Fourth in a series
For Israel and the Palestinians to be at peace, the Palestinians need to have a viable state of their own. In a prior post in this series, I discussed how the Palestinian National Authority needs to reform itself. Now, however, I will focus on the word viable.
Geography, we must admit, favors the Israelis. The State of Israel rests on the Mediterranean Sea and is part of the Fertile Crescent, but the West Bank is less arable and resembles more of a rocky desert. Life is harsher there. There is no coastline, and Palestinians have little independent access to water. As far as I can remember, the only crops that can be grown are olive trees.
Israel, in comparison, has been a miraculous success story since its founding in 1948 — but the state did have a help in the form of foreign aid and investment coupled with floods of educated immigrants. The same is not true for the Palestinians — and significant portions of the funds they do receive are stolen by their leaders and used to purchase weapons rather than, say, medicine. In short, it will be difficult for Palestinians to create a viable state by themselves, much less maintain one.
Essentially, the future State of Palestine — through the international authority that will administer its affairs on an interim basis (see the first post in this series) – will need a large amount of initial foreign investment. And I don’t mean only money.
The international community — through, perhaps, the United Nations, the World Bank and non-governmental organizations – needs to send urban planners, architects, economists, journalist, attorneys, energy and technology system contractors, judges, teachers, agriculture and irrigation experts and security consultants, along with doctors, hospital administrators and a host of other professionals. The list may be endless.
These experts can come from every country in the world — but many should come from the United States and moderate Arab countries in the Middle East like Jordan. (Palestinians, after all, are closely related to Jordanians — some consider themselves to be the same people.) The entire world would benefit from the existence of a viable Palestinian state because Islamic extremists would lose a prime motivation for terrorism against Israel and the West — and, with less local instability, threats to the world’s oil supply would decline.
I must add another condition: A significant number of the experts who would initially help the Palestinians to build their state in the West Bank must be Israeli Jews (and perhaps even Diaspora Jews for good measure). I know it sounds insane — there would indeed be tension and some hostility in the short-term, but anything worth having takes time to build.
The only way to ensure peace in the long-term is for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to see each other as people who care about them. Many Palestinians’ sole source of income is building houses for Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It is time for Israelis to help build Palestinian communities.
If Palestinian extremists see Israeli Jews helping their families, they will stop trying to kill Israelis. (This, however, also depends on the Palestinian Authority and other Arab governments discouraging fundamentalism in their schools and countries. I’ll discuss this in a future post.) In addition, the Palestinians face chronic and severe water shortages. Israel and the future government of Palestine (as well as Syria and Jordan) need to agree to share access to the Sea of Galilee and other local sources of freshwater. Much of the Middle East, of course, is a desert.
There is one other consideration in the viability of a future Palestinian state: the Gaza Strip. Except for the rare exception of the United States and Alaska, most countries need to be contiguous in order for an outlying part to be viable. Gaza, right now, is pretty much hell. (Both Palestinian terrorists and Israel — along with Egypt, to a lesser degree, are to blame. The residents are essentially trapped, and it’s difficult to go anywhere.)
Israel needs to offer the Palestinians a deal: Israel will take back the Gaza Strip in exchange for increasing the area of the West Bank (where the Palestinian state will exist) by a size matching that of Gaza. It’s an even trade. This will enable the Palestinians to have a contiguous state.
Israel — along with the leaders of Palestine and local Arab governments – needs to do everything it can to create a viable and functioning Palestinian state. When people are happy at home, they rarely want to leave to wage war.
The entire series: Part V: The Right of Return; Part III: Settlements and the Separation Barrier; Part II: Israel Needs Electoral Reform; Part I: Fix the Palestinian Authority
