First, it was Rabin's assassination that ended a period where people were hopeful for peace.  Then Barak lost his re-election campaign.  How unfortunate for peace! we are told (The election was akin to an act of God, rather than the will of the Israeli people).  For decades, Israel's friends claimed that it was all Arafat's fault; once he was gone, Israel would negotiate peace with the Palestinians.  Arafat dies.  Oh joy!  Peace at last!  No, no, no, it turns out, the problem is now that Abbas is too weak to be a "peace partner."  But Ariel Sharon, that man of peace, will forge on alone!  Ooops! Sharon is gone from the scene!  Missed it by that much!    But really, Israel wants peace.  It's just a series of unfortunate events.

I believe Israel, like America, is nominally a democracy. That means, to me, that the voters set the tone by electing representatives who come close to agreeing with the voter's positions. So, I don't see a way to absolve the Israeli people from the mess in that area of the world. Sharon was not my idea of a rational leader, but it was obvious that he couldn't go very far towards negotiating a peace without losing his government. And, that means to me, that the Israeli people, like Americans, do not want peace if it means peace comes at some cost to them.

It has everything to do with leadership.

Is it leadership or these menacing, armed groups of a few hundred men with

AK-47s?  You can't seem to make up your mind.  

Settlers are not "occupying" "Palestinian land".  As a matter of international law, the WB does not belong to the Palestinians.  It is disputed.  That means that its status will be settled by negotiations, including the disposition of the Israeli "settlements". 

The way to reconcile  the demographic problem will be simple - Israel will draw its boundary unilaterally where it wants to.  And the vast majority of the Palestinians will remain on the other side of the fence.  What they do there is their business, as long as they don't attack Israel. 

My guess is that such a Palestinian "state" will be fairly quickly absorbed by Jordan. 

No more exclamation marks, Luigi?  You're breaking my heart.

It has been forever since I have posted a comment around here!  Anyways here is a peace plan I have never seen debated seriously - perhaps this is the right forum to discuss it.  Israel upfront agrees to abandon the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem.  The Palestinians, in return, relinquish their rights to the rest of Israel and disarm all their paramilitaries (or terrorists, depending on your persuasion).  The territorial concessions will be staggered according to the pace of disarmament, but will be codified into law so that there can be no legal way out of the concession.  It's brutally simple, not very nuanced, but I don't see why it fails.

It has everything to do with leadership.  When you want to run a state, you are required to monopolize a state's most awesome power, which is violence.

This is truly one of the most moronic stock arguments in the whole moldy canon of sick jokes that make up Israeli apologetics.

Exactly how is it that any sort of Palestinian entity is supposed to have acquired this chimerical, Weberian "monopoly on violence"?  For the best part of a century now, the Zionist movement in Palestine, and then the state that was fashioned from this movement, have done everything in their power to prevent any organized and potent Palestinian political entity from taking shape.

Whether it be the PLO, or the Palestinian Authority, or Abu Ahmed's Palestinian Social Club, Zionist policy has always been to attack, disrupt, discredit and otherwise weaken and cripple any Palestinian political force which could possibly pose a threat to the Israeli state's own power and ultimate intentions, and to crush any leader with the potential to lead such a force.  Not suprisingly, since the only polity with anything even approaching a monopoly on violence in Palestine is the State of Israel, there is no Palestinian political entity which possesses the capacity to assert control of all the violent, conflict-ridden and wayward forces in the Palestinian territories.  Absurdly, Israelis sometimes seem to suggest that Palestinian leaders could simply assert control, if they "really wanted to", with a few rocks and slingshots and some inspiring public readings from the Koran.  The Israeli position is like that of one who cuts off the king's arms and breaks his legs, and then says, "Why doesn't the king pick up his sword and subdue the rogues?!"  Of course, if one of the rogues were ever to attempt to become king himself, it is soon he who would find his arms cut off and legs broken.

How do you think a polity acquires the vaunted "monopoly on violence" that is required to underpin a state and suppress violent rogues?  It needs guns and bombs and tanks and planes and men under arms - that's how!  Are you saying Israel would tolerate for one moment an effort by outside parties to arm some Palestinian proto-state, ito a degree sufficient to bring armed militais like Hamas to heel?  Of course not.  But without these things, no state can suppress and control aggression launched from inside its territory.

Nor does the Palestinian population possess the degree of political unity that would be necessary to get behind a single dominant political organization and enable it to constitute  a state-like force.  Israel has practiced since its inception a policy of division, helping to promote the rise of groups like Hamas whenever other groups seemed to powerful, and playing Palestinian leaders off against one another to foster rivalry and disunity. So the Palestinians will remain weak, and divided, and incoherent - and the conquest will contiinue as always.

