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Report 13 Ariel
Sharon
ÃäÊ ÇáÒÇÆÑ ÑÞã:
Ariel Sharon and the
Jordan Option
Gary
Sussman
March
2005
(Gary
Sussman is based at Tel Aviv University.)
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An avid enthusiast of Ariel Sharon and
his unilateral disengagement plan recently opined that the
plan “has one inborn defect: it has no vision, has no
diplomatic horizon and is devoid of any ideological
dimension.”[1] This view of the Israeli prime minister
-- tactically brilliant but lacking as a strategic thinker --
is common but mistaken. Sharon clearly belongs in the pantheon
of master tacticians in modern politics, but he does indeed
have a long-term strategy -- and disengagement fits right
in.
His vision is no longer the creation of limited
Palestinian state on some 50 percent of the West Bank, as many
have long assumed. Instead, Sharon envisions a Palestinian
state on a significant portion of the West Bank, possibly as
much as 80 percent. Sharon is all too aware that such an
entity is not “viable.” He assumes, in fact, that a two-state
arrangement cannot be sustained and will not bring an end to
Palestinian-Israeli strife.
In the
long term, the Israeli premier hopes that the Palestinian
state will meld with Jordan. His assumption is that unilateral
disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, his plan
for a carefully managed transition away from direct Israeli
rule over the majority of the Palestinians, will set this
process in motion. Over time, Sharon calculates, contiguity
between “Palestine” and its neighbor to the east, as well as
increased trade, cultural ties and the “democratization”
championed by the Bush administration, will induce
Palestinians on both the West and East Banks of the Jordan to
agitate for Palestinian-Jordanian federation themselves. If
one assumes that Sharon has quietly held on to his once openly
expressed belief that “Jordan is Palestine,” his break with
his old supporters among the settler movements and the right
becomes easier to understand.
Sharon’s Intentions
Politicians are far more forthright than we believe.
They very often mean what they say. If one, for example, reads
former South African President F. W. de Klerk’s speeches from
1989 until well into the negotiations process that eventually
ended apartheid, one is struck by how candidly he set out his
agenda. De Klerk sought to impose a limited democracy,
blunting universal democracy with significant guarantees for
the white minority. He hoped to do so by controlling the pace
and scope of the transition. He also believed that he could
outsmart the African National Congress, which he assumed to be
significantly weakened by the collapse of its patron, the
Soviet Union. In a similar way, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to
engineer a process that ensured the perpetuation of
Soviet-style communism, albeit reformed. That
perestroika and Pretoria-stroika failed to
secure their objectives is, of course, another matter
entirely.
Major speeches of political leaders and statements by
their aides are a vital guide for those not privy to the
leaders’ inner thoughts. Ariel Sharon has been less than
charitable in indicating where he is ultimately headed, but he
has been clear about his immediate objectives. In statements
since December 2003, when he announced his disengagement plan,
Sharon has repeatedly noted that he wishes to buy Israel more
time to fashion a Palestinian statelet amidst the settlement
blocs, bypass roads and military bases in the West Bank. He
has been coy, however, about what might follow.
