Palestine: road to disaster

Edward Mortimer

The Palestinian problem is, like several other aspects of the contemporary in- ternational scene, increasingly depressing to contemplate. I revisited Palestine/Eretz Israel last month. I also visited Lebanon and talked to some Palestinians there, as well as talking to Lebanese about the P. alestine problem and the disastrous effect it has had on their country.

There is one point on which Palestinians and Lebanese agree, which is that Palesti- nians belong in Palestine, not in Lebanon. Whatever may have been the case in the Past, Palestinians today are acutely con- scious of being Palestinians and believe that this differentiates them quite clearly from other Arabs.

How should one define a Palestinian? Essentially it is someone whose family home before 1948 was in the British man- dated territory of Palestine, that is between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. It is true that many such people now live on the east bank of the Jordan, as loyal and law- abiding subjects of King Husain. But few of those, and virtually none of the Palestinians !lying elsewhere (whether still in Palestine, in Lebanon, in other Arab countries or in ,the world at large) regard the Hashemite Kingdom as an adequate expression of their national identity. They consider themselves Palestinians, not Jordanians, and they want a Palestinian state in Palestine as much as Most Israelis want a Jewish state in Eretz `Eretz Israel' ('the land of Israel' in Hebrew) is geographically more or less synonymous with 'Palestine'. Like Palestine' it would have been taken by Most of those who used it early in this cen- tury to include the east bank of the Jordan, but is now generally understood to be c, °terrninous with the territory administered °Y the British under the name of 'Palestine' before 1948. Some Israeli extremists might claim that it includes part of Lebanon and all or part of Sinai. Mr Begin says it in- cludes the Golan Heights, but had this been had case under Israeli law he would not have uad to rush a Bill through the Knesset allowing him to apply Israeli law there. Under legislation passed in 1967 the govern- ment is entitled to apply Israeli law in any Part of Eretz Israel by decree. Ergo no new legislation is needed if Mr Begin decides to annex the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. That would mean scrapping the Camp David framework, but not the peace treaty With Egypt. He could argue — as many of _Ms critics are already arguing — that Camp David has failed to solve the Palestinian Problem because Jordan and the Palesti- nians have rejected it while Egypt and Israel art unable to agree on an autonomy for-

mula, and that therefore Israel is entitled to apply its own solution unilaterally. Watch that space.

Whether or not that happens, Israel has de facto possession of the whole of Eretz Israel/Palestine and has no intention of relinquishing control of any part of it. Israeli policy-makers are quite clear about this: 'autonomy' may be introduced as a way of managing the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza but it will not be allowed to jeopardise either Israel's military control of those areas or the interests of the Israeli settlers in them. (Settlement is already so extensive as to render autonomy on those terms virtually meaningless.) Above all, autonomy must not be even a potential stepping stone to an independent Palestinian state.

In other words, it must not hold out even the long-term hope of a political solution acceptable to the Palestinians, and therefore will be of no interest to any Palestinians who are aware of the political dimension of their lives. (This is a higher proportion of the Palestinian population than it would- be in most countries, since `politics', in the form of Israeli rule and Israeli settlement, has intruded directly into the lives of most Palestinians. But in any population it is the politically aware section of the community that constitutes a political 'problem' — i.e. a problem for outsiders trying to manipulate or control that community.) There has been an international consen- sus ever since 1967 that a political solution of the Middle East conflict must include Israeli withdrawal from the territories oc- cupied in that year, give or take a few boun- dary 'adjustments' here and there. Latterly the consensus has come to include the view that the parts of Palestine evacuated in such an arrangement should house a Palestinian 'entity' of some kind. A lot of people have now dropped the euphemism 'entity' and speak openly of the need for Palestinian self-determination in those areas, including at least the option of an independent state. But on the ground Israel' s colonising activi- ty is — quite deliberately — making such proposals less and less realistic.

One of the Palestinians I spoke to in Beirut is a long-standing proponent of the idea of an independent Palestinian state in part of Palestine, because he knows Israel at first hand and belieVes that in the democratic state of all Palestine, which is the PLO's official long-term goal, the Jews would still win out against the Arabs politically and economically — 'like the Maronites in Lebanon'. But he now fears that events inside Palestine — both Israeli colonisation of the occupied territories and the ever-increasing absorption of workers from the territories into the Israeli economy as a cheap labour force — are pushing the two peoples inexorably towards 'that democratic state which some of my col- leagues, who are more Jewish than the Jews, want'.

To put it another way, the more Israel comes to resemble Rhodesia, the less realistic it will be to propose a solution bas- ed on a territorial partition between the two peoples, the more unstoppable will become the struggle between them for mastery of the whole. In the short term, of course, the Jews will win, and no doubt the short term of Mr Begin and his successors will be significantly longer than that of Mr Smith. But that will only mean that the war will go on longer, and probably be much nastier, especially in its ending, than was the war in Rhodesia. For in the long term the cards must be stacked in favour of the population with the higher birth-rate, which does an in- creasing proportion of the physical work within the country and which benefits from at least the moral support of all the sur- rounding countries. So at least the Palesti- nians will believe, and therefore they will not give up. Nor will the Arab states feel free to wash their hands of them, so long as they have not even been offered an honourable compromise.

