The Obvious Solution

Everyone I asked about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, regardless of their biases, said it was a complicated situation.

``No it isn't," I'd reply. ``There is a very simple solution." Then I would outline it, and they would agree that that was a solution, regardless of their biases.

The solution is based on the principles that everyone has a right to live in and be a citizen of the country of his or her birth, and that no one individual has the right to say what the government of that country will be; it must be decided by the whole.

The solution has seven parts:

1. A return to the 1967 boundaries, with an independent Palestinian state comprised of the West Bank and Gaza. History matters, and a perception of fairness is essential. If Israel tries to keep more than that, it will not be perceived as fair, and there can be no end to Palestinian resistance/terrorism.

2. The old city of Jerusalem would be put under international jurisdiction, or joint jurisdiction of Israel and Palestine, or under the United Nations, or under the Pope. The talks in 2000 mentioned putting it under the jurisdiction of God, and that's as good a solution as any. Israel could assure the security of and access to the Western Wall, and the Palestinians could assure the security of and access to Al-Aqsa Mosque.

3. The settlers in the West Bank and Gaza can return to Israel or they can remain in Palestine. But if they remain in Palestine, they will be Palestinian and not Israeli citizens, with all the rights and responsibilities of other Palestinian citizens. Probably few settlers would want to remain under those conditions. For those who do, however, Palestinian willingness to accept them as a minority would go a long way toward alleviating the Israeli feeling that the Palestinians will tolerate no Jews at all in their midst.

4. Share the water on a per capita basis. If this is not enough for Israel's more advanced economy, they can buy water from Palestine, thus improving Palestine's economy.

5. Palestinian refugees everywhere will be given the option of becoming citizens of the country they currently reside in, or they will be allowed to come to Palestine, that is, the West Bank or Gaza. Many, such as most of the Palestinians in Jordan, will choose to remain in the country of their current residence. See below for one glitch in this part of the plan.

6. The ``Right of Return": There are two rights of return--the right of Palestinians to return to their family homes, now in the state of Israel, and the right of Jews everywhere to return to their ancestral homeland of Israel. Balance these two rights on a one-for-one basis. In order to admit one Jew from elsewhere in the world, Israel must also admit one Palestinian refugee. To keep the number of Palestinian immigrants down, Israel would also have to suppress the number of Jewish immigrants. This constraint gives Israel a motivation to allow Palestinians to return. It creates no real hardships for Jews elsewhere in the world, because since the massive immigration of Russian Jews to Israel in the 1990s, there are no longer any large reservoirs of persecuted Jews anywhere in the world. The fundamentally Jewish character of Israel would be preserved.

7. Security: Relations between Israel and her neighbors would be normalized. Palestine would be demilitarized except for token forces required to maintain order. If a crime is committed by a Palestinian against an Israeli target, Israeli police will have full access to the investigation and prosecution of the crime. And vice versa. This would cover acts of terrorism.

This plan would put an end to the general Palestinian belief that terrorist acts are a legitimate form of resistance, because it would be perceived on all sides as fair. There will no doubt still be Israelis who want to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque and rebuild Solomon's Temple in its place, just as there will be Palestinians who want to expel the Israelis entirely from historical Palestine and put it under the rule of a caliph in Mecca with an empire that stretches from Spain to China. But these groups would become marginalized and have no significant support among the general populace, especially as the prosperity of both sides became more and more dependent on the economic links between the two.

I thought this plan was brilliant until I described it to Peter Maxwell, the British aid worker I met in Damascus at breakfast in the Sultan Hotel. He said all these wars are fought over issues that any fifteen-year-old could come up with a constitutional solution for in a few minutes. He gave the example of the first war between the Croatians and the Serbs. Croatia wanted communication between two Croat areas through a majority Serb area. Well, duh! Build a road with universal access. But instead a war broke out over the issue and the formerly majority Serb area is now 3% Serb.

The one glitch with the plan is in Point 5. When I described the plan to my Arabic tutor in Palo Alto, `Ali, a Christian from Lebanon, he said it was impossible for the Palestinian refugees in south Lebanon to become Lebanese citizens. They are all Muslims, so it would upset the delicate balance in that country between the Muslims and Christians.

