There is one thing that the Camp David negotiations of July 2000
made crystal clear - and that is that boundaries are not holy. They
are subject to change depending on the circumstances. The Green
Line boundary separating Israel from the West Bank and Gaza Strip
was drawn up as part of the armistice agreements in 1948-49. The
course of the line was largely determined by the realities of the
cease-fire, underwent some minor changes when it was implemented on
the ground, caused major upheaval and economic disarray for the
Palestinian population residing in close proximity to that line -
in short, it was an artificial, man-made, line that lasted for no
more than 18 years until 1967.
Boundaries As Artificial Constructs
All boundaries are artificial constructs. There is no such thing as
a natural boundary. They are devised by politicians, generals,
negotiators. Where they can exploit natural features (such as
rivers, mountain ridges) it makes life easier to determine the
course of the line. But where these features are absent or where
they don't meet the approval of one of the sides, then other
criteria are used. And the Green Line is a classic case of a
boundary that was drawn up hastily, with little concern for the
local (Palestinian) population and which mirrored the political
realities of that particular period.
And yet the Green Line has become, in the eyes of many, the default
line for all negotiations. As though the line had come into being
thousands of years ago and was an immovable, unchangeable, feature
of the landscape.
Semantics play a major role in the territorial discourse. For the
Palestinians, laying claim to the "whole" of the West Bank for a
Palestinian state, everything that is enclosed within the Green
Line, is itself a recognition on their part that they have given up
all claims to the remaining two-thirds of Palestine which stays
part of Israel. As such, the Green Line is no more than a
minimalist demand on their part. For most Israelis, however, the
idea of giving up the "whole" of the West Bank has seemed, at least
until recently, an unacceptable claim, a maximalist demand. Let
them (the Palestinians) make concessions - why give it all up?
After all, the argument continues, we cannot evacuate close to
200,000 settlers, we need our strategic sites, we must control the
water aquifer, and so on and so on. Once all of these claims have
been taken into consideration, there is not very much left of the
West Bank to hand over to anyone.
Until the negotiations got underway, the public discourse
concerning the question of just what will be the final territorial
configuration of a Palestinian state was largely an abstract one.
The idea that the Green Line should or should not be the eventual
boundary, the notion that some settlements would remain in situ and
that the Palestinians would be compensated with land elsewhere, or
that Jerusalem could experience shared administration, even perhaps
shared sovereignty - all of these ideas were raised. However, this
was more often than not restricted to academic circles and was
generally dismissed out of hand as being unacceptable (for
political reasons) or unworkable (for administrative
reasons).
It was the public polemics that still set the tone. The Palestinian
public position was a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank,
the removal of all Israeli settlements, and a capital in East
Jerusalem. The Israeli public stance was a Palestinian entity (not
state) on part (not all) of the West Bank, the evacuation of only
isolated small settlements with the rest remaining under Israeli
sovereignty in concentrated settlement blocs, and Jerusalem
remaining under Israeli sovereignty. Taken together, a seemingly
impossible problem to resolve.
But while the public polemics of the respective Palestinian and
Israeli leaders set the tone for the public discourse, the
realities of the negotiations have proved to be significantly
different. These realities have shown that everything (or nearly
everything) is negotiable. Boundaries can be changed, some
settlements can remain in situ (regardless of the morality of
setting them up in the first place), the administration of
Jerusalem can be shared, and territorial compensation can be given
to the Palestinians in return for the land annexed by Israel. The
negotiation realities have also shown that Israel is able to
relinquish control over areas, such as the Jordan Valley, which it
has always argued are vital for its security, and that it is able
to even consider a limited refugee return within Israel proper,
ideas that would have been dismissed out of hand just a few years
ago, and labeled as the ivory tower abstractions of academics
divorced from the reality of daily life in the conflict area.