Political Zionism has been about conquest from the beginning, and will continue to be about conquest until it finishes the ugly job in started decades ago. From the very beginning it has been divide and conquer, divide again and conquer again.  And it continues to be governed by that deep, fundamental drive to this day.  Yet some people who live in the belly of the beast persist in their blinkered rationalizations, and their witless shoot and cry response to every Palestinian challenge, and simply cannot accept the reality of what their own state is at bottom.

Isaraelis hate Palestinians ultimately, and simply, because some of the latter have a shockingly bitter resistance to being conquered.  For an Israeli, the only acceptable Palestinian is apparently one who submits and bends over.  Israelis viewed the Oslo process and the Camp David meetings as a Palestinian surrender agreement.   And when it turned out the Palestinian negotiators where operating under a somewhat different and radically mistaken impression, a deluded idea that the final status agreements were supposed to implement UN 242, the Israelis affected shock and dismay.  Palestinians who fight to defend themselves, and who stand on international law and near-unanimous UN resolutions, are of course unacceptable as"partners".  But Israelis who continue to fight a blatant war of conquest are, it is said "only after peace."

Every act of continued aggression seems to be viewed by 80% of the cognitively deranged Israeli public as a "defensive act".  Of course if you march into someone's territory, chase them off, level their homes and build your own settlement on top of it, you are indeed going to have to "defend yourself" if someone has the audacity to fight back.

Sharon's insight was to realize that peace with the Palestinians is fundamentally impossible but that Israeli security was being compromised not by the absence of peace but rather by fuzzy borders.

Fair enough.  So where do you personally feel the border should be Brad? 

Some of the commenters here seem to take Israel's continued existence for granted, and imagine that the struggle over borders is simply over land for settlements.

Israel is strong, but brittle. The pre-1967 Israel was only 12 miles wide at its narrowest, and can be crossed on foot in a few hours. This land also lies lower than the West Bank land, which puts it at a military disadvantage.

Because Israel does not have room to retreat within its 1967 borders, it has been prone to go to war premtively as in 1967. It was surprised in 1973, and Arab armies overran its defense lines, but at time it had the wider borders.

You may think this talk of Arab armies is specious, at a time when the Assad regime may crumble, and peace with Egypt is holding. But Israeli voters who are say, 30 years old, hope to live to 80, and who can say what kind of regimes will exist in Egypt, Damascus, and even Washington, D.C. 50 years from now. Israelis want to have borders that give them a reasonable ability to fight a defensive battle against the armies of enemy states, should that become necessary.

That is why Sharon pushed the settlement policy in the West Bank, and why Israelis across the board believe it is necessary to keep some of the settlement blocs. It's true this is a land grab, which is why some are considering whether some land within the pre-1967 borders should be swapped to make the total land distribution equal the pre-1967 distribution.

If all you can think about is the "poor Palestinians" and you ignore the legitimate fears of Israelis for their long-term existence, you are not serious about peace.

Israel is strong, but brittle. The pre-1967 Israel was only 12 miles wide at its narrowest, and can be crossed on foot in a few hours. This land also lies lower than the West Bank land, which puts it at a military disadvantage.

....

Israelis want to have borders that give them a reasonable ability to fight a defensive battle against the armies of enemy states, should that become necessary.

Yes, but of course most Israelis and defenders of Israel seem perfectly happy with the notion of a future Palestinian state which is made up of several discontiguous pieces, or one contiguous piece made up of a few patches sewn together with little narrow threads much more slender than 12 miles.

And clearly, 30-something Palestinians worried about their own future have every reason to be just as concerned about attacks from an enemy state, Israel, as Israelis have to be worried about attacks from its Arab neighbors.  Israel, and the Zionist settler community that preceded it, has an unequivocal historical record of using military force against the Palestinians to move them off the land they inhabit.  That is, after all, how the State of Israel was formed - and how the Zionist community that was in possession of under 7% of the territory of Mandatory Palestine prior to the war came to hold about 78% of that territory.  The Palestinians currently live under Israeli occupation, and they know there is a very significant portion of Israelis who would not see the conflict with the Palestinians as ended until they have established a Greater Israel on the land currently inhabited by Palestinian Arabs.

So as an American, why should I give more weight to the desire of Israelis to live in a contiguous state with reasonable and defensible borders than I give to the Palestinian desire to possess a contiguous state with reasonable and defensible borders?

