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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-01-18
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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The 1947 UN Partition Resolution[1] proposed a smaller Israel than that of June 1, 1967, and in 1947 that territory had a Jewish majority. The war of 1948-50 did not determine borders for Israel. If, in a two-state peace treaty, Israel were to accept a territory smaller than it controlled on June 1, 1967, in a place where there had been relatively few Palestinian Arabs in 1947, and if returning refugees were to return to the locations of their original villages, then such a smaller Israel might nevertheless be a majority-Jewish state.
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Most discussions of Israeli/Palestinian peace-making limn the rocks on which these negotiations have always foundered: the splitting of Jerusalem, the return of Palestinian refugees, the reduction of Israel’s territory from that controlled today.
The question of the “return” of the Palestinian refugees has always been high on the list of irreconcilable differences. In Afif Safieh’s apt phrase, Israel has always wanted the “geography without the demography” of Palestine. After a two-state peace, it wants the refugees to return, if at all, to the “other” state. Apologists for Israel nowadays claim that Israel has a “right” to be a majority-Jewish state (but see here).
The sheer awfulness of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians since 1967 may be due, more than to anything else, to Israel’s desire to “beat the fight” and “beat the stoicism” out of the Palestinians. In part this has doubtless been a tactic for causing Palestinians to leave and never come back. And, indeed, many Palestinians have left, especially Christians.
Considered as a negotiating tactic, the oppressiveness of the occupation has much in common with “water-boarding” and the more old-fashioned use by policemen of beatings with rubber truncheons in back rooms of police stations to “negotiate” confessions.
I don’t see that the Palestinians have given up, despite all that Israel has so far done to them. They have had many opportunities to make unequal (and from their own viewpoint vastly undesirable) peace treaties and have so far refused to do so. It may happen, no one can say, that the US under Barack Obama will see its way to level the playing field and create conditions in which peace is (finally) possible. We will have to see.
In the mean time, I am concerned to inquire about what may be a completely theoretical problem—the problem of making peace including a complete “right of return” for Palestinian refugees where such a peace will, nevertheless, allow Israel to remain a democracy and to remain a Jewish-majority country.
I believe it is possible, but only if Israel is willing to give up some territory.
This would be very hard for Israelis to accept, but not impossible. After all, in any peace acceptable today to the Palestinians, Israel will have to repatriate most of the 450,000 settlers who now reside in the occupied territories and those settlers will feel that they have been expelled from their proper homes. (The fact that the settlements were all illegal at international law will not alter these feelings, for Israel has flouted international law for so long that its citizens can not be expected to see it as any sort of reality.) If 450,000 settlers will have to undergo such a pseudo-expulsion, it should not be so hard for Israelis now living elsewhere (but within pre-1967 Israel) also to move from their present homes into new homes within a smaller Israel.
Why a smaller Israel? That is what is to be discussed.
The question, again, is: whether it is possible for Israel and the Palestinians to make a two-state peace treaty which would allow Israel to remain a democracy and to remain a majority-Jewish state while allowing the Palestinian refugees a right to “return” to their villages of origin?
The first pre-requisite is that Israel forget about any significance of so-called “facts on the ground.”
Even while talking of two-state solutions, and peace, Israel has been energetically determined to keep all the territory it has ever settled, including both its pre-1967 territory (78% of Palestine) and much of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Indeed, it has referred to such settlements as “facts on the ground” as if the mere physical existence of these settlements somehow magically conferred legal sovereignty on Israel over the land on which the settlements are built. In the West Bank, it has built an impenetrable wall which separates most of the settler-settled territory from the rest of the West Bank, with what appears to be an intention to annex these settlements to pre-1967 Israel.
Neither the wall nor the settlements look intended to be temporary. Israel is unconcerned that, at international law, both the wall and the settlements are illegal encroachments on land which Israel occupies but does not “own”.
And, whatever the status of the occupied territories, Israel and the world have long treated Israel’s pre-1967 territory as Israel’s sovereign, or proper, territory. Although Israel has cheerily accepted the possibility that its sovereign territory might grow, the idea that it might shrink has been anathema.
However, just to keep the record straight, at the end of the war of 1948-50, Israel and its opponents never made a peace treaty, and Israel, perhaps alone among modern countries, has no declared boundaries. Israel and its neighbors only agreed to armistice lines, lines of truce, or hudna. Israel has no more legal right to pre-1967 Israel than it has to the lands it captured in 1967. All is subject to negotiation.
