It was a forlorn image. Two Palestinian delegates facing not the British foreign secretary but a humble TV set. On top of the box, one of those neat Internet camera gizmos, the kind kids use to talk – in slow, juddering, delayed time – to their granny in Australia.
That was how the Palestinians took part in this week’s London conference all about their future: via video link. They were trapped in Ramallah and Gaza, while British, European and United States officials sat in a Foreign Office basement watching them. Not that the Palestinians blamed their virtual hosts for shutting them out: it was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, not British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who barred them from making the journey to Britain (punishment for this month’s Tel Aviv suicide bombing that killed 23 Israelis). But the event could not help but look like a shadow version of the ”final status negotiations” Blair so grandly promised last autumn.
Still, the prime minister should not give up his ambitions to play peacemaker in the Middle East or even to host a serious London conference on the region, one attended at the highest level and from all sides. Best of all, he now has something to talk about.
For a conflict that has become a byword for stalemate and paralysis has just been graced with that rarest of commodities: a new idea. Debated in policy circles in Washington and London, this new plan is said to be gaining currency on the Israeli centre-left as well as winning a warm hearing in Palestinian leadership circles. Its advocates include people who have rarely agreed on much before, but who suddenly believe that, in this most hopeless of conflicts, they have at last hit upon a plan that might work.
Their starting point is that any trust that once existed between Israelis and Palestinians has gone. In the glory days of Oslo, it may have seemed possible that the two sides could learn to work together and make their peace face to face. That hope has turned to ash. But what if that fact was not so much a problem as a premise? What if the assumption of any new effort was that the two sides will never trust each other enough to do a deal — and so any solution has to involve a third party?
That is where the new thinking begins. It does not ask Israelis to hand over territory to Palestinians, who they fear will use it simply to launch more attacks on Israeli civilians. Nor does it ask Palestinians to trust Israel to get out of territory it has ruled by force for 35 years and that hundreds of thousands of its citizens have settled as if it was their own. It asks both to trust not each other, but someone else.
The plan, in short, is for Israel to hand over the West Bank and Gaza not to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but to a temporary, international protectorate.
Instead of Israeli troops continuing to occupy those territories, a multinational force would take their place. Not for ever, but for enough time for the Palestinians to get on, unimpeded, with the business of nation-building: creating the political institutions and basic infrastructure they need for a state of their own. When the international ”trustees” declared that work done, they would step back and hand over the keys to Palestine’s new rulers: the Palestinians.
The beauty of the idea is that it taps into what polls show both sides actually want, while removing the chief obstacle in their way. Israeli surveys, for example, reveal a national split personality, simultaneously both left and right: while close to 70% of Israelis back Sharon’s clampdown on Palestinian terror, a similar number would agree to withdraw from the occupied territories, would happily live alongside a Palestinian state, and would even share Jerusalem — so long as they believed this new Palestine would be a safe, unthreatening neighbour.
Many Israelis would be only too pleased to wave goodbye to the occupied territories — but they don’t want to ”reward terror” by handing them over to Arafat, Hamas and the like.
Signing that land over to an international force would be a different matter, especially if (maybe only if) it were US-led. Israelis might trust such a presence to provide security in the short term — stopping any suicide bombers from reaching Israel — and to nurture the embryonic institutions of a democratic Palestine in the longer term. The international custodians would be there to monitor Palestinian elections and to train new civil security personnel. Israelis could be assured that once the new Palestine was fully independent, it would be a neighbour they could live with.
Palestinian polling shows a picture no less split than Israel’s. While big numbers endorse terrorist attacks, there remains overwhelming Palestinian support for territorial compromise — accepting a Palestinian state confined to the West Bank and Gaza. The trouble is, few believe Israel will ever give it to them. After the Oslo experience, not many Palestinians trust Israel ever to leave voluntarily. Even fewer are happy to accept a process that leaves it to the Israeli government to decide when the Palestinians are ”ready” to govern themselves.
The protectorate idea solves all that. ”No one in their right mind would refuse an end to the Israeli occupation,” says one senior Palestinian of the plan’s immediate appeal. Maybe it would replace one foreign occupier with another, but Palestinians could live with that, he says. The new force would not have any ideological interest in hanging around and, as he puts it, ”they’re not going to start colonising the West Bank”.
The London group’s proposal — drawn up by the Middle East Policy Initiative Forum and authored by international relations specialist Tony Klug, alongside Israeli and Palestinian colleagues — cites recent precedents from Namibia to East Timor and Kosovo.
They are aware of the myriad complexities that need resolution, from the status of Jewish settlements to the return of Palestinian refugees. They also appreciate that their idea walks a fine line.
To find favour on both sides it has to make a Palestinian state sufficiently guaranteed that Palestinians will accept a three or five-year delay, but not so guaranteed that Israelis will regard it as a fait accompli even if Palestinian terror does not stop. But the idea’s proponents have surely succeeded in their key aim: they have changed the terms of debate.
What are the chances that this could fly in the real world? Palestinians have long called for third party intervention; trusteeship appeals to them as a preferable alternative to Israeli occupation. Israeli public opinion may well warm to it.
What is harder to imagine is Israel’s current Likud leadership embracing it. That might be conceivable if Sharon came under the double pressure of a new consensus at home demanding an end to the drain of life and resources that occupation entails and a new line from Washington, insisting on Israeli action.
Failing that, the best hope is for a shift in Israeli politics towards Labour — if not at this month’s election, then at the next one. That kind of Israeli government could well champion such an idea. For anyone committed to seeing an end to the occupation, and a resolution of this most painful of conflicts, this could, at last, be the way. — Â