Ha’aretz, Israel
April 14 2005

The dream of Aland

By Adar Primor

Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed to us this week that he
has a dream – the Irelandization (and Singaporization) of Israel.
Last week, during the visit of Finland’s foreign minister, Erkki
Tuomioja, someone in the Foreign Ministry recalled another dream of
Netanyahu’s, from 1997: the dream of the “Alandization” of Palestine,
or in other words, copying the autonomy model of the Aland Islands –
which are under Finnish sovereignty – in the Palestinian territories.
It would be interesting to know, snickered that same source, whether
Netanyahu would today repeat that original idea.

In Mariehamn, the snow-covered capital of the Aland Islands, there
were recently some people who recalled that Israeli friends from the
Levant had shown an interest in them. The governor of Aland, Peter
Lindback, told of an Israeli ambassador who wanted to learn about the
local police force on the islands. The head of the local
administration, Elisabeth Naucler, told of a visit by Prof. Ruth
Lapidot, former legal adviser of the Israeli foreign minister, who
also came to investigate the local autonomy. Nati Tamir, former
ambassador in Helsinki and at present the ambassador in Canberra,
confirmed Israeli interest in the “Aland model,” and mentioned that
it lasted for several years.

It turns out that Israel is in good company. In a world of multiple
regional and ethnic conflicts, the list of those interested in the
“islands of peace” is a long one. About two weeks ago, the president
of Zanzibar visited Aland in order to learn how to behave vis-a-vis
his mother country, Tanzania. Before him, a long list of delegations,
officials and professors, liberation organizations and government
representatives, representatives of separatist regions and
mother-countries, visited the islands, from Corsica and France,
Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan, South Ossetia and Georgia, the
Crimea and Ukraine, and East Timor and Indonesia – and this is just a
partial list.

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About 25,000 people live in Aland, which is composed of a chain of
about 6,500 islands and lies in the Gulf of Bothnia, between Finland
and Sweden. In 1809, Czarist Russia annexed Finland and Aland, which
until then had been a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. With the fall of
the last czar and Finland’s declaration of independence, in 1917, the
residents of the islands – 95 percent of whom are Swedish speakers,
wanted to reunite with Sweden.

Their request was transmitted to the League of Nations, which ruled
that the islands would come under Finnish sovereignty, but would be
demilitarized and neutralized, and entitled to self rule and full
cultural autonomy. This compromise agreement, which didn’t satisfy
any of the parties in its time, eventually turned the islands into a
dynamic and flourishing autonomy, a unique formula that is considered
the greatest achievement of the League of Nations.

Finns or Swedes? We are Alanders, boast the inhabitants of the
islands today. They watch Swedish television and go to study at
Swedish universities, their mentality is closer to Stockholm than to
Helsinki, but they still root for Finland at hockey games against
Sweden.

For all those seeking the perfect model of government, the Alanders
explain that their system is inimitable. If there is anything to
learn from it, it is the fact that it is sui generis, and apparently,
the same will have to be true of the Palestinian model.

The peace framework which Israel and Egypt agreed upon at Camp David
in 1978 spoke of “full autonomy” for the Palestinians. The Israeli
peace initiative of 1989 spoke of “self rule,” whereas the term on
which Israel and the Palestinians agreed after 1993 was “self
government.” But what was fine before Oslo today arouses profound
disdain.

There is nobody in the Foreign Ministry who will admit that the
Israeli interest in Aland was anything more than a “preoccupation
with a curiosity,” because even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – who,
according to many, expressed admiration for the creation of the
Bantustans in South Africa, and who writhed (like his predecessors)
among the terms “entity,” “autonomy,” “minimum powers,” and “limited
sovereignty” – understands that there is no serious body today in the
international community that will support anything less than a
Palestinian state with full sovereignty.

And Netanyahu? The finance minister, who is also opposed to the
disengagement, ignored the overtures of Haaretz this week, as though
refusing to awake from his new dreams about the flourishing Israel;
as though refusing, at the same time, to give up the old dream of
Palestinian autonomy, and to accept the reality and the fact that
whether you will it or not, “Aland” is just a dream.