In December, Sky News’ Mark Austin conducted a revealing interview with the Israeli ambassador in the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely. Austin asked Hotovely whether Israel’s conception of a settlement with the Palestinians included a two-state solution. After bobbing and weaving to avoid an answer, Hotovely finally said, “[T]he Oslo paradigm failed on the seventh of October, and we need to build a new one.” When Austin pressed her again about whether Israel would accept a Palestinian state, Hotovely blurted out, “the answer is absolutely no …”
As one looks at Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank today, one thing is certain. The right-wing and settler parties in the government, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have no intention of accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and even the more centrist parties are not pushing Israel in that direction. In other words, Israelis, in their majority, appear to oppose a two-state solution, reject a one-state solution, and overall offer no realistic compromise that can remotely interest their Palestinian interlocutors.
However, to put this at the door of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, not to mention the extreme para-fascist nationalist religious groups with whom he has formed his government, would be a mistake. The Israeli left has played a major role in establishing the conceptual framework for the occupation today, which was initially expressed in the Allon Plan, the first version of which was presented to the Israeli cabinet on July 26, 1967. When mentioning a “new paradigm,” this is perhaps what Hotovely was thinking about—either that, or the alternative of creating conditions to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population in the occupied territories.
William W. Harris, a political geographer from New Zealand, wrote an excellent book on Israel’s post-1967 settlement project, titled Taking Root: Israeli Settlement in the West Bank, the Golan, and Gaza–Sinai, 1967–1980. In it, Harris outlines the main highlights of the Allon Plan, named for Yigal Allon, Israel’s labor minister in the government of prime minister Levi Eshkol. Harris describes the plan as being “of great significance because, without ever being formally accepted, it gradually became the territorial and ideological base for large-scale official settlement program[s] in the occupied territories, continuing in this role for almost a decade.”
One could dispute Harris’ claim that the Allon Plan only remained influential for almost a decade. In many regards its rationale lasted well beyond that, and indeed continues to prevail today. The plan was built around a simple principle that “Israel must retain direct rule over parts of the occupied territories which conferred clear strategic advantages and, to buttress her bargaining power with regard to such regions, she must go beyond setting up military sites and immediately implement a comprehensive policy of Jewish colonization.”
Harris went on to explain that “[c]entral to Allon’s plan was the concept of a territorial compromise to maximize Israel’s security while minimizing additions to Israel’s Arab minority.” This would be done by creating areas of Arab autonomy in the northern and southern West Bank, “perhaps with confederal links to Jordan and/or Israel,” while Israel retained control over the Jordan Rift Valley, adding strategic depth to the 1948 state. In other words, the plan granted Palestinians autonomy, at most, perhaps within a Hashemite or Israeli framework, without any recognition of Palestinian national rights.
It was this thinking that was behind prime minister Menachem Begin’s autonomy plan of December 1977, in which the inhabitants of the occupied territories would elect an Administrative Council to govern themselves in a wide range of domains, while security and public order would remain under Israel’s control. The plan departed from Allon’s aim of minimizing the Arab population in Israel by proposing that “[r]esidents of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza district, without distinction of citizenship, including stateless residents, will be granted free choice of either Israeli or Jordanian citizenship.” If Arab citizens of the West Bank chose to become Israeli, they could buy land and settle inside Israel.
The Palestinians rejected the Begin plan, not least because it failed to recognize their national rights and placed the Administrative Council under the authority of Israel, which could dissolve the body when it wanted. The plan also green-lighted a project to build new settlements in the West Bank, noting that “Israel stands by its right and its claim of sovereignty to Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district. In the knowledge that other claims exist, it proposes, for the sake of the agreement and the peace, that the question of sovereignty in these areas be left open.” However, given the fact that Israel would settle these areas without restriction, and would control security, its claims of sovereignty were always likely to prevail. Indeed, in announcing his plan, Begin made it clear which outcome he foresaw, when he stated, “We have a right and a demand for sovereignty over these areas of Eretz Yisrael. This is our land and it belongs to the Jewish nation rightfully.”
While Begin’s plan strayed away from the Allon Plan in some ways, fundamentally it was based on the same foundations: autonomy for the Palestinian population under the political and security oversight of Israel, without a recognition of their national rights, let alone sovereignty, accompanied by Israeli settlement of occupied Arab land, which is illegal under international law. This was reiterated in the Camp David Accords of September 1978, which presented a plan for Palestinian self-government in the occupied territories for a transitional period of three to five years, after which the final status of the occupied territories would be discussed.