My conversation with three Israeli hitchhikers I picked up in Cappadocia began with them wishing me, as an American, condolences over the September 11 attacks. I was very sensitive to the way everyone was trying to interpret it all to their own advantage. Falwell blamed the gays. Indians responded by urging the bombing of Pakistan. The president of Yemen said he was all for eliminating ``terrorists and other troublemakers", i.e., his political opponents. Corporate leaders, wondering how they could snag a new generation of defense contracts, asked, ``How can we help our country fight terrorism?" The Israeli response was to equate Bin Laden's terror against America with the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. The Israeli hitchhikers said, ``Now you understand what we have to live with."

``Don't get me started," I said, and then I started. I said the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza are the front line of an invasion, and the Palestinians know that. Of course they fight back. Every nation would. The fact that they engage in suicide bombings is testimony only to the extent to which they are outgunned.

Far from being a security measure for the Israelis, the settlements are a provocation to terrorism.

``They teach their children in their schools to hate the Israelis," the woman in the back said.

``They don't need to. The Israelis do quite well enough at that by themselves. They learn to hate the Israelis when they see their parents humiliated at police checkpoints, when they see their older brothers hauled off to jail, when they see their neighbors' houses bulldozed into rubble."

``You don't understand the Middle East," said the man in the front seat, who was a physics student. ``We left Lebanon, and the Arabs interpreted that as weakness."

I said, ``You left Lebanon because you shouldn't have been there to begin with."

``They started four wars against us."

``The last one was twenty-eight years ago. The wars didn't stop because you occupied the West Bank. In fact, the last war was provoked by that. They stopped because they kept losing. The occupation doesn't change that. You're using a hypothetical evil to justify a real, daily evil."

``I can see we need to try harder to get our message across in the media," the physics student said.

``It's not a public relations problem," I said. ``It's a moral problem. You're occupying someone else's land."

We all tried to stay friendly through all of this, although I think the woman in the back seat was seething. I apologized frequently but then launched into yet another diatribe. One of them tried to wrap up the conversation with ``It's a complicated situation."

I replied that it was not at all complicated, and then I told them the obvious solution. Even they agreed.

``That's what we offered them last year," the woman said. ``And look what we got in return--Intifada Two."

Well, that is not quite what they offered. I've seen the map. Most of the settlements were to remain, and remain under Israeli control. Even in Gaza, where the Israelis have no religious, historical, or economic reason to be, some settlements would remain. Israel got the rivers and the roads. Palestine got the wasteland. The complaint of the Palestinians has been that it would not give them a country, but a loose confederation of bantustans. Imagine if the Chinese took over America and then generously offered to give back everything but the Mississippi River, the interstate highway system, and the states bordering Mexico. That would be the same.

``But then why didn't they negotiate for more?" she asked.

When I let them out, I shook hands with the physics student. The other two hurried off.

In the office of the travel agency in Sanaa I had an intense conversation with the five men there about Israel and Palestine. Early on, I said ``infitada" instead of ``intifada", and they quickly corrected me. I redeemed myself when I recognized ``thania" as ``second" and began referring to it as ``Intifada Thania", as they did.

I described my peace plan to them, and they agreed. They recognized that Israel cannot be driven into the sea; too many people live there now. They saw an Israeli state and a Palestinian state living side by side with the 1967 borders, with lots of economic ties. Adam would like it to be as in the United States; passing from Israel to Palestine would be no more difficult than crossing from California to Arizona. But he said that with current hatreds, that is far in the future.

In Aqaba I ate a dinner of shish tawouk and hommos at the Ash-Shami Restaurant, at a table on their balcony with a cute two-year-old from several tables away toddling up and down the balcony, making eyes at everyone, and tugging at the straps on my daypack. As I looked at the gleaming white high-rises of Eilat, Israel, across the Gulf of Aqaba from us, I was reminded of a dinner I had had in the Fernsehturm in East Berlin in 1986. My East German colleagues looked wistfully at the lights of West Berlin and wondered if it was really one city or two. There ought to be heavy traffic between the two sister cities at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba--Eilat and Aqaba--but whatever traffic there was has dried up to a trickle since Intifada Thania began.

