Prepare for a Palestinian state BY DAVID NEWMAN
One doesn't need opposition leader Amram Mitzna to tell us that there will eventually be a Palestinian state. After all, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon repeatedly stated this fact in the runup to the Likud party leadership election. It was repeated over the weekend by Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Yehuda Lancry, and again on Sunday by Chief of General Staff Moshe Ya'alon in a private meeting with American government officials in Washington where he made it clear that many of the West Bank settlements will eventually have to be removed.
The Palestinian state is not going to materialize tomorrow but materialize it will; it is finally dawning on Israeli policy makers and the public at large that the establishment of such a state has almost nothing to do with the fight against the terror which is taking place on our streets. That terror will continue well into the next right-wing government's period of office.
If Sharon has understood anything since taking office, it is that we can hit back hard, far harder than they can hit us, but we cannot put a total end to the suicide bombers, even if we destroy their arms factories, the civilian infrastructure and just about everything else which has been under Palestinian Authority control.
Sharon talks about a Palestinian state not just to distance himself from the extreme statements of Binyamin Netanyahu, but because he has mellowed into a realist during the past two years, the sort of realism which comes to almost everyone (even Netanyahu in the past) when he occupies the premiership.
On every one of his numerous visits to the White House, Sharon has been presented with a dual message from President George W. Bush. The one he chooses to publicize is the one which allows him an almost free hand in his use of Israel's military response to the terror attacks. The one which he chooses to put aside, but which is included in almost every single speech made by Bush, states categorically that once the violence and terrorism has died down, there must be an immediate move towards the establishment of a Palestinian state and an end of Israeli occupation.
Those who would try to convince us that a Palestinian state will never be established are removed from the wall-to-wall international opinion, including that of our closest friends and allies. More significantly, they are removed from domestic Israeli public opinion which, while overwhelmingly supporting the hard-line retaliation against the terrorists, increasingly demonstrate their acceptance that the only eventual resolution of the conflict will be the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel.
BUT simply saying the words "Palestinian state" does not provide the panacea to end the conflict as we found out in the post-Oslo years. The debate has to be transformed into a practical one, one which focuses on issues such as the final demarcation of the boundary, the practical (and humane) steps needed to prepare the settlers for evacuation, the nature of demilitarization, the housing and planning blueprints for refugee resettlement, the role of international peacekeeping forces both in preventing future conflict and, more importantly, in creating the civilian institutions of Palestinian statehood in an acceptable fashion, and so on.
But instead of preparing the country and the army for the realities of a Palestinian state, some irresponsible politicians and media pundits are attempting to divert the debate back to the ideological justification of whether such a state should come about in the first place a debate which has become meaningless.
It no longer has anything to do with ideology.Just watch how the support and sympathy for the settler communities will instantly fall away if, and when, there is an agreement on the table which necessitates the evacuation of some, or all, settlements and their failure to peacefully evacuate remains the only major obstacle to implementation of the agreement.
There is a limit to how long we can stand in opposition to the opinion of the entire international community. There is a limit to how long we can continue to control and occupy another people who hate us and see us as colonizers who have to be driven out like other colonial powers of the past. The terror of the past two years has only served to temporarily delay the eventual establishment of the state more to the detriment of the Palestinians themselves than Israel itself.
It is time that our political leaders began a public discourse concerning the daily implications and practicalities of two states existing side by side.
The writer teaches in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is editor of the International Journal of Geopolitics.