What was the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement of October 1995 if not a
mutual recognition of the territorial changes which would have to
take place if a final agreement were to be reached? Abu Mazen
recognized that no Israeli government, even one administered by
people such as Shimon Peres or Yossi Beilin, would be able to
implement the evacuation of close to 200,000 settlers without
causing major civil strife and violence within Israel. For his
part, Beilin recognized that the territorial extent and size of the
West Bank, not the precise shape or configuration, was what really
mattered and that, if indeed Israel were to retain control of
settlements occupying 10-15 percent of the area, then adequate
territorial compensation would have to be given to the Palestinian
state.
These ideas had first been raised as early as the late 1980s in
academic circles, and had been dismissed out of hand. When the
details of the Beilin- Abu Mazen agreement were slowly leaked, they
were equally dismissed by public opinion and by the right-wing
government that came to power in 1996. But at Camp David last July
[2000], rather than being yesterday's public polemics, they were
concrete ideas put on the table in an attempt to address today's
territorial realities. And despite the fact that the talks broke
down over the inability to reach agreement over the issue of
Jerusalem (or so we are led to believe), many of the other
territorial realities of today were seriously and sometimes
successfully addressed.
Partition - Past and Present
In reality, the negotiations today are on the same issue as during
the 1930s and 1940s, namely the territorial partition of Palestine
west of the River Jordan. The Peel and Woodhead commissions
proposed solutions that addressed, or so they believed, the
geographic realities of that period. Prior to the United Nations
vote in 1947, UNSCOP proposed its own partition plan based on the
geographic realities of that specific period, realities which had
changed considerably since the Royal Commissions of the mid-1930s.
And Israel's war of independence - the Palestinian Nakba - created
a partition reality again expressing the latest developments on the
ground.
That could have been the final line, as the Palestinian side now
demands. But it remained an armistice line, rather than an
internationally recognized line of sovereignty, because neither
side was prepared to negotiate a formal end to the conflict at that
time. Abba Eban recounts in one of his autobiographies that as
Israeli ambassador to the United States and the United Nations in
the early 1950s, he approached David Ben-Gurion with the idea of
holding peace negotiations with the Arab countries and transforming
the de facto line of partition, the Green Line, into an
internationally agreed-upon boundary. It wasn't just the refusal of
the other side to recognize the State of Israel at that time that
torpedoed the idea. According to Eban, Ben-Gurion was not in favor.
He recognized that as long as the boundaries were not formally
recognized, they would remain elastic and flexible. They would lend
themselves to future changes which, however difficult for the
international community to accept, would be less problematic than
infringing on the territorial integrity of boundaries which were
formally recognized and demarcated in international
agreements.
Had there been such an agreement, it would have been even more
difficult for Israel to enter the West Bank in 1967, and it
certainly would have been more difficult for it to suggest any
future territorial arrangement other than that which was in
position on the eve of the Six-Day War. But the fact is that the
line remained an armistice line and, given the changed geographic
facts on the ground which have emerged during the past 33 years,
there is an opportunity to draw a line that will take today's
realities into account and that will come up with an optimal
solution. By optimal is meant a line which will maximize the claims
of both sides, so that neither feels that it has given up on more
of its own claims than the other side. That is the best that can be
achieved in this, hopefully, final round of the 50-year-old
partition debate, but whatever the territorial outcome, it cannot
be worse than the artificial line which was superimposed upon the
landscape in 1949.
The Issues
Just where and how can the line be changed?
a. Israeli settlements
Since the onset of the Oslo process, there have been numerous
Israeli proposals, from academics and politicians alike, to
demarcate a new boundary, which will take the existence of Israeli
settlements into account. All such proposals have had two common
elements. First, how to retain control over a maximum number of
settlements on a minimum amount of territory. The rationale behind
such thinking is that the evacuation of Israeli settlements will
bring about a great deal of civil disorder and intra-Israeli
violence, perhaps even fatalities. Thus the number of Israeli
settlements to be evacuated should be kept to a minimum. On the
other hand, the Palestinians will not accept anything less than the
whole of the West Bank and, as such, the amount of territory to be
annexed should also be kept to a minimum.
