Argument_for_Palestinian_State

[Writer Name] [Supervisor Name] [Subject] [Date] Palestinian State Both Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres insist that the Declaration of Principles signed by Israel and the PLO in Washington on September 13 - popularly known as the "Gaza/Jericho First" plan - contains a fail-safe mechanism. Not a single Jewish settlement in the territories will be dismantled, and the Israeli army will be in charge of safeguarding the settlers. Moreover, the experiment will begin with Gaza, whose loss virtually no Israeli will mourn, and Jericho, a small and insignificant town near the Jordanian border. If the experiment fails, if the Arabs use the removal of the "occupation" not to build institutions of self-government but to establish terror bases from which to attack Israel, the Israeli army will move in and cancel the whole deal. If the plan works, we will have peace at last, even if it means the establishment of a Palestinian state. According to polls, a majority of Israelis deem peace and separation from the 1.7 million Palestinian Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza more important than keeping all the land won in the 1967 war. That a hostile army should again threaten Israel from hills within rifle range of Tel Aviv's suburbs and Jerusalem's center is something virtually every Israeli finds unacceptable. (Gresh, 12) The architects of the agreement with the PLO are aware of this fundamental concern. On returning to Israel from Washington he added another grievance - poverty - which will have to be eliminated if peace is to reign. If Israelis thought that there was no way back, that the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn signified an irrevocable withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines and the establishment of a PLO state beyond those lines, it is doubtful that more than a small minority would support the move. Yet in truth there is no going back for Israel - unless the army's departure from Gaza triggers an immediate daily barrage of Katyushas on nearby kibbutzim and towns. Israelis will be told that eventually the new PLO police will eliminate these extremists with Israeli help. And, as Peres sees it, the world community, quick to condemn Israel when its security services have dealt with Arab terrorists, will view the PLO handling of the situation as a strictly internal matter. Oddly, the moral problem posed by letting the PLO establish order in the territories seems to perturb no one. It will be interesting to see if Amnesty International and the Israeli "human-rights" organization B'tselem will censure Rabin and Peres for inviting a scenario similar to Sabra-Shatila or nominate them for the Nobel Peace Prize. Without Israeli control it will be impossible to prevent the importation of vast quantities of small arms into the territories, and the three main factions - "mainstream" PLO, radical leftists, and Islamic fundamentalists - will struggle for primacy. (Heller, 5) Each segment of the "Palestinian resistance" will play its role in this war. In a telephoned speech to students at Nablus's Najah University on September 1, he assured his audience that the agreement with Israel was only the first phase of the PLO's "phased plan," which calls for the use of Palestinian sovereignty in part of Palestine as a springboard for a final assault on Israel. The same line is preached by PLO representatives in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Both the PLO and the "rejectionists" have developed sophisticated skills in pursuing the "armed struggle." They have learned when to employ lone, "unaffiliated" knifers and suicidal bombers to demoralize civilian populations, and when to ambush an army patrol with military precision. If they feel that the Israeli army will evacuate sooner without provocation, they may lie low. But chances are that the different Palestinian groups will try to score points with the population by hastening the Israeli withdrawal. Tipped by the intelligence services, these special units, dressed as Arabs, penetrate villages and refugee shanty towns which serve as terrorist bases and apprehend wanted terrorists. So obvious is this that it occurred even to American media interviewers when the Israel-PLO pact was first revealed - particularly when it became known that Israeli army officers, from Chief of the General Staff Ehud Barak down, had expressed concern about the army's ability to combat terrorism under the new circumstances. (Johnson, 4) In general, Peres and Rabin keep assuring Israelis that the new Palestinian entity will not be a sovereign state. Like former Secretary of State James Baker, Israeli ministers like to call the territories' ultimate status "something more than autonomy and less than a state." But the Declaration of Principles makes it clear that the creation of a PLO state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, with minor border adjustments, is inevitable. The Palestinian interim governing body - the Council - will have executive, legislative, and judicial authority. There will be a Palestinian Land Authority and a Palestinian Water Administration Authority. The agreement even implicitly entertains the idea of Jerusalem as