Former NSC head proposes land swap with Egyptian and Jordanian control of West Bank.
By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER, WASHINGTONeiland cropped 224.88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council, warned in a new report that the current formulation of the two-state solution is untenable.
"Israel and the Palestinians do not truly desire the conventional two-state solution, and the Arab world - especially Jordan and Egypt - does not truly support it either," he wrote in his paper, which he presented at a Washington Institute for Near East Policy conference this weekend, and was set to discuss at a WINEP event Tuesday.
"Contrary to other disputes - where the devil is usually in the details - here the devil is more in the concept."
He assessed that the maximum that Israel is politically able to give is less than the Palestinians are politically able to accept, asking, "What is the basis for believing that now we can resume the same negotiations and be more successful?"
He challenged conventional wisdom that previous negotiations, and particularly the Clinton parameters for Israeli and Palestinian states worked out at the end of former US president Bill Clinton's term, came close to ending the core disagreements and only needed minor adjustments to present a resolution.
"It's a solution that not only can't be agreed on, but probably can't be implemented," he charged, referring to the challenges in evacuating and relocating so many Israeli settlers as well as the security environment, among other concerns.
Instead, Eiland proposed two dramatic formulations to deal with some of the problems in the current framework.
For starters, he suggested that Egypt give the Palestinians 600 square kilometers of land from the Sinai peninsula to double the size of the Gaza Strip, so that the cramped million-plus population will have room to spread out and develop.
In exchange, Egypt would be given a comparable sliver of land along the Negev border with Israel as well as a tunnel connecting Egypt and Jordan directly under Israel's southern tip.
He also proposed Jordanian security control for the West Bank, since a major obstacle for Israel has become the rise of Hamas and the concern that any Palestinian state in the West Bank would be taken over by the radical Islamic group.
Israel, he argued, needs the security of having a proper armed force in the area, with Jordan being the obvious choice because it has a vested interest in making sure extremists don't get a toehold in the West Bank from which they can threaten Jordan.
"Moderate states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia seem more willing than ever to be proactively involved in the peace process," he wrote in his report, suggesting that they take steps to make good on that posture.
But Eiland noted that their cooperation on these points might prove difficult, referring in his report to the Jordanian presence as "not yet politically correct," but said that "tacit support for this idea has been expressed in private talks."
Jordanians at the weekend conference, however, categorically ruled out Eiland's proposal.
"Good luck finding Jordanians who will accept this idea," said former Jordanian foreign minister Marwan Muasher, Eiland's co-panelist Saturday. "This is a non-starter."
And Samia Kabariti, a Jordanian diplomatic official present at the event, stood up to strongly denounce Eiland's suggestion.
"The Jordanian option is not an option," she declared.
Analysts have pointed out that Jordanians don't want to be in control of a potentially hostile Palestinian population any more than Israelis do, and that such control could prove destabilizing to a regime with a large Palestinian constituency ruled by a Hashemite monarch.
Muasher instead proposed that Israel revisit the Arab peace initiative, which he himself helped draft. The 2002 initiative, which received a cold reception in Israel, calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from all territories taken in the Six Day War, including east Jerusalem, in exchange for normal ties with the Arab world. It also calls for an agreed-upon return to Israel of Palestinian refugees.
"Israel's response to the Arab peace initiative was not the right thing," Eiland acknowledged. "It's better to say, 'Yes, but...'"
At the same time, he said, in asking Israel to accept a return to the 1967 borders, the initiative hadn't made any accommodation for the experiences of Israel during the past four decades or the current realities it faces.
One point of agreement between the two speakers was that time was not on the side of the moderates.
Muasher said that he was now against a gradual process of small steps.
"The time that we thought we were giving to proponents of peace so that they could build trust," he said, "we have given to the opponents of peace."
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