The resulting proposals have tended to focus on those areas nearest
to the Green Line which are territorially contiguous with the State
of Israel and where the majority (two-thirds) of the Israeli
settlers are to be found. These areas, in diverse configurations,
are seen as being annexed by Israel, while the other, more isolated
settlements in the interior and along the mountain ridge will have
to be evacuated. The only problem with this rationale is that the
interior settlements are populated by the very hard core of
religious nationalist and Gush Emunim settlers and are, therefore,
the least likely candidates for any form of peaceful evacuation.
Moreover, the real test of evacuation for Israel will come with the
first settlement, however small and wherever it is located. It is
possible that this will serve as a rallying call for all the
right-wing opponents of the peace process and will be the scene of
violent clashes between settlers and soldiers. It is equally likely
that the public reaction to such scenes, including amongst many of
the settlers themselves, will be such that they will acquiesce for
the sake of national unity and to prevent further fratricide.
b. Territorial compensation
The second common element underlying the settlement-border
scenarios has always been that, whatever land is annexed by Israel,
the area of the Palestinian state will, by definition, be smaller
than that of the whole West Bank and Gaza Strip. The notion that
the Palestinian state should receive territorial compensation in
other areas has generally been considered to be unacceptable. "What
is mine is mine - what is yours is half yours and half mine."
However, this basic perception has began to change, not least
because of a Palestinian recognition that no Israeli government
will be able to forcefully evacuate all of the settlements. There
are three areas in close proximity to the West Bank that could be
candidates for the transfer of territory, each with a logic of its
own. The first of these is to the immediate north of the region in
the Wadi Ara and Um el-Fahm area. The problem here is that Israel
would lose control of the route linking Hadera and the Coastal
Plain to Afula, an unacceptable scenario to any Israeli government.
Moreover, public-opinion surveys amongst the Palestinian citizens
of Israel show, time after time, that while they support the cause
of Palestinian statehood, they are less than eager to become
citizens of such a state through a process of forced
annexation.
An alternative area would be to the immediate south of the West
Bank in the area between Hebron and Arad, within which resides a
large proportion of Israel's Bedouin population. The problem here
is the existence of some large Israeli suburban communities within
Israel and, again, the reticence - even rejection - of the Bedouin
population to be part of the Palestinian state. The third
alternative is to compensate the Palestinian state with an equal
amount of land in close proximity to the Gaza Strip, thus enabling
the expansion of the land base of this densely populated
micro-region and avoiding most of the settlement problems to be
encountered around the course of the Green Line, which would
necessitate population transfer from Israel to the Palestinian
state. The Gaza alternative would appear to be the most logical,
from both a political and economic-development standpoint.
c. Land for development and refugee repatriation
A Palestinian state requires land for future development. This is
necessary, not only for the existing population, but also for the
expected return of a limited number of Palestinian refugees. Either
existing urban centers will undergo physical expansion, and/or
completely new villages and townships will be constructed in areas
that are relatively less densely populated. The latter could take
place in any one of three sub-regions - the Jordan Valley, the
southern Hebron hills, or the territorial extension of the Gaza
Strip if, indeed, territorial compensation to the Palestinian state
is undertaken.
While there is much available land in the Jordan Valley, the harsh
climatic conditions of this region would not make it a first choice
for residential development. Even after more than 30 years and
despite all the emphasis on the Allon settlement plan in this
region, successive Israeli governments have been unsuccessful in
attracting settlers to this region. The southern, relatively
unpopulated, portion of the Hebron hills is much more favorable
from this respect, although here, too, the mountainous terrain
makes the cost of construction much higher than it would be in a
valley or a plateau. Finally, if the Gaza Strip were to be
expanded, virtually all of the land would be needed just in order
to alleviate the overcrowded housing conditions of the residents of
Gaza alone and would not, therefore, be a likely area for refugee
repatriation.