Sharon has not changed his fundamental views on the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Like many Israelis, he deeply mistrusts
Arabs. As Dov Weisglass, the prime minister’s trusted policy
adviser, explains, he “believes that the Arab world views
Israel as an imposition, and won’t come to terms with its
existence.”[2] Hence Sharon rejects the very premise of
a comprehensive, negotiated two-state deal that would lead to
peace and reconciliation -- the sort of deal that his
erstwhile rivals in the Labor Party hoped would usher in “a
new Middle East.” The guiding assumption of all major official
and unofficial peace initiatives to date -- whether the Oslo
accords of 1993 and 1994, the Saudi initiative of March 2002
or the Geneva accords of December 2003 -- has been that a
comprehensive deal will remove the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict from the list of regional irritants, paving the way
for harmony, cooperation and integration. The most noted and
sanguine exponent of this vision, of course, has been Labor
Party leader Shimon Peres. For Ariel Sharon, however, there is
no new Middle East at the end of the tunnel. Instead, he seeks
to use unilateral measures to manage the conflict so as to
favor Israel. This conflict management paradigm is, in
essence, a modern variation upon the traditional Revisionist
Zionist notion of the “iron wall,” as espoused by Ze’ev
Jabotinsky.[3] Prior to Israel’s declaration of
independence, Revisionists dismissed the idea of negotiated
compromise with Palestinian nationalism. Instead, they called
for building a figurative “iron wall” between Israel and Arab
interlocutors until a “moderate” Arab leadership emerged that
was no longer intent on destroying the Jewish
state-in-the-making. The second intifada convinced
Israelis that an iron wall is still necessary.
Sharon’s deep wariness of the Arabs explains why he
long opposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
His traditional view was that Israel needs to settle beyond
the coastal plain if it is not to be a “mass of concrete from
Ashkelon to Nehariya -- all within the range of Arab guns and
having to rely on friendly powers for protection.”[4] Unlike his former allies in the
religious right wing of the settler movement, however, Sharon
is willing to amend his tactics to serve his strategic
objectives. It is not incidental that he recently accused the
settlers of having a “messianic complex.”
Sharon initially opposed the separation barrier that
Israel is building in the West Bank, only relenting when he
realized that he could not defy growing public support for the
project. Then he swiftly appropriated the barrier in service
of his agenda. Similarly, Sharon realized that he cannot fight
the increasingly hegemonic idea of partition of the territory
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. As he is
acutely anxious not to confront the United States, the turning
point for him was President George W. Bush’s embrace of the
“two-state solution” in a Rose Garden speech on June 24, 2002.
But Sharon has a very different notion of a two-state solution
than the one envisioned by the Palestinian Authority and the
international community. One might describe his vision as the
“one and a three quarter-state solution.”
Since coming to power in February 2001, Sharon has
astutely harnessed concepts like statehood, the barrier and
unilateral disengagement to maximize Israeli territorial gains
and deflect demographic pressure from Israel toward the east.
In recent weeks, the indefatigable Shimon Peres, now deputy
prime minister in Sharon’s disengagement government, has
proclaimed that while the Likud Party has secured the spoils
of political power, his party has won the battle of ideas. In
one sense, Labor Zionism’s thesis of the need for territorial
partition to achieve peace has indeed emerged ascendant.
Sharon has also embraced the Zionist left’s idea of unilateral
separation, suggesting an impressive tally of victories for
Labor Zionism. The ascendance of the unilateralist paradigm as
Sharon understands it is, however, a great victory for
Revisionist Zionism. The notion of an iron wall, as well as
the belief that there is no solution to the conflict, has
gained wider currency in Israel. In dialectical fashion,
Sharon has synthesized key ideas promoted by the Zionist left,
in order to further his vision of what a secure Israel would
be.
