On the eve of the Annapolis Conference, a little grounding in geography is in order. Already, we are told by all concerned to lower expectations ("lower than the Dead Sea," according to a Washington wag). The conference is to last all of one day, and if you think there's going to be much time left for meaningful discussion, after President Bush launches the meeting and each of the fifty or so delegations make their introductory remarks...
No, even the US hosts are stressing the notion of a "launchpad" for further talks, as opposed to negotiations per se. I can already imagine the spin: "The mere fact that delegations from Israel to Syria were gathered here at the same table..." In other words, success is defined by the mere fact of convening the conference, not in any "deliverables" coming out of it. No wonder it was reduced from three days to one.
17 long years ago, Israeli author (and former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem in the Seventies) Meron Benvenisti closed down his West Bank Data Project. For more than twenty years after the Six Day War of June 1967, Benvenisti had meticulously chronicled the steady growth of Israeli encroachment on the Palestinian lands of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza. His maps - showing first a few dots, then dots merging into blobs, then blobs connected by settler-only bypass roads - were essential to any understanding of "the Middle East Peace Process" and what might one day become a Palestinian state.
But Benvenisti threw in the towel in 1989, turning his data over to a university. This is from the New York Times 22 October 1989 article "Hard Facts Daunt Israeli Researcher"
His work is maps and numbers, by and large. But he has an unusual talent for summing up the statistics in catch phrases. He often talked of Israel's ''second republic,'' established after it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and the ''master race democracy.'' By that he meant Israel's present status as a nation with about 3.2 million Jews ruling 750,000 Arabs inside Israel, who can vote but are clearly second-class citizens, and 1.7 million Palestinians in the territories who are subjects of the state. ''Intimate enemies,'' and ''the geography of fear'' were other favorites. But his best known theory he sums up with the word ''irreversibility.'' That is Mr. Benvenisti's thesis that Israelis and Palestinians have grown so interdependent - as employers and employees, buyers and sellers of goods, providers and purchasers of services - that in his view they cannot split. ''The surgicial solution, amputating part of the area'' and giving it to the Arabs, as advocated by Israel's political left, ''is meaningless,'' he says his research has shown. ''Jews and Arabs are living in the same area, but 90 percent of the cultivatable land, 75 percent of the water, and all the infrastructure is geared to support one of those two peoples,'' the Jews. Without access to the Jews' land, water and infrastructure, he argues, no Arab nation could survive - unless it started life with grants in aid amounting to tens of billions of dollars.
Mind you, Benvenisti's work - and the numbers above - date back almost twenty years. That is, before Ariel Sharon's expansion of the settlements (but also his removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza), before Oslo and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, before the rise of Hamas and its victory in parliamentary elections, before the construction of the "security barrier."
Today's facts on the ground are best illustrated by maps, this time thanks to the BBC's excellent "Middle East Crisis" report, especially "Israel and the Palestinians." Actually, even these excellent illustrations give the misleading impression that everything in the West Bank which is not an Israeli settlement is by default under Palestinian control. Not so: PA-administered lands are within "Area A," delineated in the 1993 Oslo agreement. Israeli settlements are just that - basically massive gated communities on steroids, with the Israeli Army guarding the gatehouses. But the rest of the West Bank - the Jordan Valley and its crucial water resources, the strategic heights over which watchposts guard - is under Israeli Army control.
In his 2002 memoir and ode to his peacemaking father, "Strangers in the House," Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts how neighbors would accost him and say "we should have listened to your father twenty five years ago when he counseled making peace with Israel." The elder Shehadeh had vainly called for the establishment of a state of Palestine within the borders of the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip. Shehadeh pere was ostracized by the PLO, which was always holding out for more.
Had the Palestinians in the thirties and forties accepted the reality of a Jewish state, and had Israel's independence been greeted with resignation but not rejection, then Palestine might have kept much of the territory - contiguous, viable territory - promised them in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. It is, of course, an oversimplification to place the failure of Partition solely on the Palestinians; we now know that there was at least as much Israeli "push" as there was Arab "pull" in the exodus of Palestinians from their homes and lands.
Peace, territory, and statehood thrown away in 1948, again after 1967 as recounted by Shehadeh, yet again in holding out for the maximum solution in Camp David in 2000: Palestinians are ill-served by their leadership. In "Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007," by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar (reviewed in The Economist), we see how Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the exiled PLO in Tunis
had no idea how settlements had permeated the West Bank. To the horror of their local advisers, they agreed [in the Oslo accords] to no more than a token constraint on settlement growth. Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who signed Oslo and whom the authors plainly admire for hating settlers almost as much as they do, gets a lashing for presiding during one of their fastest rates of growth and being in a "state of denial" about their influence.
The facts on the ground - settlements, checkpoints, bypass roads, walls - all will make an Israeli-Palestinian accord harder to reach. A viable agreement would be one respected by all major elements of Palestinian and Israeli society. But when the leaders of Hamas - who won the January 2006 parliamentary elections fair and square - are excluded by the US, Israel, and a compliant PLO, it is reasonable to question the legitimacy of any eventual agreement. Yes, it is difficult to deal with Hamas, and yes, their brand of political Islam may be anathema to the other parties. But that is what happens when "freedom reigns" in the Middle East - sometimes the voters, bless them, will choose the "wrong" people. Annapolis, which is only a one-day launch fest, will only get somewhere if it can find a way to bring Hamas into the tent. Otherwise, why waste the effort?
(Maps courtesy the BBC Special Report "Israel and the Palestinians")