If all the plans for how Israelis and Palestinians can peacefully divide or share their homeland were printed and shelved, they could overflow the vast Library of Alexandria. And yet, the latest one deserves attention, and not just for what it states explicitly.
While the world is watching the war in Ukraine, it’s worth remembering those persistently working to make peace elsewhere. The Holy Land Confederation plan comes from Hiba Husseini, former legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators; Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo process; and a team of other Palestinian and Israeli experts.
The key word in the title is “confederation.” Perhaps the most important proposal in the nearly 100-page document, and the most controversial, is that Israeli settlers in the West Bank be allowed to stay in the Palestinian state. That’s intended to remove what’s popularly perceived to be the main roadblock to a two-state agreement. It would do so, but not for the reasons stated.
A confederation between Israel and Palestine, as the authors stress, is “not a substitute for two sovereign states.” It’s a way of implementing a two-state agreement without stark separation and the “we’re over here and you’re over there, with a big wall between us” thinking common until now, especially among Israeli two-state advocates.
Partners in a confederation are independent. They are free to leave if they want, as Britain left the European Union. But they agree to yield bits of independence in favor of cooperation. The whole land between Jordan and the Mediterranean is smaller than Belgium. The economy of what will be two states is entangled. Sewage spilled on one side of the border-to-be flows to the other side, and avian flu that breaks out in chicken houses on one side will likely spread to the other. Shared institutions to handle such issues make sense.
Psychologically, what’s essential in the confederation plan is open borders and free movement. For both Israelis and Palestinians to have self-determination, two states are needed. But as the pro-confederation Two States, One Homeland movement argues, “both people consider their homeland” to be the whole land.
I’ve repeatedly heard Palestinians complain that the current regime of fences, checkpoints and permits isn’t just exhausting and humiliating for those who do enter Israel; it also prevents the others from visiting most of historic Palestine. Simply seeing the beach at Jaffa is a dream. A hard boundary between states threatens to preserve that exile. And, at least for some Israelis, the idea that places basic to Jewish history could be off-limits is anathema. Free movement between two states is the answer.
Still, the most-cited political and psychological obstacle to a two-state agreement is the ever-growing number of Israeli settlers. The response from Husseini, Beilin and their colleagues is to let settlers stay if they wish, as permanent residents of Palestine.
They are right that this would solve the evacuation problem, though not for a reason stated in the text. In this scenario, very few settlers are likely to remain. When it sinks in that they will be members of a minority in an Arab state, they will want to return to the Jewish state. They may hesitate until their neighbors start leaving. But then they will also want to go — to sell their homes to Palestinians or perhaps to the government of Israel or Palestine, which will designate their houses or apartments for Palestinian refugees.
Israel will absorb the returning settlers, as it absorbed a larger number of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Unlike former Soviet immigrants, they’ll already know Hebrew. Many, perhaps most, will already have jobs in Israel.
The West Bank, as I’ve noted before, is an Israeli colony. The colonists will return to the home country, as colonists from Algeria returned to France or Portuguese from African colonies returned to Portugal. This could lead to a social crisis, as in France and Portugal, but the republic will survive.
The immense difference in this case, however, is that Algeria didn’t border France, and no one in Algeria regarded France as rightfully part of their country. The underlying fear of most Israelis, I’d hazard, is not of returning settlers but of what comes after. It shows in a thousand variations I’ve heard about the 2005 pullout from Gaza: “We evacuated settlements, and then we got missiles fired at us.”
The Holy Land Confederation proposal has a chapter on security arrangements. But it leaves out a point that was, perhaps, obvious to its authors. For any two-state accord to work, Israel and Palestine must fulfill the classic definition of a state: Each must have “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” in its territory.
Israel will have to disarm and control radical settlers and their supporters who would sabotage the agreement. Palestine will have to end the existence of armed political factions and disarm its society, so that violent struggle for the rest of the land will end. If those conditions are met, the two-state outcome can be politically attractive, and a confederation might be the best way for both states to flourish.
Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli historian and journalist. He is the author of, most recently, “War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East.” He is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and has written for The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, among others