the capital of the new state. Other issues left for these discussions are refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, and relations with other neighbors. Only the mention of borders in this context hints that, while the West Bank and Gaza are certain to become the Palestinian state, border adjustments may still be negotiated. (Hermassi, 11) To keep insisting, as Rabin and Peres are doing, that it will be possible to prevent the birth of a Palestinian state after the interim period - which may last far less than five years - is to insult the intelligence of Israelis and Palestinians alike. In fact, all that is needed for the emergence of a Palestinian state is the withdrawal of Israeli troops. Even if the territory were handed to Jordan, King Hussein would not be able to prevent a declaration of Palestinian sovereignty. The question, then, is not whether the government's plan will lead to a Palestinian state - which Labor no less than Likud has always considered a mortal danger to Israel - but whether Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist in peace. The advocates of the agreement say that a Palestinian state would not only pose no danger, it would enhance Israeli security by enabling Israel to make peace with other Arab countries. When Rabin returned from Washington (via Morocco), he mocked right-wing warnings that the agreement would create a terrorist state which would endanger Israel. To his credit, he did not deny that a PLO state might become a base for terrorists; he merely asserted that Palestinian terrorism has never been, is not now, and will not be in the future a threat to the existence of the state of Israel. Terrorism is, to be sure, a troublesome, painful threat that leads to the loss of life of Israeli soldiers and civilians, but it does not and cannot threaten Israel's existence. Rabin's confidence about the relative safety of the agreement has had a decisive impact on the Israeli electorate. Ironically, it came just before the 20th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which reminded the less sanguine that the whole army brass, almost to a man, was dead wrong about the intentions of Israel's neighbors at that time. It was a miscalculation that almost cost Israel its life. There is, to be sure, no disputing the contention that a Palestinian state in itself cannot threaten Israel's existence. This is not because it will be demilitarized, or because it will be, in Abba Eban's words, a small country with "zero tanks" against Israel's 4,000 tanks. The new state will indeed be tiny in area, but it will be strategically and topographically at an advantage vis-a-vis Israel. Israel's withdrawal from the Jordan valley and the Judean-Samarian mountains will leave in Arab/Muslim hands an uninterrupted land mass from Iran to the outskirts of Tel Aviv. It would be better for Israel, he contends, to be at peace with Jordan and Syria and thus prevent their joining Iraq or Iran (or both) in an eastern front against Israel. But would peace treaties with Syria and Jordan keep them out of war with Israel' As for the about-face on the PLO, the justification for it was that if Israel did not talk to Arafat it would have to talk to Hamas. Much the same holds for the PLO and Hamas. The enthronement of the PLO has also made Jordan's King Hussein unhappy. Jordan has always paid lip service to the PLO's role as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," but King Hussein has seen a PLO state as a threat and has counted on Israel to prevent it. The king is even more unhappy about the idea - ardently touted by Peres to allay Israeli fears of an irredentist, unviable state next door - of confederation between Palestine and Jordan. The prospect of a radical Palestine-Jordan bordering Israel on one side and Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Hafez Assad's Syria on the other must give pause even to the terminally optimistic. Israeli economists forecast the imminent lifting of the Arab boycott, an avalanche of foreign investments, and the free movement both of cheap Arab labor and of goods in and out of Israel. Most enticing are the projections of huge exports to the Arab world, resulting in Israeli prosperity of unprecedented proportions. The American diplomat, Roger Harrison, who once served as political counselor in Israel and ambassador to Jordan, has articulated the prevailingly optimistic attitude in a New York Times article believes that the new state would not be radical, because Egypt, Jordan, and even Syria (assuming an agreement is reached on the status of the Golan Heights) will all have a stake in peace; none would welcome the increase in power of radical interests that a militant state would portend. What Harrison forgets is that even if Assad were to expel the rejectionist Palestinian organizations he is harboring in Damascus, cut his ties with Iran, and opt for a pro-Western stance, there would still be Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Iran to sponsor radicals and fundamentalists. Nor is the general belief warranted that the Saudis and the Gulf emirates would fight against a fundamentalist regime. Harrison implies that this movement, which has swept the Muslim and Arab world