How can the Israelis and the Palestinians come to a fair and peaceful settlement? One is reminded of the old joke: however they get there, they shouldn't start from here.
Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, the question has taken the form: what is to be done with the Palestinians? Nobody has ever come up with a satisfactory answer. Bernard Wasserstein, a professor of history at Glasgow University, quotes the Zionist leader Leonard Stein, writing in 1937 about the the British Royal Commission's proposal to 'transfer' Palestinian Arabs into Transjordan.
'If it is not carried out rapidly and on a large scale, it will leave the Jewish State with a minority problem of the most formidable dimensions. If it is…, the odium attaching to the swift and wholesale evacuation of Arab peasants from their homes will fall mainly on the Jews, with results which will be embarrassing not only to the Jewish State itself, but to Jews in other parts of the world.'
In the event, Israel has faced both problems throughout its existence. Now more than ever, Israel is regarded with odium by much of the world. The Sharon administration's brutal repression of the Palestinians has made Zionism a dirty word. Interestingly though, Wasserstein shows that the doctrine has not been particularly important to the history of Israel. It is a rationalisation after the event, justifying the peculiar form of the Jewish State, rather than the mere presence of the Jews.
Historically, most Jews arrived in Israel, whether from Europe in the thirties or the former Soviet Union in the nineties, because they had nowhere else to go. And the bulk of Jewish settlement even in the occupied territories is not so much ideologically-motivated colonisation as commercially-driven suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, great swathes of Israel proper are underpopulated.
Accordingly, the interests of Israeli Jews are far from identical with those of Zionism or the Israeli state. Indeed, the simplest way for Jews to live wherever they want would be to abandon the Jewishness of the state. Wasserstein shows that the demography is inescapable. Inasmuch as it is committed to retaining a Jewish majority, Israel not only cannot expand. It must retreat.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip offers an easy territorial compromise. There is a substantial consensus, outside Israel-Palestine at least, that the basis of any solution should be Israeli withdrawal to its 1967 borders. Of course if Israel also occupied Jordan, as revisionist Zionists have sometimes demanded, such a 'compromise' might give Israel all of the currently occupied territories. Given the uneven nature of the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, a territorial compromise is no compromise at all.
Nonetheless, some sort of two-state solution is currently envisaged. Wasserstein asks what form this might take, and what barriers exist. Most crucially, Israel's dependence on Palestinian labour means that the physical separation of Israel from a Palestinian state by means of a fortified wall, which has been proposed by some Israelis, is not workable. Instead there would have to be a 'porous' border, allowing for economic interaction, but leaving the question of sovereignty hopelessly fudged.
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