Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau
thestar.com
JERUSALEM–The elusive two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now effectively dead, and new ideas are needed, says a leading Israeli security analyst.
"I think it is a big illusion that something like (a two-state solution) can happen," Giora Eiland, former head of Israel's National Security Council, told a gathering of diplomats, academics and journalists here yesterday. "In a way, it is a game. I'm saying we have to change it." In place of the conventional two-state solution currently proposed – in which an independent Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza would live alongside Israel – Eiland yesterday advanced a complex two-pronged arrangement involving three-way land swaps, an enlarged Gaza Strip, and the direct involvement of both Jordan and Egypt in a peace deal that would look very different from any under consideration today.
"I have good reason to believe these two proposals could be accepted by Israeli leaders," he said.
Whether his proposals would be accepted by anyone else is another question.
An Egyptian diplomat – Samah El-Suevi, political counsellor at Cairo's embassy in Tel Aviv – informed the gathering his government still supports a conventional two-state approach to the conflict and said this is the view of the international community as well.
But Eiland said the main players seeking an end to the Middle Eastern conflict continue to pay lip-service to the possibility of such an agreement but must realize it is not likely to be achieved.
If such an agreement were possible, he said, it would have been reached long ago, when conditions for such a deal were far more favourable than they are today.
The template for a conventional two-state pact was set at Camp David, Md., in July 2000 when U.S. president Bill Clinton sought to nudge Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat toward accepting a highly detailed peace plan, an effort that eventually failed.
"Any deal would be 90 to 95 per cent the same as the Clinton proposal," Eiland said. "The general solution is not only known but fully accepted by everyone."
And yet there is no deal.
"Here is the catch," said Eiland. "This solution is not really desired by either side.
"The maximum a government of Israel can offer to the Palestinians and still survive politically is less, far less, than any proposal that would be accepted by any Palestinian government."
This being so, he said, Israelis and Palestinians can either accept the uneasy and often violent status quo or else look for ways to break the impasse.
Eiland proposed two such measures. He conceded they are unorthodox and challenged others to shoot them down.
Regarding the West Bank, he said, neighbouring Jordan might now be inclined to consider reclaiming the sovereignty it exerted over the territory between 1948 and 1967, in order to head off the likely alternative – an eventual West Bank takeover by Hamas, the radical Islamist group that currently rules Gaza.
Under this arrangement, Palestinians in the West Bank would be granted autonomy in all areas except foreign affairs and state security, which would be administered by Amman.
As for Gaza, he said, the territory is too small and too crowded to be viable and will only become more crowded in the future.
To solve the problem, he proposes a series of land swaps, in which Israel would retain 600 square kilometres in the West Bank, where 270,000 Israeli settlers now dwell illegally. Some of them would have to leave but not all.
According to Eiland, it is not possible – financially, politically or socially – for Israel to withdraw from all its West Bank settlements.
In exchange, Gaza would receive an equivalent tract of land in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and Egypt would gain 600 square kilometres of Israel's Negev Desert, along with the possibility of a land route to Jordan. (A tunnel would be necessary.)
All this would likely leave Hamas in control of Gaza, but Eiland said Israel's policy of trying to drive Hamas from power is doomed to fail.
"I believe Israel and Hamas can find a way to live together," he said.
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