The stock answer to this argument is that there is no alternative (where have I heard that before?) because the Arabs, and in par- ticular the PLO, have not clearly indicated their willingness to accept a compromise if it were offered. It is true that the Arabs suf- fer from a dispiriting incapacity to 'get their act together', exemplified handsomely by last November's abortive summit at Fez; that Arafat always baulks at saying in front of TV cameras what he is happy to say to visiting MPs or congressmen in private; and that the reason for this is that he faces stiff opposition within the Palestinian move- ment, backed openly by some Arab states and covertly by others, to the idea of accep- ting a compromise peace based on parti- tion. This is very frustrating for his Euro- pean friends, who believe that a clear peace proposal from the PLO would help them to change American policy. But politically it is understandable that he is not willing to have a major battle within the PLO, in which his leadership and even his life would be at risk, for the sake of a compromise which is not being offered to him anyway, either by Israel or by the United States.

The Fand plan, involving Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1%7 and the creation of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem (i.e. East Jerusalem) as its capital, is regarded by most Arabs as the minimum they could honourably accept. The, state in question would, after all, comprise only one fifth of pre-1948 Palestine. But the Palestinians know that it is regarded by Israelis and Americans, as maximalist, and that if they accepted it now it would, at best, become the base line from which they would be ex- pected to make further concessions in negotiations. They compare it to Sadat's speech to the Knesset in 1977, which con- tained essentially the same demands, and then point to the meagre results which Sadat obtained on the Palestinian issue, even though it was obviously in the Americans' interest to help him strengthen his credibility with other Arabs.

Almost certainly, if the United States of- fered them the Fand/Sadat terms, the Palestinians would accept. If the offer came from the US and the Soviet Union jointly, one could delete the 'almost' — and this is in theory quite possible, since the terms in question coincide perfectly with long- standing Soviet positions on the issue. (When Sadat had finished speaking in the Knesset, it was the leader of the pro-Soviet Israeli Communist Party, Meir Vilner, who leapt to his feet to propose the immediate acceptance of Sadat's peace terms.) Israeli doves as well as moderate Arabs believe that the only hope for peace lies in the imposition of a compromise along these lines by the great powers, and specifically by the United States, on which Israel is in- creasingly dependent for both economic and military survival. Doves have given up any hope of winning the political battle within Israel so long as America continues, despite occasional verbal reproofs, to finance and arm Israel no matter what policies her government adopts. The key argument of the doves has always been that Israel could not afford to forfeit interna- tional support. But Begin has now demonstrated to the Israeli voter that American support is unconditional, and that, that being so, the support of the rest of the world doesn't matter.

Unfortunately there is virtually no chance that American policy will change, unless under the impact of major new events. The strength of pro-Israeli opinion in the United States, and particularly in ma- jor power centres such as Congress, the media and (important for the present ad- ministration, at least) the entertainment in- dustry, is so great that any President who decides to oppose it knows he is embarking on a major political battle, and a very nasty one at that. Mr Reagan got a whiff of it on a tangential issue during the struggle over the AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia, when he was moved to say that he would not let any foreign country (se.Israel) dictate American foreign policy — a remark that was im- mediately pounced on for its alleged anti- Semitic overtones. No doubt that episode removed most of the sentiment from his at- titude to Israel, but it did not change the political realities, which are that any Presi- dent, in the nature of things, has plenty of political battles on his hands, and he does not go out looking for new ones. Intellec- tually one might convince him that it is in America's national interest to impose a peaceful settlement of the Middle East con- flict including Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and Palestinian self- determination therein. Politically he will see overwhelming arguments for not attemp- ting any such thing.

That will only change when the conse- quences of not attempting it become clear, and painful, for the American public. In shorthand one could say this means either the fall of the present regime in Saudi Arabia or its adoption, under pressure from fellow-Arabs, of less pro-American policies than it pursues at present.

One or other of those things is almost certainly going to happen sooner or later, and the consequences, when it does, will be very unpleasant for the West. I do not ,say that by imposing a Fand/Sadat solution of the Palestinian problem the Americans could guarantee the survival of the Saudi regime. There are many other factors to be taken into account. But I do say that by do- ing so they could appreciably strengthen its chances of survival, and also, more impor- tant, make it easier both for it and for anY putative successor to maintain good rela- tions with the West.

When disaster comes, in the shape of a shift of the balance of forces in the Arab world against the United States, it maY already be too late to re-partition Palestine. What a tragedy it is that political leaders can take decisions only when disaster is upon them, and not in time to avert it.