d. Territorial dimensions of the security discourse
According to all media reports, the Israeli negotiators at Camp
David offered over 90 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinian
state. This included the whole of the Jordan Valley, the region
which successive Israeli governments have argued would have to be
retained by Israel in order to ensure security over the eastern
border with Jordan. This region formed the very basis of the Labor
Party Allon Plan in the immediate post-1967 period, the idea being
that the region should be settled and fortified as a means of
bolstering Israel's defensive posture, while the remainder of the
West Bank, including the densely populated mountain interior, would
become an autonomous Palestinian region under direct Jordanian
control and administration. During the ensuing period, the
importance of retaining relatively small areas of territory as a
means of bolstering a country's defensive posture have undergone
radical rethinking, not least in the light of changed warfare
technology and the fact that ballistic missiles, fired from
distances of thousands of kilometers, take little notice of the
precise location of the boundary as they target the very heart of
the metropolitan areas.
What is more important is the nature of the peace agreement and the
measures adopted to ensure joint control - perhaps with an outside
neutral power - of the quantity and quality of weapons that are
introduced (if at all) to the region. Thus, it has been possible
for Israel to suggest a total withdrawal from both the Golan
Heights, a region which was always perceived as being of supreme
strategic and defensive importance, as well as the entire Jordan
Valley. In similar fashion, the recent Israeli withdrawal from the
so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon to the international
boundary has, so far, not resulted in any marked deterioration of
the country's security posture in this region.
e. Jerusalem
While the Camp David summit may have collapsed over the inability
to find a mutually agreeable solution to the complex issue of
Jerusalem, the very fact that Israel was prepared to negotiate the
future status of the city marked another important departure from
the traditional public polemics and discourse. As with the case of
settlements, there is no shortage of proposals of how to deal with
Jerusalem, ranging from shared sovereignty to single (Israeli)
sovereignty, but separate municipal administration in Jewish and
Palestinian neighborhoods respectively.
The question of "what is Jerusalem" is unclear from a geographic
perspective. The existing municipal boundaries were drawn up in the
immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War and included many parts of
the city that had previously been part of the West Bank. The
construction of new neighborhoods in the eastern section of the
city, as well as the establishment of Jewish satellite communities
in the suburban periphery of the city (such as Ma'aleh Adumim to
the east, Givat Ze'ev to the northwest) have, as in the case of
settlements in general, changed the geographic realities on the
ground. Two contrasting trends can be defined. On the one hand, the
Barak government has been prepared to hand over Palestinian
neighborhoods that are not part of the existing municipal
boundaries to the Palestinian Authority, arguing that this is not
part of Jerusalem, regardless of the fact that the built-up area is
as much part of the city as all other neighborhoods. At the same
time, the government and the Jerusalem municipality desire to
extend the municipal boundaries to include such communities as
Ma'aleh Adumim and, thus, to expand the jurisdictional base of the
"formal" city.
In other words, with the exception of the Old City and the holy
sites that both sides agree is Jerusalem, the precise definition of
just what is, and what is not, Jerusalem is open to different
geographic interpretations and can be defined as such, for separate
Israeli and Palestinian purposes. What is Abu Dis for Israelis can
be Jerusalem for Palestinians, enabling both sides to have their
administrative headquarters in an area that they themselves
perceive as being part of the city. It all depends on who draws the
municipal boundaries and how they are drawn, so as to afford
maximal administrative separation between Jewish and Palestinian
neighborhoods - in fact, everything that is not part of the Old
City.
A Practical Way of Resolving the Outstanding Territorial
Issues
The remaining territorial issues to be decided are relatively minor
(with the exception perhaps of Jerusalem), given the fact that the
principles underlying the redrawing of the boundary and possible
territorial exchanges have been determined between the negotiators.
However, as negotiations continue to take place and to progress
towards the finishing line, the final lap becomes slower rather
than a sudden last-gasp sprint. It is important to be able to
define exactly what micro-territorial problems remain to be
resolved, so that time is not wasted on negotiating areas around
which there is basic agreement.
