Sunday, May 02, 2004
A Belated Response
Coming back to the question of the Sharon Plan, which a fellow blogger and I have been hashing out, here are some more thoughts.
My core argument is that this is a step that could lead to peace, but it is not a peace plan. It's certainly not an agreement. Holding it to the criteria of a peace plan misreads it. This is a wartime action premised first and foremost on security. Sharon may be giving the Palestinians a state without a government, but he could not give them a government in any case. Sympathetic EU well-wishers couldn't give the Palestinians a government either for that matter. Israel is too jaded to believe in the possibilities of nation-building on Jordan. Arafat may be a lesser evil to Hamas, but no responsible Israeli could trust him at this point. From a counterterrorist perspective, forcing Hamas to come out into the open makes it more vulnerable as an organization, and it has taken a number of body blows lately. To the extent that the PA has cultivated and encouraged Hamas - from timely prisoner releases in the fall of 2000 to the increasing Islamist bent of PA media - the distinction between the two is thinning.
One would certainly anticipate, in the event of Palestinian movement toward statehood an effort to vest the Palestinian people with the infrastructure for it - after all that sideline boosterism, the Arab states and EU are probably good for it. Nonetheless, the division of Gaza and the West Bank will remain until someone builds a highway. I doubt that their economies had much to do with each other even in the pre-2000 time frame. Gaza is an economic deadweight and a basket case. It may be better for the West Bank to run its own affairs than to subsidize a mini-Somalia before serious reconstruction can improve the situation in Gaza.
The settlements have deeply complicated the process of solving this, but at this point they do exist. And, if Israel has little reason to think that a Palestinian partner will act responsibly, retaining them becomes rational. They give Israel greater strategic depth - some do anyway. In the days of Oslo, anticipating the political storm that removing them would entail, Barak was willing to compensate the Palestinians with other chunks of land. That may be a possibility. But again, in the absence of real measures to curb terror by the PA, it would be unrealistic to expect any freebies from Israel. One can talk about the injustice of the more recent expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank and reasonably demand that Israel freeze construction and make restitution in individual cases (one can also reflect on the fact that the status quo 1949-67 period, which Palestinian advocates want to restore was a deep historic anomaly, since it is the only time in modern history when the West Bank was fully Judenrein - and that any Palestinian state will reap the dividends of Jordan's own wartime acts of illegal expulsions).
It may be unrealistic to expect someone evicted 2 years ago not to want to return, but here my colleague is choosing his example. What of instances where settlements were built on largely unoccupied land? What if they were built 25 years ago? A fair measure might be to insist upon the restitution of all West Bank property seized post-Oslo (1993).
And finally and peripherally: Israel's complaint agains terror attacks isn't that they are efforts to alter the peace process. Israel is condemning them as barbaric actions - it gave up on the peace process in the fall of 2000 and little that has happened since has restored any rational faith in it. Until there is reason to think that a partner exists, expect Israel to take actions premised firstly and lastly on its own security needs.
Coming back to the question of the Sharon Plan, which a fellow blogger and I have been hashing out, here are some more thoughts.
My core argument is that this is a step that could lead to peace, but it is not a peace plan. It's certainly not an agreement. Holding it to the criteria of a peace plan misreads it. This is a wartime action premised first and foremost on security. Sharon may be giving the Palestinians a state without a government, but he could not give them a government in any case. Sympathetic EU well-wishers couldn't give the Palestinians a government either for that matter. Israel is too jaded to believe in the possibilities of nation-building on Jordan. Arafat may be a lesser evil to Hamas, but no responsible Israeli could trust him at this point. From a counterterrorist perspective, forcing Hamas to come out into the open makes it more vulnerable as an organization, and it has taken a number of body blows lately. To the extent that the PA has cultivated and encouraged Hamas - from timely prisoner releases in the fall of 2000 to the increasing Islamist bent of PA media - the distinction between the two is thinning.
One would certainly anticipate, in the event of Palestinian movement toward statehood an effort to vest the Palestinian people with the infrastructure for it - after all that sideline boosterism, the Arab states and EU are probably good for it. Nonetheless, the division of Gaza and the West Bank will remain until someone builds a highway. I doubt that their economies had much to do with each other even in the pre-2000 time frame. Gaza is an economic deadweight and a basket case. It may be better for the West Bank to run its own affairs than to subsidize a mini-Somalia before serious reconstruction can improve the situation in Gaza.
The settlements have deeply complicated the process of solving this, but at this point they do exist. And, if Israel has little reason to think that a Palestinian partner will act responsibly, retaining them becomes rational. They give Israel greater strategic depth - some do anyway. In the days of Oslo, anticipating the political storm that removing them would entail, Barak was willing to compensate the Palestinians with other chunks of land. That may be a possibility. But again, in the absence of real measures to curb terror by the PA, it would be unrealistic to expect any freebies from Israel. One can talk about the injustice of the more recent expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank and reasonably demand that Israel freeze construction and make restitution in individual cases (one can also reflect on the fact that the status quo 1949-67 period, which Palestinian advocates want to restore was a deep historic anomaly, since it is the only time in modern history when the West Bank was fully Judenrein - and that any Palestinian state will reap the dividends of Jordan's own wartime acts of illegal expulsions).
It may be unrealistic to expect someone evicted 2 years ago not to want to return, but here my colleague is choosing his example. What of instances where settlements were built on largely unoccupied land? What if they were built 25 years ago? A fair measure might be to insist upon the restitution of all West Bank property seized post-Oslo (1993).
And finally and peripherally: Israel's complaint agains terror attacks isn't that they are efforts to alter the peace process. Israel is condemning them as barbaric actions - it gave up on the peace process in the fall of 2000 and little that has happened since has restored any rational faith in it. Until there is reason to think that a partner exists, expect Israel to take actions premised firstly and lastly on its own security needs.