I understand the "existential" fear of the Israelis.  But Israel's supporters show a marked favoritism in their ability to identify emotionally with the existential fears of only one group of people, when the existential fears of the other group of people are just as stark - and in fact it is the latter who are at greater risk of losing entirely any hope of a sovereign existence.  Looking over the course of decades, it is the territory of the Palestinian Arabs that has been progressively devoured until barely anything is left, and yet for some reason the supporters of Israel are only concerned about the fast that the pieces that have been ingested by the Zionists are not big enough for them to defend easily.

I was referring to the Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian cities in the West Bank (Area A) that was, with the exception of Hebron, was completed in December 1995. I confess to poor wordchoice I should have said "proceded to implement Oslo II."  Oslo II was never fully implemented by either side.  

I asked you to cite sources for a reason: I have zero confidence in your ability to accurately recite facts.  However...

Peres, in his brief time as PM during that period, was quite energetic.  He launched an attack on Lebanon, and authorized massive new appropriations of Palestinian land, as is documented in this U.N. report.  But Peres, you would have me believe, was the peaceful one, and the failure of Oslo was all those Palestininas' fault for being terrorists.    

I dished out a 2 for sarcasm with minimal factual support (I think it may have accidentally registered as a 1 at first, but as soon as I saw that I fixed it).  Its not personal.  I don't want to waste anyone's time getting personal.   I see however, that someone decided to give me a 0, which is abusive.  You may not agree with me - but I'm not spam.  

Sarcasm needs factual support?  Any single statement I made in that post needed factual support?  You gave me a 2 because what I said hurt your widdle feewings, and probably, because you wanted to bump my post down where fewer people would see it.  I gave you a zero, ostensibly for gross factual misstatements, but I won't call you on your problems with truthtelling, and then commit the same transgression: it was sauce for the goose.  

It's reasonable to ask about Palestinian existential concerns.

My answer is that under nearly 30 years of occupation, the Palestinian population has ballooned, with a population growth exceeding that of Jewish Israelis. They have suffered under occupation, and thousands have died, but as a community they have not faced an existential threat.

In contrast, need I remind you, the Holocaust cut the world Jewish population from approximately 18 million to 12 million. That is an existential threat. Hamas is not quite as ambitious as the Nazis, but it is their goal to ethnically cleanse Jews from the Jordan River to the sea.

To even have to explain this here makes me wonder if Democratic activists have turned against Israel. Fortunately, I'm confident that Democratic elected officials still support Israel, even if they are out of touch with their activist base.

Is it your position then that the border should be wherever the Israeli government unilaterally declares it should be?




Yes, exactly. Given that a negotiated peace is impossible as long as the Palestinian Authority is not in control of its territory, Israel must impose a unilateral solution. That means drawing a border that takes into account the realities on the ground, first and foremost the large settlement blocs in the West Bank of Maale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion. All other land, including the major Palestinian population centers, should be east of the border.




There is another factor at work here that often doesn't get talked about, at least in liberal circles. Five years ago, the Palestinians turned down an offer of a state in all but a tiny portion of the West Bank and Gaza, a divided Jerusalem and some form of compensation for refugees. Not only did they reject it and not offer any alternative, but they then set out to change the political dynamic and garner the world's sympathy by engaging in a premeditated terror campaign that they knew would make them again a victim in the world's eyes. The result was more than a thousand dead Israelis, many more thousands of dead Palestinians and the continuing radicalization of the Palestinian population, making it all but ungovernable. To give in to all their demands after such a disgusting episode would be a moral travesty. No democratic leader of any nation would do it. The Palestinians must pay a price for this and the price is they will get what Israel says they will get and nothing more.




At one time, it would be possible to argue that imposing a unilateral solution would cut off any chance for peace. The considered of opinion of most Israelis, even those on the left, is that that dog won't hunt anymore. There is nothing Israel can do, short of national suicide, that will bring peace. The only answer is separation of the populations.

Yes, exactly. Given that a negotiated peace is impossible as long as the Palestinian Authority is not in control of its territory, Israel must impose a unilateral solution. That means drawing a border that takes into account the realities on the ground, first and foremost the large settlement blocs in the West Bank of Maale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion. All other land, including the major Palestinian population centers, should be east of the border.

Why stop there Brad? Perhaps the Israelis should wait until they have established even more favorable facts of the ground before drawing their border.

But as long as we are at the stage where it is accepted that a solution must be simply be imposed in the absence of a negotiated peace, why don't we just have the international community as a whole, working through the Security Council, draw the border, and then tell both parties where it is.