Sharon’s Logic of Unilateralism
The Israeli premier and his aides have been most
transparent in stating the objectives behind the unilateral
disengagement plan. As noted above, it is first and foremost
an articulation of Sharon’s dismissal of the conflict
resolution paradigm, whereby the “final status issues” in the
conflict -- chiefly borders, settlements,
Palestinian refugees and Jerusalem -- can be resolved
at once. A leading architect of the disengagement plan, Eyval
Giladi, argues that it is impossible “to reach a final status
agreement in one step.” Giladi rejects the notion that peace
will bring security. Instead, he posits that security brings
peace.[5]
Moreover, the plan seeks to free Israel from the “road map” to
a negotiated two-state solution, sponsored by the Quartet of
the US, UN, Russia and the European Union and promulgated in
May 2003. Sharply contradicting his undertakings to the
international community and his later comments at the February
8, 2005 Sharm al-Sheikh summit, Sharon made it clear to a
group of Israeli ambassadors that “there will not be a direct
transition from the disengagement plan to the road
map.”[6]
A
successful flight from the road map ensures that Israel
reasserts control over the diplomatic process and manages it
on Israeli terms. Speaking in the West Bank settlement of
Ariel, prior to his summit with George Bush in April 2004,
Sharon noted, “Only an Israeli initiative will keep us from
being dragged into dangerous initiatives like the Geneva and
Saudi initiatives.”[7]
Sharon’s failure to take any diplomatic initiative in his
first term created a diplomatic vacuum that others filled. His
plan was partly a response to such efforts. Dov Weisglass
concedes that the plan “compels the world to deal with our
idea, with the scenario we wrote.”[8] By
reasserting control, Sharon intends to avert the final status
negotiations with the Palestinians that are stipulated
in phase three of the road map. In such an exchange,
Palestinian concessions on the question of the right of return
would need to be matched by Israeli flexibility on Jerusalem,
settlements and borders. Tellingly, Weisglass likened his
scheme to “formaldehyde” applied to ensure that “there will
not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
The
unilateral approach, then, allows Sharon to address the issues
of settlements and borders without negotiations and on terms
that greatly favor Israel. Sharon assumes that “painful”
measures, like the removal of small settlements, will allow
Israel to control the scope of the withdrawal. In private
conversation and in numerous media interviews, the prime
minister has noted that his plan “constitutes a mortal blow to
the Palestinians” and their quest for statehood, and will make
it impossible to return to the 1949 armistice lines.[9] His
pet journalist Uri Dan explains that Sharon’s “cruel
separation” plan is premised on making tactical sacrifices in
exchange for strategic gains in the West Bank.[10]
It is striking that Sharon continues to be reluctant to
return to a bilateral process, even though his arch-nemesis
Yasser Arafat is no longer the Palestinian leader. The
disengagement scheme was after all presented as a means to
bypass a recalcitrant and ruthless Arafat. Though Arafat’s
successor, Mahmoud Abbas, may be emphatic in eschewing
violence as a means of struggle, he is no less committed to
the bottom lines from which Arafat refused to budge at Camp
David in July 2000. These are positions that Sharon could
never agree to.
Withdrawing to
What?
Given that Sharon is keen to avoid a withdrawal on the
scale of the Geneva blueprint, the critical -- and still
unanswered -- question is what his red lines for a withdrawal
are. His spokesperson Raanan Gissin notes that his plan “will
remove the issue of other major evacuations, major withdrawals
in Judea and Samaria, particularly the major clusters of
settlements.” The plan, as Gissin notes, leaves Israel “the
most vital percentages that we need.” Sharon has long held
that Israel requires greater “strategic depth” and can attain
it through establishing “security zones” -- swathes of
occupied territory from which Israel would not withdraw.
Clarifying the nature of the zones, Gissin suggests that
“there will be an eastern security zone and a western security
zone: the eastern 10-15 kilometers and the western 3-5
kilometers from the 1967 borders.” Pressed to quantify the
percentage of the West Bank left to the Palestinians, Gissin
confirms that it would be 58 percent.[11] Sharon’s former national security
adviser, Ephraim Halevy, corroborates this percentage,[12] as does journalist Ben Kaspit, who
detailed Sharon’s strategy days before the December 2003
Herzliya speech in which he first laid it out.[13] In the widely cited Haaretz
interview in which he used the term “formaldehyde,” Weisglass
intimated that disengagement will ensure that 190,000 [of
240,000] settlers “will not be moved from their place.”
Relocating 50,000 settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza
(the figure of 240,000 excludes settlers residing in East
Jerusalem and its surroundings) will leave Israel still
controlling a significant
portion of
the West Bank. Such a withdrawal would roughly conform to the
plan proposed in July 1967 by Gen. Yigal Allon, who was then
deputy prime minister in a Labor government. The
aforementioned interviews would, therefore, confirm what many
critics have long assumed about Sharon’s intentions.
