Armistice Now: An Interim Agreement for Israel and Palestine – Ehud Ya’ari

Ehud Ya’ari has been a Middle East commentator for Israeli television since 1975. Among his numerous awards for journalism are the Israeli Press Editors-in-Chief prize for coverage of the peace process with Egypt, the Sokolov Prize for coverage of the Lebanon War, and the Israel Broadcasting Award for coverage of the Gulf War. On a visit to Australia in July, Ehud Ya’ari addressed The Sydney Institute on developments in the peace process and Israel.

ARMISTICE NOW: AN INTERIM AGREEMENT FOR ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

EHUD YAARI

Tonight I will try to offer an observation on the state of the play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and briefly describe ideas for how to move forward. These suggestions of mine were originally published in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs in New York and caused some stir amongst Israelis, Arabs and a few Americans.

What is the status of the situation right now? First, I always find it difficult when I’m in foreign countries and also with some Israeli audiences to explain the basics of the situation. That is how a Palestinian state, with the 1967 borders and East Jerusalem as its capital, carries no sex appeal for the Palestinians. That’s a fact. There is no enthusiasm, no craving for that. And when people wonder why, the Palestinian answer is to say make sure that you understand, that we understand, the distinction. They’re struggling for independence but independence is not necessarily sovereignty. They’re fighting to get rid of the Israelis, to get the Israelis off their backs, to end the occupation. This is understandable. But it doesn’t follow, in their logic, that the result is sovereignty and a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.

The Palestinians are basically saying to us Israelis, “Either it is a runaway statehood that is a state for which they don’t pay the full price in peace or we, the Palestinians, are running away from statehood. What will you do?”

The most important, in my opinion, Palestinian intellectual today was an advisor to the late Chairman Arafat and now informally advises Mr Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority. His name is Professor Ahmed Khalidi. He lives in London and teaches at Oxford. He is not on the fringe of Palestinian politics; he’s in the middle of the mainstream. Ahmed allows me to quote him, and he says the following;

The concept of Palestinian statehood is nothing but a punitive construct devised by the worst enemies of the Palestinian people, the US and Israel, in order to constrain Palestinian territorial ambitions and moral claims.

“A punitive construct”. The Palestinians are basically saying to us Israelis, “Either it is a runaway statehood that is a state for which they don’t pay the full price in peace or we, the Palestinians, are running away from statehood. What will you do?” They would like statehood but do not hope for partition of the land between the Jordan river and the sea.

The challenge to Israel, and I’m speaking as an Israeli, is that the Palestinians will keep collapsing slowly, impoverished, miserable, sometimes unfortunately bleeding, into our unwilling arms. The concept of the two-state solution, or the establishment of the Palestinian state, is more urgent from an Israeli point of view than it is from a Palestinian point of view. And Israel has to think of how to arrest the Palestinian retreat from the concept of a two-state solution.

I’ve spent all my life, and I’m not a young man anymore, in the no-man’s land between Israelis and the Palestinians. My estimate is, give it two years. If we don’t have a tangible process, the Palestinians are going to declare that the two-state solution is no longer their objective.

There has never been a problem of supplies to the Gaza Strip. The problem was whether Hamas would be allowed to access Israel on their way to capture the West Bank; yes or no?

They are already toying with what I consider dangerous ideas. Such ideas include “parallel statehood”. That is, two state structures between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea functioning in parallel without demarcating borders, each responsible for its own people. It’s an innovative idea. You have all sorts of ideas popping up throughout the Palestinian community for different types of confederate systems which means, basically, to have one state with two peoples. It didn’t work elsewhere. Not in our neighbourhood. It does not even function in Belgium. So it is Israel, contrary to what is very often reported, that has the interest to speed up the establishment of a Palestinian state before it becomes too late.

Secondly, the situation on the ground today is that we have the Palestinians separated between the Hamas in the Gaza Strip (they took over in June 2007) and the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah movement or what remains of it, in the West Bank. Hamas is contained by Israel. We have a tripartite blockade of the Gaza Strip – by Egypt in the South, by the Palestinian Authority and by Israel. Also at sea. There has never been a problem of supplies to the Gaza Strip. The problem was whether Hamas would be allowed to access Israel on their way to capture the West Bank; yes or no? In fact there could have been an easy solution to the Gaza problem if Egypt, an Arab country, took responsibility to open its own border to traffic of both goods and people to and from Egypt, to and from Gaza. But Egypt says no!  it won’t happen! and it’s not happening.

So Gaza is contained. They are not really firing rockets anymore. We have the best security cooperation ever. We have reached a point, also very rarely if at all reported by Western media, in which today we have zero people on the wanted lists of terrorists in the West Bank. It has never been like this since 1967. That’s the result of very close cooperation between the Israeli security and the Palestinian Authority security agencies. It has dramatically reduced the Israeli army and Israeli intelligence agencies’ activity inside the West Bank. It has allowed the Palestinian Authority to ask Israel, and the Israeli Army, for help when they have trouble with organised criminal gangs in the territories, and when they have difficulties containing them. The situation is of unprecedented cooperation which is producing security. 2009 was the best year in terms of the number of terrorist incidents we had. Israel has been able to revitalise economic activity in the West Bank. Many of the Israeli roadblocks which were set up in order to contain the flow of suicide bombers from the West Bank have been removed. GDP growth in the West Bank reached 12% and is even higher in Gaza, according to the IMF.

