Guest Opinion/Commentary*
What's Going To Happen In the Middle East
By Robert Locke (09/02/05)
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 (http://www.vdare.com/locke/palestinian_problem.htm), 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 (http://www.hri.org/docs/straits/exchange.html) 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 (www.sahistory.org.za/pages/chronology/thisday/racial-segregation.htm) 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.
Original Blog
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*Ed: Views are those of individual authors and not necessarily those of American Daily.
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