Eyval
Giladi, on the other hand, speculated further that the final
figure for “West Bank territory on the western side of the
barrier will be a fraction below 10 percent.”[14]
That percentage was corroborated by Ehud Olmert, then deputy
prime minister and now serving in the new position of vice
prime minister.[15] The
trajectory of the separation barrier adopted by the Israeli
cabinet on February 20, 2005 also points in this direction
(see map).
These assessments suggest that Sharon entertains a set
of possible withdrawal scenarios, ranging from a case in which
Israel would evacuate 60 percent of the West Bank to one in
which Israel would leave just below 90 percent. Many presume
that Sharon will determine the Palestinian entity’s final
borders with the separation barrier, and that, accordingly,
the barrier’s ever changing route through the West Bank and
East Jerusalem tracks with Sharon’s evolving thinking on the
proportions of the Palestinian entity that he will
countenance. The rulings by the International Court of Justice
and the Israeli Supreme Court on the barrier have constrained
Sharon’s ability to impose a scenario at the lower end of
those he envisages. But a further incentive for a larger-scale
withdrawal is that such a pullout would abet Sharon’s
long-term efforts to maximize territorial gains.
Reframing the
Conflict
Sharon’s first objective is to create a subservient
Palestinian state with provisional borders and then seek to
limit subsequent territorial concessions to that state. A
Palestinian state with provisional borders is promised by
phase two of the road map. In contrast to the Palestinians,
however, Sharon seeks to avoid phase three of the road map for
as long as possible. Weisglass conceded that Sharon embraced
unilateral disengagement only when it became apparent that
there was no Palestinian partner for an interim arrangement
that postpones phase three. Arafat’s refusal to accept this
idea underpinned Israel’s efforts to marginalize him. In
Sharon’s eyes, a limited Palestinian state, where the maximum
number of Palestinians lives on the minimum amount of land, is
a strategic asset. Such a statelet improves Israel’s hand in
final status negotiations, because the conflict can be more
easily portrayed as a disagreement between two sovereign
states. Israel will no longer have to deal with the PLO, which
represents the refugees. As Azmi Bishara explains,
There is a vast difference between negotiating a final
settlement with a state and with a national liberation
movement. Dozens of states have borders disputes; there is
nothing particularly urgent or unsettling about them, unlike
national liberation causes. Sharon has no intention of
broaching the latter, and the Palestinians will forfeit the
opportunity to broach them too if they accept the creation of
a state outside the framework of a just, comprehensive and
permanent solution, a state amputated at its inception and
that Sharon intends to make the permanent solution.[16]
Disengagement also allows Israel to stake the moral
high ground in the conflict. For this reason, Sharon will go
beyond the avaricious 60 percent that many assume he plans to
return. At the same time, he has made a determined effort to
lower the expectations of the Palestinians, Israelis and the
international community regarding the extent of the eventual
withdrawal. Sharon assumes that nurturing a pessimistic
outlook among others will serve him when he makes overtures
that, ultimately, fall below former Prime Minister Ehud
Barak’s “generous offer” at Camp David. The more territory he
agrees to evacuate, the stronger his case will be for
demanding annexation of the rest. When the Palestinians, as he
expects, spurn these overtures, Israel will yet again be able
to hold Palestinian dogma responsible for unilateral Israeli
annexation.