But as long as we are at the stage where it is accepted that a solution must be simply be imposed in the absence of a negotiated peace, why don't we just have the international community as a whole, working through the Security Council, draw the border, and then tell both parties where it is.




Get serious. Israel will never agree to a role for the UN in deciding where borders are. The UN is chronically biased against Israel and has never shown the slightest bit of concern about Israel's security. Such a process would quickly get hijacked (I use the term advisedly) by the Arabs and those sympathetic to them, like the French.




No, although it would be nice to have a grand signing ceremony with various world leaders gathered around shaking hands, it simply isn't going to happen. Israel needs to decide where its strategic interests really are, impose the borders, and wait for the international community to come around. Sooner or later they will.




The irony is that the kind of borders Sharon would likely have imposed are probably not so different from what a UN-imposed solution would look like. We're not talking that much land, in actuality. It's a myth that the only thing holding up a negotiated solution is where the borders are. While it's true that the parties are wide apart on the status of Jerusalem, the real deal-breaker is the refugees. Once the Palestinians accept that Israel will never allow refugees back into their territory, then the major obstacle to a deal will have been removed.

In contrast, need I remind you, the Holocaust cut the world Jewish population from approximately 18 million to 12 million. That is an existential threat. Hamas is not quite as ambitious as the Nazis, but it is their goal to ethnically cleanse Jews from the Jordan River to the sea.

I thought we were talking about existential threats to the State of Israel, and existential threats to the Palestinian community in Palestine.  These are not the same things as existential threats to the Jewish people, or existential threats to the Palestinian people. 

If the Palestinians in Palestine were all driven off their land, and scattered to various parts of the Arab world, the Palestinian community in Palestine would threby come to an end.  But the Palestinian people would survive.

Similarly, if the Jews in Israel were driven off their land and scattered around the world, the State of Israel would come to an end.  But the Jewish people would survive.

You may believe that the prospects for future survival of the Jewish people would be somewhat less secure without a State of Israel.  Perhaps that is true.  But equally, the prospects for the future survival of a Palestinian people would be far less secure if there were no Palestinian community in Palestine.

I think it is also worth mentioning that the possibility of Israelis being driven "to the sea" and out of Israel seems far less likely at this point in time than the possibility of the Palestinians being driven out of Palestine.   Of course, no sane person should wish for either of these eventualities to come about, since they would both ential a tremendous amount of bloodshed and loss.

But in any case, the main issue is not so much Peoples as people.  In the 20th century, a whole bunch of people in Palestine had their land taken, and their property seized, as one party of imperial occupiers abetted the takings by another party of colonial occupiers.  Much of the debate about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict seems to get caught up in spurious ratings of "Peoples" and their relative importance.  But surely whether or not an individal person or a family is part of a larger "People", does not bear greatly on that individual's right not to be driven off his land and have his property stolen.

If the land in question is near the Green Line then it has everything to do with the creation of a more secure and defensible border - one in which Jerusalem, the coast and Ben-Gurion airport are secure.

Secure from what?

And the land isn't near the Green Line, neither was the land appropriated in the link I provided.  But you didn't bother reading the link I provided, did you?  You might have read a few words, realized what it was about to say, and then, to protect your comfortable world view (Jews = victims, only trying to defend themselves from a savage enemy, we want peace -- really we do -- but it's the other guy's fault) stopped reading it, and immediately started spewing talking points.  How can discourse be "civil," which you so plaintively asked for, when it isn't honest?  

You were correct to assume I was talking about the 1967 land grab. The land that was grabbed in 1967 was meant as a homeland for the Palestinians as part of the Two State solution, hence it deprived a whole people of their homeland, so I think your initial objection is without merit.




Anyways I have a more substantial question. You mentioned going beyond the Barak plan and ceding an amount of land to the Palestinians equal to the amount that would be taken away in order for there not to be a vulnerable neck in the political geography of Israel. My question is would the resulting Palestinian state be criss-crossed by Israel-only roadways, thereby preventing freedom of movement within the Palestinian state and rendering it completely vulnerable to the whims of future Israeli government policy? That is the principal problem with the Barak plan - it wasn't a state the Palestinians were getting, it was a patchwork quilt of pieces of land. As it is I think everyone agree that Palestine will be split up into at least two pieces (since even I doubt Israel will cede the Negev to the Palestinians :-) ), but your 'more than Barak's plan' plan does not seem to ensure the territorial integrity of the Palestinian state. What's the safeguard here for the Palestinians? Don't they deserve a secure state too? Or is that just reserved for the Israelis (don't forget that it is the Palestinians who are the ones who are actually in fact stateless right now)?