from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic, will subside if only Israel gives the Palestinians what they want. (Herz, 473-93) Quite apart from the implausibility of this analysis, the trouble is that what the Palestinians want right now is not just a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza but half of Jerusalem as its capital and the "right of return" for the refugees of the 1948 war so that they can go back to their former homes in Israel. Aware of this, Peres's deputy, Yossi Beilin, the architect of the agreement with the PLO, is already talking of a "quarter" in Jerusalem which would be run by Palestinians. (Jackson, 2) The "right of return" is no longer unthinkable, either. Uri Avnery, a prominent journalist who is now being celebrated as a prophet for having long advocated precisely what the government is bringing about - recognition of the PLO and a Palestinian state at the 1967 lines - has begun suggesting that the resettlement of 300,000-400,000 Palestinians inside Israel would enhance the chances of peace. Here, then, is what the government is asking the people of Israel to believe: that the Palestinian state will form a benign, business-oriented confederation with Jordan; that, with open borders, 150,000 Arab workers will enter Israel every day and - satisfied with seeing their flag in Gaza, Hebron, and Nablus - will forget all the catechisms of hatred and revenge they have been taught and will work peacefully in Israel; that the very same chieftains who fathered international terrorism will from now on change course completely, apprehending and hanging Islamic fundamentalists, heroes and martyrs of the glorious intifada, for the sake of the Israeli infidels; that the 1948 Palestinian refugees and their offspring, who for 45 years have been kept in squalor with promises of reclaiming their homes, will now be satisfied to relinquish those claims; that Syria, once it has regained the Golan, will start disarming, throw out the Palestinian rejectionists, and disband Hezbollah ("Syrian youth are becoming democratic. In short, as Peres announces at every opportunity, "It's a new Middle East." Here is what he said in a speech on September 1 responding to the news of the Israel-PLO agreement: “The Palestinian state which is established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a mere stage; the Palestinians will take it as a base for liberating Tel Aviv, Acre, Haifa, and Jaffa....” (Jowitt, 11) When the PLO was set up, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip belonged to Arabs. Thus the conflict was for Palestine, not for the West Bank and Gaza. The Arab boycott of the Israelis - the Arab boycott and the Arab League Charter - based on liberating all Palestine occupied in 1948. Because the conflict was over Palestine, and not only over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Arab League Charter calls for liberating Palestine. This is a stage in which we are establishing the Palestinian state. A PLO state in the territories will become an improved model of the PLO state in Lebanon before the Israeli incursion of 1982. When asked if the PLO could run Gaza and Jericho, Arafat said that we ran all of Lebanon until 1982; Gaza and Jerico will be child's play. At some point, radical elements in Jordan, encouraged and incited by their newly independent neighbors, will overthrow the Hashemite monarchy and extend the Palestinian state from the Iraqi border to the outskirts of Tel Aviv. (Jordan was part of the British Mandate of Palestine, and the PLO charter defines "Palestine" as demarcated by that Mandate.) Strife between secular and Islamic factions, already brewing, will intensify, with Iraq supporting some and Syria others. Whether Syria or Iraq gains the upper hand, the eastern front against Israel will become more dangerous every day. (Haas, 407-44) Except that today's Arab armies are far more efficient and sophisticated, and they do not have a friendly-to-Israel, Shah-dominated Iran threatening their backs. just the opposite: the ayatollahs will support any move they make, as long as it is against Israel. Shlomo Hillel, one of the very few Labor-party stalwarts who has resisted the idea that "it's a new Middle East" and that Israel can therefore permit the establishment of a Palestinian state and safely return to the 1967 borders, puts the case powerfully. Works Cited Gresh, Alain. The Struggle Within: Towards a Palestinian State , London: Zed, 1985, p12. Haas, Ernest. " What is Nationalism and Why Should We Study It'" International Organization 40. 3 Summer 1986, p707-44. Heller, Mark, and Sari Nusseibeh. No Trumpets, No Drums . New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, p5. Hermassi, Elbaki. Leadership and National Development in North Africa: a Comparative Study . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p11. Herz, John L. " Rise and Demise of the Territorial State." World Politics 9. 4 ( July 1995): p473-93. Jackson, Robert. Quasi-States: International Relations, and the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990, p2. Johnson, Chalmers. Revolutionary Change. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982, p4. Jowitt, Kenneth. Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p11.