Disengagement has two additional advantages. One is
that limited withdrawal will allow Sharon to demonstrate to
Israelis and the international community the trauma associated
with territorial “concessions.” In doing so, he can undermine
a comprehensive peace deal in a Machiavellian manner. As a
prominent settler leader, Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun, explains, “He
needs national trauma to impress upon the Israeli public and
the international community that it is impossible to do this
again.”[17] A second advantage is that the plan
relieves the domestic pressure that demographic concerns place
on Sharon. Israelis are obsessed with demography -- the
relative percentages of Jews and non-Jews in the population of
Israel-Palestine. Their fear of a declining Jewish majority
has led to a dramatic paradigm shift, in which an independent Palestinian state and “the
potential military threat from such a state” are viewed as the
lesser evil.[18] In giving up Gaza, Sharon
readjusts the demographic balance and reduces domestic
pressure for a comprehensive deal. Moreover, by removing Gaza
from the equation he weakens the Palestinian hand in a later
bargain.
Above all, the plan will allow Ariel Sharon to fight
for the territorial assets he deems vital. In contrast to his
predecessors, Sharon does not expend valuable political
capital fighting symbolic battles. This trait is also what
distinguishes him from religious hawks.
The letter he obtained
from Bush in April 2004 is testament to his strategic focus.
Time gained as his unilateral game plays out is time to deepen
Israel’s hold on key settlement blocs and create yet more
facts on the ground. As Sharon declared to a settler audience,
“Ma’aleh Adumim will grow stronger, Ariel, the Etzion bloc,
Giv’at Zeev will remain in Israeli hands and will continue to
develop. Hebron and Kiryat Arba will be strong.”[19]
Even the most liberal of Likud leaders, Ehud Olmert, has made
clear that these communities will not be conceded. Beyond
creating more facts on the ground, the decision to let Gaza go
makes it easier to build an internal Israeli coalition to
fight to keep these blocs.
Sharon and
his key Likud allies recognize that alternative “solutions,”
like transferring major Arab-Israeli communities to the
Palestinian entity or carving the West Bank into totally
disconnected cantons, are not feasible. The former option,
which is explicitly supported by Avigdor Lieberman of the
far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party and implicitly endorsed by
Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon’s major rival within the Likud, can
only become possible if the Zionist left also champions it. To
date, only Ephraim Sneh, who was defense minister under Barak,
has briefly courted the idea. Public support for the idea from
the political center may increase over time as concerns over
demography are fueled. As journalist Aluf Benn notes, “The
solution of withdrawal from the territories is no longer
enough for the angry prophets of demography,
Professors
Arnon Sofer and Sergio Della Pergola.”[20] But
a critical mass of support is not yet close to being
formed.
Sharon supported the canton option when he first
entered politics.[21] But the intensified international
scrutiny of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the years of
the second intifada has taken this option off the table
for Israel’s image-conscious hawks. Ehud Olmert notes, “The
canton program will create a situation that the world will not
be prepared to live with, and rightly so, because it will not
allow for territorial contiguity and does not give the
Palestinians the minimal basis to enjoy independent life under
self rule and sovereignty. The plan effectively turns them
into something, pardon me for the infuriating comparison,
similar to the old South Africa. The world will not live with
this.”[22]
Living with a Limited Palestinian
State
Sharon appreciates that something the White House will
call “a Palestinian state” is a given. He is now trying to
create greater domestic and international consensus for a
limited Palestinian state -- though one much larger than
Sharon’s detractors are prepared to admit. He will even
acquiesce in greater sovereignty for the Palestinian entity
than his predecessors may have been willing to do. One might
call his current project “the 20 percent (of the West Bank for
Israel) coalition.” In other words, he seeks to realign
Israeli positions on the Palestinian issue around borders he
considers vital to Israel.
His unilateral measures, therefore, are a way of
repackaging the notion of the two-state solution. Seen from
his perspective, such an approach is rational. Sharon, after
all, believes that a negotiated peace like the one spelled out
in the Geneva accord will not resolve the conflict.
The Israeli premier can already count several successes
in his endeavor. For starters, his plan is viewed as the only
game in town. Secondly, his letter from Bush recognizes
Israeli “facts on the ground.” Domestically, Sharon’s gelding
of the Labor Party represents a triumph in efforts to realign
the Israeli political topography. At present, the biggest
threat to his agenda comes from the religious right and
ideologues and disaffected legislators in the Likud.
