What’s Going To Happen In the Middle East
By Robert Locke (09/02/05)
American Daily
Sept 2 2005
The inadvisable Gaza pullout may have the one virtue of revealing
what has long puzzled observers of the Mideast situation: Gen.
Sharon’s long-term intentions for Israel. My guess is that they
are represented by the map below. On this map, the territory to be
returned to Jordan would have its Jewish population removed, and the
territory retained by Israel would have its Arab population removed.
(I am not at all sure of the exact final border. I am aware that that
there is more than one fence either under construction or in planning,
and that there is some controversy as to which will actually get
built, and on what route. But I must assume, based on the logic of
the argument below, that Mr. Sharon wishes to take as much territory
as possible, not as little, so I am actually inclined to go with what
the Arab side considers its worst-case scenario.)
I believe Gen. Sharon believes this map represents the best
long-term sustainable outcome for Israel, i.e. it is the greatest
amount of territory Israel can hold onto permanently. Logically,
the Gaza pullout (if we assume he is logical and leave aside canards
about his patriotism and sanity) only makes sense if he is pursuing
a strategy of giving up land that Israel cannot hold long-term in
order to strengthen Israel’s grip on what land it can.
It is important to note that this is not an unusual operation in world
history: Great Britain gave up the bulk of Ireland in 1922 and kept the
pro-British area of Northern Ireland. Turkey abandoned the remains of
the Ottoman Empire under Atatürk in 1921 to rebuild the nation upon
its Anatolian heartland (pace intrusions upon Armenia, Kurdistan,
etc.) The USA conquered the whole of Mexico in 1848 and only kept the
virtually uninhabited northern sections, which were demographically
tractable to incorporation into the US and became (all or part of)
the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming
and Colorado. The Malaysian Confederation expelled Singapore in 1965 to
rid itself of an urbanized ethnic Chinese population it did not want.
Sharon believes that while it would be politically infeasible
to execute the population transfer of the entire Arab
population of the West Bank, as I and others have proposed
(), it would be
politically feasible to transfer those Arabs residing in the area
indicated as retained by Israel if Israel simultaneously transferred
Jews out of the area indicated as returned to Jordan.
Such a double transfer, while it would of course attract opposition,
could not be depicted to (the reasonable, i.e. swing and therefore
decisive elements of) world opinion as a one-sided act of aggression.
It would largely take on the color of a mutual sacrifice by both
sides for the sake of obtaining a peaceful long-term outcome.
(Frankly, the more Jews in orange shirts howl in misery about it, the
more fair it will appear.) Although it would of course create massive
protest from the usual suspects, such protest would not rise to the
catastrophic levels that a one-sided (Arabs only) transfer would. It
would not be likely to trigger general war in the Middle East. It
could be plausibly represented to the world as a mutual “exchange of
populations” like those that have been carried out before, as between
Turkey and Greece ()
in 1923 and to rectify ethnic German minorities in Central Europe
after WWII.
Politically, Sharon believes that a double transfer would unite the
Israeli center – which desperately craves normality and will probably,
whatever its supposed moral qualms, in the end support anything that
promises to make Israel more like California – and split the serious
Zionists. Given that 1/3 of the Israeli electorate already supports
some variety of population transfer – whether in its full-blown form
or its well-intentioned but implausible “Elon Plan” variety – there
is clearly a base of support for such a program.
Obviously the truly hard-core Zionists must, upon their principles,
denounce this scheme as a betrayal of God-given land (or of national
territorial patrimony, if they are secular), but the more moderate
ones will see this as a way to swap insecure possession of everything
that is rightfully theirs for secure possession of a part of it. If
Mr. Sharon is lucky, this will split serious Zionist circles right
down the middle, rendering them incapable of uniting to mount serious
resistance to his plan. The Irish Republic fought a civil war over
roughly the same question in 1922; that’s not going to be an option
for Israelis, and if the “Palestinians” want to fight over it, they
will be unable to alter the outcome.
As I said, I am not sure of the exact final border. Anyone who
knows the facts on the ground in greater detail than I is welcome to
critique the squiggly line above. The main facts that seem to suggest
the border shown above is at least approximately right are:
1. The main Palestinian population centers have to be returned to
Jordan for demographic reasons. Because there are limits on how many
Arabs Israel will be able to transfer (i.e. not many more than the
number of Jews), the land returned to Jordan must include most of
the Palestinian population. Those who know Israel well will recognize
that the northern and southern “lobes” of the lung-like shape above
contain the bulk of the Palestinian population. Those readers who are
unfamiliar with the detailed geography of the West Bank should note
that the area to the east of these lobes is mostly lightly inhabited,
and the area to the west heavily infiltrated with post-1967 Jewish
settlements.
2. The lightly-populated areas can be retained by Israel because they
contain minimal unruly populations to cause trouble. This mainly means
the closed military zones down by the river, which are of military
interest because, obviously enough, they are on the border towards
potentially hostile foreign states.
3. The territory returned to Jordan must be contiguous,
or it will not be credible to the world community. South
Africa tried setting up discontinuous Bantustans
()
in the 1980’s and nobody bought it. Somehow – I don’t know why –
human beings just naturally assume that nationals are contiguous
pieces of territory. It’s one of those mysterious pre-political
ideas that doesn’t have a lot of pure logic behind it, but it has a
grip on people’s minds and therefore it determines what’s feasible in
politics. I am slightly nervous that Mr. Sharon thinks he can finesse
this, which will almost certainly not work, both because of credibility
problems and because overland transit rights would cause trouble.
4. The territory returned to Jordan must be connected to Jordan. This
is necessary in order for the whole undertaking to be presented,
ideologically, as a ceding of territory conquered in 1967 back to
the possessor ante bellum. This, in turn, has the signal advantage
of making a serious assault on one of the key props of the whole
“Palestinian” war against Israel: the idea that the West Bank
constitutes a nation in its own right, rather than just a section of
Jordan. This premise, which has been admitted by Palestinian leaders,
in unguarded moments, to have been an invention whose sole purpose was
to harness the passions of “nationalism” against Israel, cannot survive
serious scrutiny. The fact that Jordan has, thanks to Palestinian
bullying and Israeli miscalculation, verbally ceded territory it no
longer controls to the nonexistent country of Palestine, will have
to be shrugged off like the joke it always was.
The fact that Jordan will have all sorts of problems re-absorbing
this territory and its unruly inhabitants, will simply be Jordan’s
problem. After all, a country can hardly complain when it gets given
back land it claims was unjustly taken from it!
The odd man out of this arrangement is, of course, Gaza, which by
simple geographic fact cannot be made contiguous with Jordan without
rendering Israel discontiguous, and which wasn’t Jordanian territory
in any case. Egypt, its former owner, does not want it – a fact one
might take as an astonishing reflection on its character and that of
its Arab inhabitants – so perhaps there is no alternative than for
it to become, at long last, the independent “Palestinian” state that
the PLO says it wants. It would be the greatest booby prize in history.
–Boundary_(ID_MCgYmTUYv2BDkgEtQmglZw)–