Swap Meet

, formerly the Mossad's director of intelligence and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyhu's foreign policy adviser, is the founding director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, which is part of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.For 70 years, efforts to devise a fair and durable solution to the Israeli- Palestinian dispute have centered on the question of how to partition the land between the two peoples. There have always been maximalists who wanted dominion over the entire area. But, over the years--from the Peel and United Nations commissions in the 1930s and 1940s to the Oslo process and the road map in the last decade--partition, or a "two-state solution," has become the internationally accepted key to the dispute's resolution. This guiding principle has received additional support in the wake of the second intifada, whose violent attacks have disabused many Israelis of the idea that they can co- exist with the Palestinians in a single state. Only some Palestinians and their hard-core supporters in Europe and the United States retain maximalist tendencies. The natural growth rates of the Palestinian population (almost double those of the Jews) spurred Palestinian support for a one-state solution--a secular democratic state, dominated by the Palestinians because of their sheer numbers, with Jews as a minority. But this will not happen. The legitimacy of a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority, has been supported by the international community for almost 100 years, and Israel will fight to preserve its existence as such. It is precisely to maintain its Jewish and democratic character that Israel is willing to withdraw from more than 90 percent of the West Bank, despite the security interests that warrant keeping those areas, as well as the profound attachment that Israelis have to these parts of their patrimony. Today, most Israelis and the international community back the two-state solution. The necessity--in fact, the inevitability--of partition has drawn its strength from the observable fact that both the Jewish and the Palestinian societies are bent on exercising as well as advancing their distinct identities to the point of national self-determination. Embedded in the partition concept, therefore, is the cultural and ethnic divide between the two peoples. By now, even most Palestinians--who, in previous decades, rejected a two-state solution- -have recently come to accept the formula. During the last decades, plans for implementing partition have given rise to the mechanism of land swaps, meaning the exchange of sovereignty over territories without the physical transfer of populations. All land-swap plans use the 1949 armistice lines--which divided the British Mandate territories west of the Jordan River between Israel and the Arabs--as a starting point. Their appeal lies in demographic developments that have created settlements that are nearly uni-ethnic. Geographically, these blocs are situated in such a way that they could be attached either to Israel or to a Palestinian state. The various land swap plans proposing a tradeoff of territories aim to increase ethnic homogeneity and to preserve each side's basic territorial reach. In this context, land swaps allow an exchange of sovereignty over contiguous population blocs--Jewish population blocs in the West Bank proximate to the armistice line and Arab population blocs west and north of the armistice line. For example, the Gush Etzion and Ariel blocs and towns in the Jerusalem district could be exchanged for the towns and surroundings of Umm El Fahm, Arara, Bartaa, Qalansuwa, Taybe, Tira, and Kfar Kassem. A land-swap plan must be part of a final status agreement between Palestine and Israel. Indeed, it appears that, without such territorial exchanges, a final agreement may not be reachable. Among the geographers and demographers who have put forward various proposals for land swaps is Professor Gideon Biger of Tel Aviv University. In 1996, Biger proposed creating two states--one wholly Jewish, the other wholly Arab--by annexing to the Palestinian state the "triangle area" from Kfar Kassem in the south to Bartaa in the north, along with their populations. In return, the Palestinians would transfer to Israel some areas in the Jordan Valley. Biger also considered population transfers without land exchanges, allowing Jews in the West Bank to resettle in Israel in return for Israeli Arabs and Bedouins living in the Galilee and Negev to settle in Palestine. The most outspoken Israeli advocate of land exchanges has been Haifa University's Arnon Soffer. Like Biger, Soffer proposed that, as part of a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, 450,000 Arabs now living under Israeli sovereignty--particularly the Arabs of East Jerusalem and the Arabs of the "triangle"--be placed under Palestinian sovereignty without having to leave their homes. Of course, for Israelis, an important gauge of a land swap's utility is its demographic impact. In 2003, Sergio Della Pergola of Hebrew University advocated Soffer's idea after calculating its likely long-term effect on the Jews' majority in Israel. According to his study, even after Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza, Jews would comprise 79 percent of the population in 2010, 77 percent in 2020, and 74 percent in 2050. In other words, Israel would retain a solid yet receding Jewish majority well into the second half of this century. But, by performing Soffer's land swap, the Jewish majority would remain at 81 percent until 2050. In other words, the land swap has great potential to preserve Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state well into the latter half of this century. The concept of territorial exchange as a basis for a viable, long-lasting settlement has essentially become consensual in Israel, at times explicitly and at times implicitly. This is true across the Israeli political spectrum--left, center, and right--with the exclusion of anti-Zionist groups. It should therefore be no surprise that senior politicians like former Minister of Infrastructure Avigdor Lieberman (from the political right) and former Minister of Transportation Ephraim Sneh (from the left) both endorse these proposals. Retired Admiral Ami Ayalon, former head of the Israeli Security Agency, claimed that a six-point program he negotiated with Palestinian Professor Sari Nusseibeh contains the kind of flexibility that would allow for mutually