The creation of a limited Palestinian state is fraught
with risks for Israel, which could find itself with a highly
unstable neighbor. As Gideon Levy notes, there can “be no
independent Palestinian state between Ofra and Etzion. There
can be no just solution with Ariel and Ma’aleh Adumim.”[23] Not all Israelis seem bothered by a
Palestinian state that lacks territorial contiguity and may,
as a result, be unviable. One right-wing commentator suggests
that the “idea that a country requires
geographical integrity is an odd one.” Instead, he posits
that a “country’s viability” is “chiefly a function of
the quality of governance.”[24] Without denigrating the
importance of governance, a cramped, non-contiguous
entity inhabited by poor and aggrieved people would likely
continue to generate attacks on Israeli civilians. Some cynics
in Israel might silently approve of such an outcome, which
could reinforce their thesis that the Palestinians do not want
peace.
Another issue is sovereignty. The democratic transition
literature suggests that sovereignty is a precondition for
democracy -- an association conveniently overlooked by Israel
and the international community in placing so much emphasis on
Palestinian “reform.” Yet there is every reason to assume that
even a negotiated Israeli territorial retreat might lead to a
Palestinian state whose sovereignty is diluted. Israel may
well insist on controlling the external border crossings, in
order to prevent weapons smuggling, or on mastering
Palestinian airspace. Israel will probably insist that the new
state be demilitarized. Israel will also violate the
Palestinian entity’s sovereignty in cases where it perceives
itself to be under military threat. Furthermore, Israel may
also insist that it has the right to veto diplomatic relations
between the Palestinian state and entities deemed hostile to
Israel -- Iran, for example. Such demands will limit both the
internal and external aspects of sovereignty. Internal
sovereignty implies that a government enjoys decisive and
unrestricted sanction, while external sovereignty entitles a
community to set policy free of the meddling of other agents.
“Sovereignty,” as David Held notes, “by its very nature
implies a degree of independence from external powers and
dominance or ultimate authority over internal groups.”[25]
Israel’s instinct will be to limit
Palestinian sovereignty as is universally understood. Even if
Israel were to secure the support of certain Palestinian
elites, willing to collaborate for their personal interests,
for such a limited entity, Israel would face the possibility
that ordinary Palestinians would not accept the entity as a
state. “A state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its
people; if they do not believe it is there, no logical
exercise will bring it to life.”[26] An outcome in which
Israel limits the scope and substance of Palestinian
sovereignty will serve to ensconce the binational reality in
which Palestinians and Israelis find themselves. If the
Palestinian state is not recognized by the Palestinians as a
state it will be akin to the South African bantustans of yore.
It is hard to imagine that Ariel Sharon is not aware of the
risks implicit in a state whose sovereignty and contiguity is
limited -- which leads us to the tacit part of his
disengagement plan.
The Jordan
Option?
It is worth recalling that the “Jordan option” --
whereby a Palestinian entity federates with Jordan -- was the
endgame that Sharon espoused when he entered politics in 1974.
For many years, he vocally supported the removal of the
“artificial kingdom” in Jordan.[27] At least one prominent Jordanian
believes that the Israeli premier’s tactical maneuvering
should be evaluated in the light of his past predilections.
When he was still foreign minister, current Deputy Prime
Minister Marwan Muasher noted, “We are afraid that the day
might come when Israeli leaders might argue ‘Jordan is
Palestine.’ Why are we worried?
The wall will effectively divide the West Bank into
three parts. It will make life impossible for Palestinians:
dividing them from their work, their schools, their lands. If
that happens, what options do Palestinians have? They will
leave, voluntarily or by force, for Jordan.”[28]
Indeed, a variant of the idea, euphemistically labeled
as the “regional solution,” enjoys support in the Israeli
security establishment. Press reports intimate that Giora
Eiland, head of the National Security Council, has presented
the “regional” option to Sharon. Besides receiving a favorable
response from the premier, Eiland has a mandate to present the
plan to the international community.[29] The salient difference between the
current Israel Defense Forces command and the ex-general
Sharon is that the former fancy that such an accommodation can
be negotiated. The more prudent Sharon appreciates that
neither the Palestinians nor Israel’s neighbors will agree to
the idea.