We are witnessing now a change in the Obama Administration’s policy all over the Middle East.

I should make one comment in parentheisis. You can read a lot in the Western media, especially in the US, about Palestinian Prime Minister Mr Fayyad and his plan to create an infrastructure for Palestinian statehood by 2011. This is widely exaggerated. Basically what he has been doing is creating a new patronage system through  an ever expanding bureaucracy financed by the donor states. The European Union recently informed the Palestinian Authority that they have to come up with results if they want the pace of subsidies to continue as at present. It is close to $US2 billion a year for the Palestinian Authority.

In Gaza things are happening in many ways because of the impact of the political boycott and the blockade. They are not happening in the open, but public debate is developing within the top leadership of Hamas. In my opinion, this is of the utmost importance. For example, one of the top leaders of Hamas, Ahmed Youssef,  recently distributed to a few people a blog or article that he has written. Ahmed Youssef is nominally the Director-General of the Hamas Foreign Ministry in Gaza. Previously he was running Hamas from his offices in Virginia, very close to Washington D.C. He’s a very important fellow in that movement.

Ahmed Youssef’s article was titled “Do we want to become the Palestinian Taliban or do we want to be like the AKP”. The AKP is Mr Erdogan’s party now in government in Turkey; an Islamist government. Behind this question is the debate going on within Hamas. Some people, Ahmed Yousself amongst them and others even more important than him, are saying that they don’t really need the military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. They have realised they don’t need the rockets and that type of resistance preached by the top leadership of Hamas in Damascus by Khaled Mashal and the military leaders. Rather than becoming a Palestinian version of the Taliban, a movement controlled by military militia imposing its own interpretation of Islam on the general society, these Hamas leaders are saying that the example of the AKP governing Turkey, a civilian party playing by the book, winning elections without a military wing, not preaching resistance and so on should be their goal.

That no one has sovereignty over the holy places is basically the Israeli position. We cannot solve the Palestinian demand for refugees to be allowed the right of return into Israel proper.

This is a major development within Hamas. If Hamas is contemplating, or if people within Hamas are contemplating, whether armed struggle is the right way to go, that’s huge. That means that the pressure exercised on Hamas is bearing fruit. And this debate should be encouraged and stimulated. Many in Hamas are saying that the takeover of the Gaza Strip, in 2007, was a mistake. Certainly many of the Hamas leadership in the West Bank are asking the military commanders, behind closed doors, why they fired 8,000 rockets and missiles into Israel for years only to stop it completely after the Israeli operation in Gaza in 2008. So things could be happening there.

The fourth point I wanted to make has to do with American policy. We are witnessing now a change in the Obama Administration’s policy all over the Middle East. But I’m speaking now about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said recently that  the US had “screwed up” in the Middle East on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The President himself said something that amounted to, “I went into the minefield and lost a few fingers.” His latest meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quite different from all his previous meetings. They now have an agreement to encourage the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas to move as early as possible into direct negotiations to replace the proximity talks that have been conducted by Senator Mitchell without much progress being made.

I am suggesting we have a sort of an armistice deal. I couldn’t care less how the deal is made. They can call it an armistice; they can find a different definition, everything goes as long as it moves us forward.

Now what results would they be contemplating? A final status deal, the completion of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, will keep proving elusive. We cannot, unfortunately, solve the issue of sovereignty over the holy places in Jerusalem. No Israeli government, left or right, can allow another sovereignty in Jerusalem. The best the Israeli’s offered, which I think is a logical offer, was sovereignty to God. So let’s deal with management and administration.

That no one has sovereignty over the holy places is basically the Israeli position. We cannot solve the Palestinian demand for refugees to be allowed the right of return into Israel proper. In a poll held yesterday in the West Bank and Gaza, by a Palestinian pollster Nabil Kukali, 88 per cent of those questioned said that they would absolutely reject any deal that does not include the right of return. That’s unthinkable from an Israeli point of view; to flood Israel with who knows how many Palestinian refugees, second, third and now fourth generation, going into Israel proper.

This is accepted by Mahmoud Abbas, and he said so explicitly in an interview he had with me a couple of months ago. He accepts that the solution for the Palestinian refugee problem should be within the boundaries of the Palestinian state. But I don’t think he has the constituency for that and I do not believe that he has the political clout to make this concession which is indispensable. So I have a strong suspicion that the only way forward is through what I call an armistice deal. Armistice is different from cease-fire in the sense that it has a political dimension. An armistice deal between Israel and the Palestinians, would be based on the speedy establishment of a Palestinian State and a comprehensive package of interim measures on all core issues. Whereas President Bush’s roadmap of the Quartet in 2005 suggested the establishment of a Palestinian state within provisional boundaries only, I think that an armistice regime should deal with all core issues in a comprehensive manner.