What this means is that Israel and the Palestinians could make a peace treaty whereby Israel became smaller than it had been on June 1, 1967, without Israel giving up so much as a square kilometer of territory within its boundaries.
But why on earth would Israel agree to take LESS territory in a two-state peace than it held on June 1, 1967?
No-one expects it to. Such a suggestion flies in the face of constant Israeli war-making and state-terrorism and pre-state Jewish terrorism.
The only reason that Israel would do such a thing (and a very tenuous reason it is, too) lies in the tension within Israel between its desires (a) to be a majority-Jewish state, (b) to be a democracy, (c) to enjoy the good opinion of the US and perhaps of the rest of the world, and (d) to make a peace with the Palestinians.
The time of war-without-end and oppression-without-end may be ending, because the US, perhaps under new President Obama, may finally re-calibrate its foreign policy and determine that endless Israel/Palestine war and terrorism (state-terrorism from Israel and non-state terrorism from some Palestinians) must stop, that a peace must be made, and that the peace must be sufficiently agreeable to the parties (and their people) that the peace can, in the words of UNSC Res. 242, constitute “a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security”.
In other words, Israel (and the Palestinians) may shortly come under pressure to make peace (and no longer get away with the mere pretense of trying to do so).
The Palestinians desire to see a final resolution of the problem of the Palestinian refugees from 1948-50 (the original refugees and their progeny who now live chiefly in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza). They seek a “right of return” by which they mean a right of the refugees to return to the land on which the villages stood from which their families were expelled in 1948-50. [2].
Were all the refugees to return into pre-1967 Israel, then Israel would, presumably, have an Arab-majority population and would either become an Arab-dominated state or would cease to be a democracy (if Israel denied the vote to the newcomers or to all non-Jewish citizens). This is why Israel has been so dead set against “return”. It wants Israel to be a majority-Jewish state and also a democracy[3]
Israel’s current “take” on “return” is that Palestinian refugees should “return” not to their villages of origin but to whatever territory becomes the new Palestinian state. This would leave the new Palestinian mini-state (if consisting of all of Gaza and the West Bank, about 22% of 1947 Palestine) severely overcrowded. Gaza, where 1.5M refugees now live is one of the most densely populated places on earth.
Palestinians’ “take” is that refugees should return to their homes if they exist or to the location of their former homes, and to be compensated if those homes are no longer in existence or if they agree to relocate elsewhere. This is what UN Res. 194 intends.
On the issue of “return”, then, Israel and the Palestinians are at loggerheads.
The only “way out” I can see which allows for total and complete “return” of the Palestinians to their ancestral homes (even if those homes were obliterated), which allows for Israeli democracy, which allows for a two-state peace, and which allows for Israeli democracy—is for Israel to agree to retract itself into a smaller territory than it occupied on June 1, 1967. The exact boundaries of that territory would need to be carefully determined, but in principle they would be boundaries within which lived a relatively small Palestinian-Arab population in 1947 whose progeny today, were they all to “return” to this smaller Israel, would nevertheless leave it majority-Jewish. The treaty would then allow complete “return” and Israel would be preserved against an instantaneous Arab-majority.
Israel would thus be preserved as a Jewish-majority and democratic state in a treaty which would be acceptable (for these reasons) to Israelis; which would give “back” to the Palestinians more of their territory than merely Gaza and the West Bank and allow complete “return” and thus be acceptable to the Palestinians; which would be quite acceptable to the rest of the world; and which would usher in a time of peace.
This new-Israeli territory might be the territory set out in the UN’s 1947 partition resolution (56% of Palestine), because, with enormous Jewish immigration since 1947, Israel’s Jewish population today may well outnumber the population of Palestinian Arabs who sprang from that land in 1947.
The alternatives to this suggestion are well known: either no “return” or no democracy in Israel. and quite possibly, no peace.
I do not place myself in the shoes of the negotiators. I merely make a modest suggestion.
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[1] See: here
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[2] As it happens, Israel bombed and bulldozed most of those villages (presumably to erase the Palestinians from Israeli consciousness, but possibly also to make “return” less attractive)
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[3] Israel’s desire to be a democracy is less firm than some might wish or suspect. Recently, Israel ruled that two Arab political parties could not take part in Israel’s upcoming elections. If upheld by the courts, this would mean that, although Israel’s Arab citizens could still vote, they could not be elected and therefore could not be properly represented.
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