How might Sharon succeed in effecting this binational
outcome to the conflict? He and his spokespersons often note
that the disengagement plan buys Israel time. If Sharon has in
mind a two-state outcome that will usher in peace, then why
play for time? The reason is not only that time gained allows
Israel to strengthen its hold upon crucial settlement blocs.
More
importantly, the time that Sharon will purchase through his
plan allows another demographic trend to progress, namely, a
change in the internal Jordanian demographic balance between
Palestinians and Transjordanians. Palestinian refugees
residing in Jordan already constitute a majority, but
gerrymandering by the Hashemite regime has ensured that they
are vastly under-represented in the legislature. Moreover,
Transjordanians continue to dominate the kingdom’s key
institutions, most importantly the security apparatus. This
balance could shift, especially if Jordan is pressed into
majority-rule democracy as some might think Bush’s rhetoric of
“transforming” the Middle East implies. In such a scenario,
the region could be home to two “Palestinian entities” -- a
limited state on the remnants of the West Bank and Jordan. Cut
off from Israel by the separation barrier, the Palestinians
would look to Jordan as their cultural and economic hub. In
such a sequence, Sharon probably envisages the collapse of the
two states into one entity. The merger would not necessarily
require force or direct Israeli involvement. One development
Sharon could anticipate is the rise of irredentist movements
in both polities, calling for voluntary association based on
the will of the two peoples. Heightened Jordanian
sensitivities and current US interests prevent Sharon from
discussing this broader objective with the candor he uses to
discuss West Bank settlements.
In order
for Amman to become the “new Jerusalem,” Israel would need to
connect the two territories by giving up the Jordan River
Valley.
What was
once seen as a vital threat to Israel -- continuity between
Jordan and the West Bank -- could be seen by Sharon as an
Israeli interest. No Iraqi army is going to be marching
through Jordan any time soon. To boot, leaving the Jordan
River Valley will aid Israeli efforts to secure the moral high
ground and alleviate Israeli demographic fears by giving West
Bank Palestinians room to the east for population expansion.
In the context of his disengagement scheme, Sharon has also
made it clear that Palestinians should seek their economic
prospects in Jordan and Egypt. The fact that there is unlikely
to be an eastern separation barrier between the valley and the
hilly areas of the central West Bank adds weight to the idea
that Sharon will give up parts of the Jordan River Valley.
In essence, Ariel Sharon proposes an undeclared waiting
game with Jordan. He assumes that Israeli withdrawals will put
Israel in pole position for such a game, in which Jordan’s
dependence on the international community for economic aid
makes it vulnerable. He further assumes that the national
resolve of Palestinians and Jordanians is weaker than that of
the Jewish people. This last assumption may be somewhat naïve;
Jordanian nationalists are determined to preserve a distinct
entity and have actively been doing so since 1988.[30]
Similarly, Palestinians continue to be committed to the
two-state outcome and a Palestinian state. Misguided
assumptions about one’s opponents are an inherent flaw of
unilateral games -- as F. W. de Klerk can testify.
A managed
transition might take on a life of its own. Writing before the
current uprising, however, Palestinian intellectual Salim
Tamari perceptively suggested that the “conditions that will
arise from a truncated state will also compel Palestinians to
rethink the pan-Arab component of their culture” and make the
binational idea “increasingly of greater relevance to
Palestine’s relationship with Jordan, than its relationship
with Israel.”[31]
Tamari raises a provocative issue.