But if you go for an interim arrangement we can have the Palestinian state now. Under this arrangement, the Palestinian state would participate with Israel in running Jerusalem at the municipal level.

In 1949, following the War of Independence and the establishment of the State of Israel, Israel concluded four armistice agreements with four Arab states which amounted to a sort of de facto acceptance, if not recognition, of Israel by its neighbours. There were all sorts of mechanisms created. Mixed armistice commissions happened with Egyptian and Syrian officers and diplomats coming to Israel and Israel going to them. It took place under the UN.  The Palestinians were not part of the armistice regime because at that stage of the War of Independence they had no military forces on the ground, and no control over any territory. They were not part of the equation. The Jordanian and Iraqi armies invaded the West Bank, the Palestinians retained no territory and by that stage didn’t have any organised troops.

What I am suggesting is that the Palestinians be called to the table now, 62 years later, now that they have presence on the ground, now that they control territory, now that they have military security forces. I am suggesting we have a sort of an armistice deal. I couldn’t care less how the deal is made. They can call it an armistice; they can find a different definition, everything goes as long as it moves us forward.

What would be the features of an armistice regime?

Firstly, the establishment of a Palestinian  state right away. Then Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank, as we have already withdrawn   from Gaza. This withdrawal would require the removal of 40,000-50,000 settlers from the heartland of the West Bank. Just to give you an idea of this, the latest Israeli offer to the Palestinians made by the previous Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was for Israel to retain 5.9 per cent of the West Bank territory and compensate the Palestinians through a territorial swap by annexing to the Palestinian state territories that lie now within the territory of Israel. The principle of swap is accepted by the Palestinians. According to this offer Israel had to remove something like 96,000 settlers from the West Bank; a major move for a tiny state. What I’m saying is that in the interim stage, the armistice stage, about 50,000 settlers should be moved.

Who brokers the deal? Basically the United States. My reading of the mood in Washington is that some people within the administration are beginning to think along these lines.

The refugees are the other matter. The offer should follow what was discussed in Camp David Summit in 2000. The refugees are to be told that they are not called to give up their refugee status, but still they are offered a very generous package of compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation within the territory of the Palestinian state. Remember that most refugees reside in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The majority of these people will go for the package if they can retain their political status as refugees for future claims. This can go a long way towards defusing the refugee problem which is probably the most complicated one in this century old conflict.

Jerusalem. We cannot resolve, as I said before, the issue of sovereignty over the holy places and some other parts of Jerusalem. But if you go for an interim arrangement we can have the Palestinian state now. Under this arrangement, the Palestinian state would participate with Israel in running Jerusalem at the municipal level. The Arab neighbourhoods would be managed by the Palestinian state. There would be joint administration of the Holy Places, probably with the participation of other countries and other bodies such as Christian churches as there are also Christian holy sites there.

Then is the issue of replacing the current customs union. According to the Oslo Accords of 1993, we have a customs union with the Palestinian territories. We don’t need it and they don’t need it. We are all better off replacing the customs union with a Free-Trade Zone and, of course, issuing Palestinian national currency is necessary here.

As to security arrangements based on existing cooperation between Israeli security and Palestinian security agencies, as long as it’s working, and at this point it is working, that should be the basis. Israel and Mahmoud Abbas have already discussed the possibility of some presence of a US-led NATO force in the territory.

The negotiations for all these moves should be conducted with the Palestinian Authority, with Mahmoud Abbas. As for Gaza and Hamas, this is the Palestinians’ problem. It’s for them to resolve. There are no outstanding issues re–Gaza in terms of territory. Israel removed itself completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005. How the Palestinians sort out their differences, their internal strife, is their problem although as I have discussed some positive developments  may occur over time.

Who brokers the deal? Basically the United States. My reading of the mood in Washington is that some people within the administration are beginning to think along these lines. I know for a fact that some of the Israeli leaders accept the concept, if not the details. I know that President Abbas is saying that  the interim package could come  following a DOP, a Declaration of Principles and there is a vision of how the final status deal will look like, but without the details. For example, the DOP will lay down that the Palestinian state will have territory equal to the size of the territory of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. As I said before, the principle of a swap is accepted by the Palestinians. There will be a statement but not an exact demarcation of border lines. If you can have a declaration of principles agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, facilitated by the US and then endorsed by the Security Council as a Security Council resolution, then the implementation of an interim package could be presented by the Palestinians as a phased out implementation of that vision of the future.

Why is this important? Because it provides us with the opportunity of changing the lay of the land, the geopolitical configuration on the ground, within a year or two. That can be done quickly. That can be done during Obama’s first term. It can be done with Hamas objecting but not sabotaging the deal for one simple reason. Hamas would not accept recognition of the State of Israel or peace with the State of Israel. But the armistice does not call for recognition of Israel or a peace treaty with Israel at the interim phase.

It could work, but it needs the support of the international community. It needs support from the key Arab players, mainly Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. And it needs loads of goodwill from both parties, both Palestinians and Israelis. But I believe it’s there and I’m convinced that if we don’t do it now, in two years we will see the two state concept already fading into thin air.