jordan.

There is a world of difference between a Palestinian state that would be entirely free to do as it likes and a Palestinian nation that would be bound by community commitments to harmonize its policies with those of its neighbors. The tactical advantage of this option is that it confers on the Palestinians an asset in the form of a national identity that they could easily lose by irredentism or terrorism. The knowledge that this could be the case would be the surest guarantee of responsible conduct.

Since the Palestinians would have a very small territorial area and would not be able to compete with Israel in military terms, their compensation would lie in a national identity and in the fact that they would be saved from total weakness by using their economic and human links with Israel and Jordan. In advocating a confederation between Israel, Jordan and a Palestine state, the Tel Aviv Center for Strategic Studies, representing mainstream military thinking in Israel, wrote: “In this way, even a malevolent Palestine, were it to emerge, would be deterred by an alliance of the stronger countries that completely surround it: Israel and Jordan and, adjacent to Gaza, Egypt.”

Free movement across the western part of the community area would prevent Israelis from being cut off from areas revered in the national history. It would also diminish the anomaly of lack of contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza. The area, though partitioned politically, would be intact as a social and human reality.

Is this too utopian or visionary to be considered in an area now plunged in a sordid alternation of revolt and repression? The Palestinian leaders will have to advance much further on the road toward credibility in Israel before this vision comes into sight. There will also have to be a substantial modification of Israeli attitudes, although the basic idea of “territory for peace” already has massive support. It is precisely because the gaps are so wide and the dangers so acute that there is need for new thinking even at the edge of the precipice. When Jean Monnet first projected his idea for a European community to be formed by nations whose wars had plunged mankind in torrents of blood and anguish, there were many who doubted the realism of his idea.

A sense of impending peril often drives human beings and nations toward innovation. In the last resort, nations can only find security by doing what their mutual interests demand.