Ironically, it might well be that the bubbling binational
discourse -- which focuses on Israel-Palestine, not Jordan --
inadvertently serves Sharon’s agenda. On the one hand, it
undermines the hegemony of the two-state solution as
understood by the Zionist left, Palestinians and much of the
international community. Moreover, a progressive-led debate on
Israeli-Palestinian binationalism creates important space to
consider the alternative binational option. It might well be
easier to forge a domestic Israeli consensus around such an
agenda. The Zionist left has traditionally supported this
position. In March 1990, Shimon Peres lamented that the
Likud’s efforts to stymie the Jordan option would “open the
door to the Palestinians, the PLO and Arafat.”[32] For the likes of Peres, for whom the
two-state solution is a means to an end -- securing a
Jewish-majority democracy in Israel -- yet another political
U-turn would be no problem. Perhaps this explains why Peres
gleefully cooperates with Sharon in government. On the right,
elements of the settler movement and the Likud support a
variant of the idea.
When the time comes, a limited
Palestinian entity linked to Jordan could quite easily be
repackaged as a natural extension of former Prime Minister
Menachem Begin’s plan to grant the Palestinians wide-ranging
autonomy on civil matters, yet leave Israel in control of West
Bank and Gaza. The repackaged Palestinian state and a
subsequent Jordanian-Palestinian union could well emerge as
the common denominator for the Zionist
movement.
[1] Ari Shavit, “Year of Truth,”
Haaretz, December 30, 2004.
[2] Haaretz, July 21, 2004.
[3] Avi Shlaim, “Ariel Sharon’s War Against the
Palestinians,” Logos 3/3 (Summer 2004).
[4] Quoted in Colin Shindler, The Land
Beyond Promise: Israel, the Likud and the Zionist Dream
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 285.
[5] Haaretz, July 13, 2004.
[6] Haaretz, December 31,
2004.
[7] Haaretz, April 13,
2004.
[8] Ari Shavit, “The Big Freeze,”
Haaretz, October 8, 2004.
[9] Jerusalem Post, September 9, 2004;
Yediot Aharonot, April 5, 2004; Haaretz, April
5, 2004; Haaretz, April 13, 2004; Haaretz, June
7, 2004.
[10] Jerusalem Post, May 5,
2004.
[11] Jerusalem Post, January 6,
2005.
[12] Jerusalem Post, December 31,
2004.
[13] Ben Kaspit, “Sharon’s Plan,”
Ma’ariv, December 5, 2003.
[14] Jerusalem Post, November 25,
2004.
[15] Makor Rishon, May 14,
2004.
[16] Azmi Bishara, “Palestinian State as
Israeli Demand,” al-Ahram Weekly, December 23-29,
2004.
[17] Ari Shavit, “Apocalypse Now,”
Haaretz, January 28, 2005.
[18] Jerusalem Post, June 7,
2004.
[19] Haaretz, April 13,
2004.
[20] Aluf Benn, “Demographic Politics,”
Haaretz, February 2, 2004.
[21] Uzi Benziman, Sharon, An Israeli
Caesar (New York: Adama Books, 1985), p. 131.
[22] Makor Rishon, May 14,
2004.
[23] Gideon Levy, “Don’t Disengage,”
Haaretz, April 18, 2004.
[24] Bret Stephens, “Toilets in the Sand,”
Jerusalem Post, September 3, 2004.
[25] David Held, Political Theory and the
Modern State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1989), p. 225.
[26] Joseph Strayer quoted in Ian Lustick,
Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland,
France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank (Ithaca,
1993), p. 38.
[27] Benziman, pp. 191, 259.
[28] Washington Post, January 30, 2004.
[29] Haaretz, June 4,
2004.
[30] Marc Lynch, “No Jordan Option,” Middle
East Report Online, June 21, 2004.
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero062104.html.
[31] Salim Tamari, “The Dubious Lure of
Binationalism,” Journal of Palestine Studies
30/1 (Autumn 2000).
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