agreed land exchanges of the kind proposed above. In a less explicit and public manner, both Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his predecessor, Ehud Barak, seriously examined this option but probably deferred their explicit support for the negotiating process. Land swaps have become an imperative element in almost every final status proposal. In December 2000, for example, President Bill Clinton set forth what is widely considered the most authoritative set of principles for a future bilateral partition between Israel and Palestine. He said that the Palestinian state should include somewhere between 94 and 96 percent of the West Bank, with a land swap of 1 to 3 percent and other territorial arrangements to compensate for the land Israel would annex for its settlement blocs. Clinton also said that any deal should allow Israel to annex 80 percent of Jewish West Bank settlers in blocs, preserve territorial contiguity for both sides, and minimize the number of affected Palestinians. Some Palestinians believe that such a land swap would have meaningful benefits for them: They would receive Arab Jerusalem and could resettle refugees closer to their native land. Members of the Palestinian Authority have been open to the possibility of a deal along such lines, arguing privately that it should be part of a final-status agreement. They believe that, if such a package were to be accompanied by adequate economic incentives, it would become a plausible option. But not all Palestinians currently living in Israel (the Israeli Arabs) want to be in Palestine--an objection that presents a serious moral challenge. Public opinion polls in Israel's Arab community show that only about one-third support land swaps and that most Israeli Arab leaders oppose the idea. Some polls appearing in the Israeli-Arab press suggested that the majority of Israeli Arabs would like to see Israel alter its constitutional foundations and evolve into a binational state, erasing most of its Jewish character. This sentiment is particularly strong in those towns destined for exchange under the land-swap proposal. Recent surveys have shown that almost half of the Arab Israeli residents in those areas oppose Israel's continued existence as a Jewish and democratic state, and a significant number of them espouse fiercely radical Islamic ideology. Given this kind of pronounced Palestinian nationalism and the deep ideological, religious, and political alienation from Israel, territorial exchanges would not only achieve greater ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the two states, but they would also enhance their political stability. Proud Palestinian nationalists now living in Israel could manifest their identity as citizens of their own state. Some counter that Israeli Arabs would prefer the democratic virtues of the Jewish state to Palestine. But one should not ignore the trend toward democracy in the Palestinian territories. In fact, the world community has made clear that Palestinian statehood should be bestowed only when the state is viably democratic. Others argue that, faced with the possibility of economic hardship under Palestinian sovereignty, Israeli Arabs would invoke their Israeli citizenship and relocate to the Jewish state. That argument cynically assumes that economic benefits would lead Arabs, who so frequently and vociferously express a deep attachment to their native towns and villages, to cavalierly pack up and move to predominantly Jewish areas. Moreover, it would undercut the Arab argument for refugees' "right of return." Any land swap would likely allow Israeli Arabs assuming Palestinian sovereignty to keep whatever social welfare benefits they had as Israeli citizens, and compensation would probably be offered to offset the costs of the transition. Thus, there might actually be an economic disadvantage to staying in Israel. At present, Israeli Arabs are exempted from military or national service--a substantial economic benefit. Following a final status agreement, however, Israel is much more likely to insist that all its citizens genuinely enjoy and fulfill the state's rights and obligations, including military service. In addition to the bilateral land-swap plans, another plan calls for multilateral land swaps between Israel, the Palestinians, and Egypt. Hebrew University's former rector, the geographer Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, has proposed that Israel transfer to Egypt some 200 to 500 square kilometers in the Negev contiguous to the Sinai Peninsula, along with a corridor across the Negev, creating a land bridge between Egypt and Jordan. In return, Egypt would transfer to the Palestinians an area twice the size of the northern Sinai, contiguous to the Gaza strip, significantly increasing the territory of one of the most densely populated areas in the world. In turn, the Palestinians would agree to Israeli sovereignty over areas in the West Bank of commensurate magnitude. The latter would include not only the contiguous Jerusalem neighborhoods and settlement blocs, but also additional territory with no Palestinian inhabitants along the Jordan River, on nature reserves in the Judean desert, and on the Dead Sea shore. The primary advantage of this wider land-swap deal is that it would enhance the economic and social viability of the Gaza Strip and allow Israel to keep a greater portion of the West Bank. Palestinians and Israelis would benefit significantly from such an exchange. Senior American, European, and Middle Eastern officials have all expressed interest in the idea, though Egypt has indicated that it is not yet ready to consider this proposal. A final settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute still requires much work and will take some time. By then, hopefully, Egypt will embrace such flexibility, which would greatly benefit the Palestinians and further its own quest for regional power. It is therefore now--when people are looking beyond the disengagement plan and when much thought is being given to where this process should lead--that a land swap conceding Palestinian towns contiguous to the West Bank to the future Palestinian state should be given serious consideration. Whether in their bilateral forms or their expanded multilateral forms, the land-swap formulas should no longer be dealt with as though they were the hidden agenda of one party or the semi-official plan of another; rather, they should be treated as an operational option whose time has come.

By uzi arad