Published: 7 May 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In his new book, All of Israel’s Borders, Shaul Arieli calls the limited land swap the “optimum point” by which Palestinians can maintain territorial contiguity and freedom of movement, and Israel can bring as many as 80 per cent of the settlers under its full sovereignty.
Arieli, a retired colonel, oversaw the delineation of the frontier with the Palestinian Authority under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and served as head of the army’s Peace Administration under Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He has published extensively on the geography and history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is considered the foremost expert on Israeli-Palestinian peace maps.
At the book launch on May 1 at Jerusalem’s Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, he surveyed the history of Israeli-Palestinian territorial negotiations. Up to 1988, when the PLO accepted the UN partition plan for the first time, the Palestinian position was steadfast in rejecting Israel on any borders.
Since then, in all negotiation rounds, Palestinian negotiators demanded full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines with minimal land swaps, of no more than 2 per cent of the West Bank territory. The Palestinians based their position on UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967 – which called for “the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” – as well as subsequent UN resolutions.
Israel, for its part, has gradually moved towards the Palestinian position over the years. During the Oslo negotiations in the early 1990s, Rabin envisaged Palestinian self-rule (he never used the term “state”) on no more than 75 per cent of the West Bank and refused to discuss the partition of Jerusalem.
At the Camp David peace talks in 2000, Barak offered the Palestinians a state on 92 per cent of the territory with no land swaps. Ehud Olmert was the first Israeli leader who acknowledged the principle of equal land swaps at the 2007 Annapolis talks, proposing the annexation of 6.5 per cent of the West Bank in return for sovereign Israeli territory handed over to the Palestinians.
But Arieli claims such generous land trading would doom several rural Israeli communities to extinction, communities around the Gaza border and north of Samaria whose agricultural lands would be given over in their entirety to the Palestinian side. The 4 per cent land swap Arieli envisages – following close consultation with local authorities in Israel and the Palestinian territories – is viable and palatable to all sides.
Arieli’s map would entail the dismantling of Ariel, a settlement of 20,000 21 kilometres beyond the internationally recognised Green Line, which Olmert had insisted on annexing to Israel.
“For the first time in history, settlements – rather than the outcome of war – will determine Israel’s eastern border,” Arieli said at the book launch.
During the previous Knesset sitting, several right-wing coalition members, including Bezalel Smotrich (United Right), Yoav Kish (Likud) and Sharren Haskel (Likud), have drafted bills calling for a unilateral annexation of all or part of the West Bank to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has thwarted these attempts but may be too weak or simply uninterested in doing so in his next government.
“Forget the 2009 Bar Ilan speech. Netanyahu does not believe in the two-state solution,” Arieli said. “In his next coalition, he may succumb and advance annexation.”
Several Israeli experts, mostly retired senior officers, weighed in on Arieli’s findings at the book launch. Israela Oron, a retired brigadier-general who served as deputy national security adviser under Barak and Ariel Sharon, warned against unilateral Israeli annexation and a one-state outcome.
Annexation could come in the creeping form of increased Israeli construction outside the settlement blocs or legally favoring Israelis living in the West Bank over Palestinians living in the West Bank, or in the more robust form of a law declaring the West Bank part of Israel.
Such a scenario would likely spark widespread Palestinian rioting in the West Bank, which would, in turn, force Israel to physically re-occupy Palestinian cities and impose martial law. The re-occupation of the West Bank, she argued, would bear a heavy cost on Israel financially and diplomatically; the severing of ties with Egypt and Jordan and an annual addition of 52 billion NIS ($15 billion) to Israel’s defence budget. Israelis could expect a decrease of 15-19 per cent in their standard of living.
But more dangerously, Oron said, Israel would be in grave violation of Security Council Resolution 2334 of December 2016, which underscored the illegality of settlements. It could be subjected to international sanctions “similar to those imposed on Iran.”
“To summarise, one state is a dangerous idea,” she said.
Brigadier-General (retired) Shlomo Brom, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and former director of the strategic planning division of the IDF, challenged the concept of “defensible borders,” espoused by Netanyahu to justify an unlimited Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley under any peace deal.
“This notion has become outdated and irrelevant,” Brom said, noting the collapse of neighbouring Arab armies in the Arab Spring had made the notion of a massive tank attack from the east unfathomable in the foreseeable future.
“The conventional war has been replaced by two other types of warfare: ballistic missiles that can fly over borders and guerrilla warfare. In this new reality, there is no need to control the Jordan Valley. True strategic depth is our good relations with Jordan and Egypt, who prevent cross-border infiltration and arms smuggling,” he said.
“The demographic threat of a bi-national state outweighs the conventional threat of war. That is our true strategic threat.”
In a recent op-ed published in the daily, Haaretz, Arieli warned that favouring the territorial goal of Zionism over the need to maintain a Jewish majority within Israel would invariably lead to catastrophe.
“[Annexation] would be an avalanche, the speed and extent of which will be determined by regional and international powers. If Israel chose to initiate it, it would eventually bury the Zionist vision.”
Photo: Shaul Arieli speaks at the launch of his book All of Israel's Borders, Jerusalem, May 1, 2019. Credit: Elhanan Miller