After dinner I walked along the highway that follows the shore. A young man was sitting at a table in front of his shop. There were two empty chairs at the table. He invited me to join him, and to his surprise I did. A friend of his joined us soon after. We talked a bit about my efforts to learn Arabic, and theirs to learn English. Then I turned the conversation to Palestine.

They were both Palestinians. The shopkeeper's father was from Nablus. He himself had never been to Palestine. I asked if he would return if he could, and he said no. His life was here now. I tried to describe my peace plan to them, but they spoke English much better than they understood it, so I didn't get very far. But they both agreed that whereas the Jews stole the land from the Arabs 120 years ago, all Arabs realize and accept that they are there permanently. They know there is no possibility of removing six million Jews from Israel. They know the two peoples have to learn to live in peace. About a return to the 1967 borders, the shopkeeper objected that there had to be a connection between the West Bank and Gaza. I said that was easy; build a road with free access to all. It had not occurred to him that that would be a solution. He also said that all of Jerusalem had to belong to Palestine, because it is a holy city. I pointed out that it is a holy city to everybody. He had no counter, but seemed to agree with me when I praised the plan of declaring the old part of Jerusalem to be under the sovereignty of God.

After his friend left, I asked him what he thought of King Abdullah II, hoping to get a confirmation of the ``muppet" view the Belgian tourists had reported. But he would only say that King Hussein had been good, and his son is good too.

At breakfast at the Jordanian Dead Sea resort of Suwayma I met a Slovenian banker in his fifties named Marko, who owned a house in Bethlehem, and spoke pretty good Arabic. He had fought alongside the Palestinians in the 1960s and 1970s, and had spent time in an Israeli prison.

I said that I saw the settlements as one of the greatest difficulties in the way of a negotiated peace. He said that most were temporary residences for American Jews, and were generally empty. The ones in Gaza--only the soldiers live there. But try to remove them and influential American Jews halt it. He asked me if I remembered the scenes on television of Israeli troops removing Israeli settlers from the Sinai Peninsula after the peace treaty with Egypt. ``Can you imagine the footage if Israel tried to remove the settlements from the West Bank? No Israeli politician has the courage to face something like that!"

On my idea of a one-for-one right of return, he said that was okay. Most Palestinian refugees have made a life elsewhere and would be unlikely to return. It is only the 400,000 in southern Lebanon who have not been assimilated who would want to return. If the Palestinians in Jordan returned, that would be 80% of Jordan's population. The country would collapse. The real solution, he said, is a program of compensation, on the model of European compensation for Jews after World War II--compensation for personal suffering for those who personally suffered, and compensation for economic losses for those persons and their heirs.

He said the Israelis arbitrarily halt traffic for hours at a time just to harass the Arabs. He said Israel brags that there are Arabs who are Israeli citizens, but Arab citizens of Israel have been removed from villages in northern Israel, for fear they will collaborate with the refugees in Lebanon, and they are not allowed to return to their homes. He said that for the first time they are firing and bombing near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and they recently destroyed a beautiful Ottoman-era hotel there.

At one point I mentioned with approval America's new efforts to attack the money laundering sources of the terrorists' funds. He said Israel was the money-laundering capital of the world, and there was no chance the U.S. would do something about that.

How could such a plan actually come to pass? I think Yasser Arafat would do much better if he simply stated the final settlement the Palestinians wanted, refused to negotiate on it in any way, asserted that resistance would continue until that was achieved, and pledged that all terrorism would cease once it was achieved. But that is the northern European in me speaking. That is a very non-Arab mode of operation.

What could the United States do? A lot. Shortly after World War II President Truman discovered that the Dutch were spending exactly as much on their attempted reconquest of Indonesia as they were receiving in aid from the United States for rebuilding the Netherlands. Truman told them he was not going finance the reestablishment of the colonial empires, and the Dutch quickly agreed to recognize Indonesia's independence.

The United States gives Israel at least three billion dollars a year in aid, and maybe as much as ten billion, if you count loan guarantees and tax deductible contributions to Israeli charitable organizations. For comparison, the United States gives India, a country with 200 times the population $300 million a year. The American government could simply refuse to finance the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It could reduce the amount of aid by the cost of the occupation. That would provide a powerful incentive to Israel to come to some sort of arrangement with the Palestinians.

When I told Marko the story about Truman, he raised his eyebrow in disbelief.

``Times have changed," I said.