Modern mapping and cartographic technology enables the use of
sophisticated techniques that can help resolve boundary demarcation
issues, even at the most micro of levels. Known as Geography
Information Systems (GIS), these techniques enable the negotiator
to work with a database, including maps, which highlight the
precise areas of conflict over which there remain disagreement
between the two sides. These techniques can be used in one of two
ways. Precise satellite digital data enables maps to be produced,
each showing a separate theme (such as routes, land use,
agriculture, settlements, topography and heights, water resources
and so on). These maps can be laid on top of each other, or any
combination of these maps can be used as desired, to show who would
lose and who would gain which resources, given any pre-determined
boundary line (of which the Green Line is but one alternative)
which would be superimposed upon the maps. The protagonists could
then weigh their own relative costs and benefits (assuming also
that Israelis and Palestinians assign varying degrees of importance
to different factors) and determine which boundary line(s)
constitute(s) the optimal geographic solution, losing least and
gaining most.
Alternatively, computer programs can be written for each of the
factors in question as a means of finding the optimal line of
separation for each individual factor. Again, each map can be laid
on top of each other into a sum total of separation, so that the
true areas of conflict are highlighted, while those areas over
which there is agreement - because they afford maximal separation
between Israelis and Palestinians and their respective concerns -
no longer need to be negotiated, while attention and energy can be
devoted to resolving those micro areas (approximately 10 percent of
the course of the eventual boundary) about which there is no
agreement.
Such a database would prevent the negotiators and politicians from
turning around at a later date, as they did following the
demarcation and implementation of the Green Line in 1949, and
arguing that the boundary was determined in such a way because of
the lack of available information and data. This probably also
explains why most of the politicians involved - both Israelis and
Palestinians - have not been receptive to the use of such
techniques, which are being used by many governments throughout the
world to resolve territorial and boundary issues. They realize
that, in the final analysis, the availability of data will enable
them to have better knowledge of the real costs and benefits, but
that the final decisions are political in nature, based on quid pro
quo considerations rather than an intimate knowledge of the
geographic and territorial realities. To demarcate a boundary that
will be as problematic as that of 1949, even when they have the
available data, would lend themselves open to criticism they would
prefer to avoid.
Notwithstanding, given the high levels of GIS technology available
to both Israelis and Palestinians, the final boundary will only be
the poorer for the continued refusal of both sides to make full use
of such techniques.
Conclusion
Clearly, no boundary line is holy, especially not a line which was
only demarcated for the first time just 50 years ago and which has
already been subject to much change in the immediate vicinity. If
Israelis and Palestinians wish not only to resolve the immediate
conflict, but to lay the basis for a period of relative stability,
then more considered attention should be given to the age-old
question of "how best to partition Palestine," affording maximal
separation of both peoples each under their own sovereign entities,
without any given preconditions. This may fly in the face of the
accepted notion that the area known as the West Bank and the Green
Line boundary, which determines the extent of that artificial
political territory, are facts which are impossible to change. But
other facts have emerged in the interim period, and it would be in
the best interests of both sides to draw up a mutually acceptable
boundary that takes these contemporary facts into account before
the line is given international recognition as a permanent feature
of the political landscape.
Postscript
This essay was written just a few weeks before the eruption of the
latest cycle of violence and death in the region. Two months into
the renewed conflict and, what seemed for many an almost foregone
conclusion in the summer of 2000, now seems distantly removed. The
order of the day has, once again, been transformed from dialogue
and debate to killing and violence. But the basic territorial
question remains distinctly contiguous territories must be created,
with a clear line of division/separation between the two
states/peoples. This, more than ever in the past, requires the
dismantling of those settlements which have created obstacles in
the path to a final territorial arrangement during the past seven
years, because they have constituted exclaves and enclaves within
and between areas of Palestinian autonomy.
The scenes of Israeli and Palestinian children being killed and
injured are horrific, but there can be no justification for keeping
these children in isolated settlements, surrounded by Palestinian
territory, because of the territorial irredentism of their parents.
While the Israeli left may have to reassess its approach to the
peace process, the recent events clearly do not justify the
hard-line stance of the right wing. On the contrary, it has become
even clearer than ever before that, in order to reach a final
territorial solution to the problem, these settlements must be
evacuated - and the sooner the better.