It’s worth remembering that Camp David introduced a key antecedent that still prevails in diplomatic thinking on the Palestinian-Israeli question. It is that the final outcome of Arab-Israeli peace talks must be negotiated between the parties, not set beforehand. Why is this relevant? In part, because in February 1972 the Nixon administration conceded that Israel need not commit itself to a full withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 as part of any interim agreement with the Arabs. So, Israelis entered negotiations with the Arabs during the 1990s without having to accept any outcome with which they disagreed, an approach that underpinned Israel’s interpretation of the Oslo Accords.
Israel’s continuation of the settlement process during the post-Oslo period only confirmed that they expected to remain in large parts of the West Bank, while there were delays in moving to the final-status talks encompassed by the accords. When they eventually did take place, at Camp David in July 2000, they failed. While president Bill Clinton blamed Yasser Arafat for this, other participants in the summit, including Clinton advisor Robert Malley, disagreed and, in a much-publicized article written with Hussein Agha for the New York Review of Books in 2001, the authors argued that Arafat couldn’t have rejected an offer from his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak, as nothing clear had been put on the table:
The final and largely unnoticed consequence of Barak’s approach is that, strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer. Determined to preserve Israel’s position in the event of failure, and resolved not to let the Palestinians take advantage of one-sided compromises, the Israelis always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal. The ideas put forward at Camp David were never stated in writing, but orally conveyed. They generally were presented as [U.S.] concepts, not Israeli ones; indeed, despite having demanded the opportunity to negotiate face to face with Arafat, Barak refused to hold any substantive meeting with him at Camp David out of fear that the Palestinian leader would seek to put Israeli concessions on the record.
Part of Barak’s problem, it might be said, was that he was wary about ending the stranglehold of the Allon Plan. Ultimately, prime minister Ehud Olmert accepted what, at first glance, seemed to be a significant variation on the Allon Plan in September 2008. He offered to concede almost 94 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians, even if three major settlement blocs—Gush Etzion, Ma’ale Adumim, and Ariel (located in the southern half of the West Bank, in a large area east of Jerusalem, and north of Ramallah in the northern half of the West Bank, respectively)—would have been annexed to Israel. While Olmert and the then U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, saw the offer as very generous, what they didn’t mention is that the Palestinians saw major shortcomings in the scheme.
For starters, it offered at best a restricted form of Palestinian sovereignty. The Palestinian state could have no army or air force. Nor could it control its border with Jordan, which would be patrolled by international forces, perhaps from NATO. Israel would have the right to defend itself across the border in Palestine, pursue its foes inside Palestinian territory, and would have access to Palestinian airspace. Similarly, there would be no recognized right of return for Palestinians, except for around 1,000 refugees a year for five years. Olmert offered the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, a nonnegotiable map for him to sign, and not surprisingly Abbas, who must have seen this as an ambush, refused to accept.
While Olmert seemed to be moving away from the Allon Plan, the logic was not so very different. The annexed settlements were large Israeli-controlled geographical nodes in the West Bank that presented obvious strategic advantages for the Israeli military. The plan would have also, borrowing from Harris, sought a “territorial compromise to maximize Israel’s security while minimizing additions to Israel’s Arab minority.” And even if foreign forces “patrolled” the Jordan Valley, this meant nothing in terms of who retained sovereignty there. Israel would have continued to regard the valley as its first line of defense to the east, and its latitude to cross the border into Palestine and fly its military aircraft into Palestinian airspace would have provided a legal basis for its interventions.
So, the Allon Plan still remains at the heart of much Israeli thinking about the West Bank, even today. What many Israelis seem to want is a Palestinian population that accepts a state without the sovereign attributes of a state; that accepts a Jewish settlement presence in their midst that can double as a security presence; that concedes to Israel major instruments of control over Palestine and Palestinians; and that seeks to bury the refugee issue once and for all.
In light of this, the differences between Olmert, who offered an aborted state, and Menachem Begin or Netanyahu, who rejected or reject the very notion of a Palestinian state, are not great. And they aren’t because the Allon Plan’s parameters are flexible enough to offer some form of autonomy or minimal statehood. Ultimately, the plan also presents a compromise that can unite the Israeli left and right, so just as the right accepted its tenets after it was initially formulated by the left, the plan’s substance may ultimately end up drawing in Israeli extremists, whose proposals offer no viable solutions that are worth considering.
