You are here: Home » News » World » ISRAEL » Israel Hints At How Borders Would Be Drawn

Israel Hints At How Borders Would Be Drawn

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on January 9, 2012.

As the latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks entered their second day (after a 15-month shutdown), Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested part of a plan for drawing new borders between Israel and the proposed Palestinian state.

President Obama drew a lot of flak for suggesting that the borders for the new state would be based on the pre-1967 borders and involve “land swaps.” That is precisely what Lieberman was talking about on Monday. “Any future agreement with the Palestinians must address the matter of Israeli Arabs in the formula of territory and population exchanges. Any other arrangement is simply collective suicide. This has to be clear and I think it is time to say these things out loud.” Past time, might be more like it.

The Israelis have built modern suburban developments that they call settlements in the West Bank to house over 300,000 Israelis. They have also seized land for “military installations” and “historical/archeological preservation” and for “environmental control.” The total amounts to more than half the land of the West Bank. The majority of the settlers are believers in the most radical Zionism – calling for the Israeli state to contain all the Biblical land of Israel, though no one is quite certain what that entails — and the ultra-Orthodox.

Population exchanges can be extremely difficult to pull off. The British tried it when their “colony” of India was partitioned into East and West Pakistan and India. It was supposed to be a controlled migration – Muslims to the Pakistans and Hindis to India. It turned into a bloodbath.

There are Palestinian enclaves inside the state of Israel, and the residents are Israeli citizens. What Liebermann is proposing, if it just involves looping borders around settlements and enclaves, would create two nations of Swiss cheese. What President Obama suggested was “contiguous” states – no Swiss cheese. That would necessitate moving populations of Palestinians from Israel to the West Bank and populations of Israelis to Israel, or at least into clusters at the border.

About 1.56 million Arabs live in Israel. Though they are citizens, they are discriminated against. But Lieberman’s proposal has raised a lot of criticism against him, including accusations of racism. The “population exchange” idea cuts too close to the primary complaint the Palestinians have about Israel – the Palestinians were there first and were displaced by the establishment of Israel. The “right of return” used to be the prerequisite for a peace agreement with the Israelis, as in “Palestinians have the right to return to the property they lost in 1948.” They have, for the most part, given that up, but the seizure of Palestinian property since 1967 has replaced that issue.

Talks between the Israelis and Palestinians broke down in September 2010 because of the settlements in the West Bank. Since then, the Palestinians have insisted that all construction must be halted before they will resume talks. The Israelis have said there must be no preconditions for talks. The meetings in Jordan this week are to set out some parameters for new talks. The Quartet of Mideast mediators, the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, are hosting the meetings.

Lieberman is not being helpful, saying that “It is clear that the Palestinians came to these talks against their will and only did so because they couldn’t say no to the King of Jordan. Unfortunately, the Palestinians are working to internationalize the conflict and to try and escape direct negotiations.” The Palestinians are there “against their will”? All the Israelis had to do to reopen the negotiations was stop building their settlements. Instead, they have kept building and kept building, and failed to protect the Palestinians in their occupation.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by a right wing Israeli because he signed the Oslo Accords. Since then, Israel has managed to find loads of reasons for avoiding any serious attempts at making peace with the Palestinians and releasing their occupation of the Palestinian territories. And the longer they delay, the more the Palestinians, especially in the Gaza, strike out at them. It’s a sick, deadly spiral that has drawn in dozens of countries in from the United States to Indonesia because the Palestinians are the excuse given for Islamic terrorism.

So long as there are Israelis who believe they have the right to every inch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, the Israeli government cannot allow the creation of a Palestinian state. So long as there is no Palestinian state, the heirs to Osama bin Laden and all the other Islamist terrorist leaders have a recruiting tool. What the situation needs is for the people, both the majority of Israelis and the majority of Palestinians to say “enough is enough” and force their governments to finally settle this and their radicals to step down. It is not impossible, it just takes the same kind of exhaustion that finally overtook the residents of Northern Ireland.