fugitive peace

Yesterday MediaCentral had a session for some journalists with Giora Eiland (above) and Shlomo Brom, two retired generals, at the INSS, a security thinktank in Tel Aviv. Their topic: “Alternatives to the two-state solution”.

As an inherent pessimist who tends to believe it’s already too late for the two-state solution, I was curious. Eiland, who used to be the national security adviser as well, presented two alternatives.

One was the so-called “Jordan option”, a long-held Israeli wet dream whereby Jordan takes back responsibility for the West Bank (Israel is already edging closer to throwing Gaza back in Egypt’s lap). Jordan washed its hands of the West Bank 20 years ago, which was what led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But Eiland thinks it would sooner take it back than have a Hamas-run Palestinian state emerge on its borders.

Brom, as he made fairly plain, thinks Eiland is nuts.

Eiland also outlined his land-swap plan (which at least one other person I know has independently laid claim to) whereby Egypt gives Gaza an extra 700 sq km, Israel gives Egypt a chunk of the Negev desert and a corridor to Jordan, and the West Bank surrenders a slice with most of the settlements to Israel (see the map above). Eiland thinks Egypt would gladly surrender a bit of the Sinai to Gaza in return for various inducements.

Brom thinks Eiland is nuts on this score too.

Each of them cited various Arab officials (unnamed, of course) as supporting their arguments. Brom rather snidely commented that “every Israeli has his pet Jordanian who tells him what he likes to hear”, but then implied that his own pet Jordanians were both more numerous and more in touch with reality.

For me it was less a sign that one or the other was nuts than an example of just how sensitive one’s ideas about this conflict are to small differences in temperament. Eiland is slightly more rightist and more willing to imagine a scenario in which Palestinian public opinion doesn’t matter that much. Brom’s suggestion - not an alternative to the two-state solution so much as an alternative way to bring it about - was to hold talks with Hamas.

And neither of them was nearly as nuts as some of the audience. One journalist whose affiliation I didn’t catch demanded of Brom how he could claim that the Palestinians are politically divided when they “were all dancing in the streets” to celebrate the downing of the twin towers on 9/11. Maybe she’s been asleep for the past two and a half years.

Another turned out to be Ted Belman of Israpundit, who demanded of Brom why, if Egypt could give up some of the Sinai to Gaza, it shouldn’t just give up a bigger chunk so Israel could keep all the West Bank. This is clearly someone who takes the claim that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” quite literally.

He notes on his blog, apparently without irony, that keeping the West Bank “was two (sic) absurd to even discuss.”

Still, I can be as huffy as I like from my lofty position of “neutrality”. People like Belman are the future. After the presentation I popped in to see an Israeli journalist friend and we talked about how the bottom is falling out of the newspaper business. In three or four years, he said, the paid newspaper columnist in Israel will be almost gone as a profession. Bloggers do the job just as well, and for free. And to a lot of their readers, the more outrageously biased they are, the better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under land, peace.