Source: The Financial Times
Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, has proposed the "unilateral separation" of Israelis and Palestinians by Israel - in effect, a partition of the West Bank. As he conceives it, this would be achieved over the next three to four years. It would leave the great majority of Israeli settlements and settlers in Israeli hands, together with the Jordan Valley and the roads linking Jordan to Israel proper.
A massive security fence, with only extremely limited possibilities for crossing, would indefinitely separate this enlarged Israel from the residual Palestinian-ruled territories. Only in this way, Mr Barak and others argue, can Israelis secure themselves against terror bombings without having to maintain direct control over the Palestinian territories.
That Mr Barak is now advocating such a plan is a sign not only of the fury even moderate Israelis feel over the wave of suicide bombings but also the scepticism many feel over whether the present ferocious Israeli military campaign will curb terror in the long run.
While superficially attractive, this plan is in fact a counsel of despair, and a sign of the decay of the Israeli Left in the face of Prime minister Ariel Sharon's hardline chauvinism. What would be seen by Arabs as the de facto annexation of more Arab land would make the normalisation of relations with the Arab world impossible.
Equally important, it would do nothing to ensure Israel's long-term security. By splitting the Palestinian territories into several different reservations, with no access either to the outside world or to Israeli markets (particularly for labour), it would doom the Palestinians to deep and permanent impoverishment and the most intense national frustration. That would only give the Palestinians the incentive to seek new and even more destructive forms of terrorism, at which point the entire Israeli dilemma would repeat itself.
Furthermore, the planned "fence", with its tortuous loops to include the settlements and the Jordan Valley, would be the antithesis of a clean and effective partition, particularly from a security point of view.
This thinking reflects the chronic inability of Israel to choose between different, incompatible desires. Some Israelis still want to make peace with the Arab world and support the establishment of a Palestinian government capable of improving the economic lot of its people and of controlling terrorism and extremism on its territory. Yet these wishes are permanently blocked by others: to maintain the maximum possible number of Israeli settlements and to maintain Israeli control of Palestine's external borders.
This is understandable enough in terms of past Israeli experience of attack, and particularly in view of the firestorm of opposition that any significant withdrawal of settlements would cause among Israeli hardliners - a factor that cost Yitzhak Rabin his life. It is argued that this opposition can only be limited by guaranteeing permanent and absolute Israeli domination in the security field, and by making territorial concessions only gradually and as long as complete peace prevails on the ground.
This is a critical error. The result is that the Palestinian leadership, let alone ordinary Palestinians, has never been given enough of a real, immediate stake in the new deal to make it committed to maintaining the agreement.
Another essential part of any peace settlement is that the majority of the Palestinian refugees and their descendants must give up their "right of return" to Israel. For a Palestinian leadership to force its people to accept such a painful concession, it must be given full statehood and control of its own national territory.
The only country that can force Israel to face up to the fundamental contradiction in its position is the US; and the US has failed to do so. Successive US administrations have failed to confront the illegality of the settlements and the criminality of the methods used to establish them.
Moreover, with the exception of President Bill Clinton at the end of his period in office, no US administration has ever put forward a clear-cut, detailed public plan for peace. Nor, of course, have any been willing - at least since the administration of George Bush, the former president - to threaten Israel with a reduction of US aid in return for defying US wishes and damaging US vital interests.
The iron grip of pro-Israeli sentiment apparently makes all this impossible. To call this a case of the tail wagging the dog would be inadequate - it is more a case of the tail dragging the dog around the room and banging its head on the wall. Rather than confront this sentiment, the Bush administration would rather expose Colin Powell, its secretary of state, to public humiliation, undermine the war against terrorism and the position of moderate Arab regimes, wreck its own hopes of a successful campaign against Saddam Hussein, damage its alliance with Europe, and push the world closer to a catastrophic "clash of civilisations".
This last prospect is one that some hardline Israelis, and their allies in the US, actively seek to encourage. Not only do they despise Muslims but they seem to reckon that a breakdown of relations between the US and the Muslim world would remove any possibility of US pressure on Israel.
But if the latest Barak plan is a counsel of despair, this is a counsel of madness, not least from Israel's own point of view. The alienation of the Arab world would make future terrorist attacks using weapons of mass destruction very much more likely. This would be bad enough as far as the west is concerned; it could cripple economies and persuade democracies to destroy themselves. But as Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, has argued, for a small country such as Israel it would threaten the actual physical destruction of the state.
A true friend should remind Israel that it is supposed to be a permanent home for the Jewish people, not a temporary military camp on the road to somewhere else; and that no country, however strong, can permanently survive a state of bitter enmity with all its neighbours.
Reprinted with permission from The Financial Times.