If the land in question is near the Green Line then it has everything to do with the creation of a more secure and defensible border - one in which Jerusalem, the coast and Ben-Gurion airport are secure.    Oh please.  Every parcel of land that is seized for settlements only moves the de facto border further into the occupied territories.  The settlers in these new territorial acquisitions are, of course, attacked.  And then we hear that that the new settlements are in danger, and that requires yet further territorial acquisitions and consolidation of Israeli control - to defend the settlers.   If the point were simply to establish a more secure border, Israel would establish a secure line of military outposts along the border, not colonize the other side of the border with vulnerable citizens.   How stupid do you think people are?  Israel has has continued to follow a policy of settlement, fueled by immigration, because that is how they acquire more territory.  It is how they have always acquired more territory - by settling it first, and then using the inevitable attacks as a pretext for securing the settled territory militarily. 
  Why don't the Israelis just declare their border to be the Jordan River and get it over with?

I'm not sure what you mean by "whole population of its nation" but if you are saying that the creation of the state of Israel in 1947, which did result in the displacement of Palestinians, was an illegal land grab, then you are anti-Israel. Israel was created legally under UN authority as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust.

The UN General Assembly proposed a partition of Palestine in 1947, in GA 181, and requested that the Security Council take steps to implement the resolution.  While it is no doubt true that  global horror over the Holocaust played a role in generating sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish state, the main thrust of the resolution was to find a solution to the conflict in Palestine, a conflict that had already been raging for several decades.

General Assembly resolutions are, of course, non-binding.  The Security Council never did take steps to implement the resolution.  The failure of the resolution was acknowledged by the US Ambassador in the UN is March of 1948:

The plan proposed by the General Assembly was an integral plan which would not succeed unless each of its parts could be carried out. There seems to be general agreement that the plan cannot now be implemented by peaceful means. From what has been said in the Security Council and in consultations among the several members of the Security Council, it is clear that the Security Council is not prepared to go ahead with efforts to implement this plan in the existing situation. We had a vote on that subject and only five votes could be secured for that purpose.

Israel was thus not "created by the UN".  Allthough steps in that direction were taken, they were never completed.  Israel made a unilateral proclamation of its establishment in may of 1948, following the 1948 war.  The international legitimacy of Israel depends on the subsequent recognition of Israel by most of the world's countries, and its eventual admision to the UN in 1949, after its first application for membership failed.

Well then see we're not so far apart on this ourselves :-) So perhaps the reshaping would be something along the lines of keeping the western border of Palestine somewhere along the lines of where the settlements end today but push the northern border to give the Palestinians more arable land in exchange (thereby keeping the Palestinian state topologically homeomorphic to the Gaza/West Bank situation today but with the actual geometry altered).

That a solution to the territorial issue should involve such an exhange was called by the Palestinians at Camp David "the principle of the exchange of territories."  They undertood this to be a reasonable baseline for negotiations, according in spirt with Article I of the Oslo accords:

It is understood that the interim arrangements are an integral part of the whole peace process and that the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 and 338.

UN 242, it will be recalled, asserted "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force".  Recognizing that a return to rthe 1967 line was unrealistic, the Palestinians were willing to accept a final status territorial agreement based on the spirit of UN 242 rather than its letter.

This view of the endpoint of the Oslo process was rejected by the Israeli side, who wished to negotiate over various different proposals for cutting up the West Bank, all of which conformed with Barak's own self-imposed red lines, and offered several proposals along these lines.  The fact that the Palestinians insisted upon the exchange of territories baseline, and were not willing to begin haggling over the various outright giveaways acceptable to the Israeli side, is one of the reasons Israel's supporters have clung to the "Arafat offered no counterproposal" talking point about Camp David.

This discussion thread has been very enlightening.  The Camp David talks happened when I was just moving and getting used to college in 2000 and so I did not follow them as closely as I should have and I only heard that Bill Clinton (whose opinion I do respect) was blaming Arafat for the collapse of the talks - clearly (as there always is) a more subtle story was going on and I totally missed it.

 Actually the near fulfillment of Oslo makes Barak's fall from power and the really strident criticism from Likud hard-liners about Oslo makes the whole situation make a lot more sense to me.  I think I didn't appreciate that the hard-liners in Likud are just as hell-bent on never giving the Palestinians a state as Hamas in not letting Israel exist.