The flight into Egypt of tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza this week might provoke some rethinking by Palestinians into how they might improve their lives.
Gaza is a 360 square kilometre strip of land along the Mediterranean bounded by Israel and Egypt.
Its population of 1.5 million makes it one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
At international law it is part of no country. Egypt occupied it in 1948 after the dissolution of the British Palestinian Mandate and then Israel occupied it after the 1967 war.
Since the last Israeli settlers withdrew in 2005, it has notionally been governed by the Palestinian Authority, but in fact it has been controlled internally by Hamas for the past year. Israel controls the border, the coast and the airspace. It can determine what people, goods, and electricity cross the border. Without access to Israel and Israeli electricity, life in Gaza descends from the merely grim to utterly hellish. Small wonder when the border to Israel was closed most recently, people attempted to cross to Egypt for essentials.
Life in the other parcel of land notionally controlled by the Palestinian Authority but hemmed in by borders mostly under Israeli control – the West Bank – is better, but not a great deal better.
For Palestinians to get a better life they will have to change the reality-denying mindset instilled by Yasser Arafat when he led the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
This mindset was that Palestinians could rid Palestine (including what is now the state of Israel) of its Jewish population and that the use of violence was the way to do it.
Morality aside, it was and is illusory.
More than 5.6 million Jews live in Israel-Palestine. They are not going anywhere and they have too much military power to be removed, again leaving aside the morality of attempting to do so.
That being the case, Hamas, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians generally should renounce violence not only because violence is immoral, but because it is not achieving anything.
They should also recognise Israel’s right to exist because not doing so is not achieving anything.
Would that be total capitulation? No, it need not be.
What about a settlement? – a peace settlement or a political settlement? Well, the saga of seemingly endless attempts at negotiated “settlements” has been one of the main problems in the Middle East. President Bush’s lame-duck attempt this month was just the latest. Before that Oslo and Camp David were similar failures.
The idea of a negotiated settlement presumes there are two “sides”, like two nation states or two individuals who can come to an agreement and stick to it.
The Oslo agreement in 1993 came up with a two-state solution. A Palestinian state would be created from the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli state would comprise the rest. But the agreement broke down over borders; suicide bombings; Israeli attacks on Palestinian sites and the question of whether those Arabs (and their descendants) who left or were expelled from Israel in 1948 had a “right of return” and a right to claim compensation.
You can’t have two “sides” when so many people from each side are demanding a right to live in land the other claims.
None of this is doing the Palestinians any good. Even if they got their own state, would they be much better off? Inevitably it would be incompetently and corruptly run, as the running of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority show. And a state comprising the land-locked West Bank cut from the coastal enclave of Gaza would not be economically viable.
There is another course. Forget a separate state. The region already has one reasonably functioning state called Israel. Twenty per cent of its population is non-Jewish (mostly Moslem Arabs, but some Christians and Druze). That 20 per cent (or 1.4 million) is growing faster than the other 80 per cent.
Many Arabs living in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights (which were taken from Syria in 1967) have a right to Israeli citizenship, but refuse to take it up because they think it would be some kind of betrayal. They should take up Israeli citizenship. Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank and Golan Heights – far from seeking a separate state – should demand integration with Israel. Jews could settle in those territories and Arabs could buy property and live in Israel.
Oddly enough many hardline religious Jews would welcome a Greater Israel. It would comprise all the area presently controlled by Israel – Israel itself, Gaza, the whole of the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
Greater Israel offers the best long-term chance for peace, because of demographic forces. Not many Jewish immigrants are arriving in Israel these days – about 18,000 a year. The birth rate of Arab Israelis is much higher than Jewish Israelis. Arab Israelis will be a quarter of the population in 15 years.
Greater Israel has a population of between 10 million and 11 million (West Bank figures are disputed). Of them just a tad over half are Jewish. Given the birth figures it will not be long before the Jewish population is less than half.
With that demographic make up the state of Israel would have to become more secular and a society which embraced religious tolerance. Arabic would have to become one of several official languages.
So far from shunning Israeli citizenship and shunning Israel, the Palestinians should embrace it, and having abandoned violence take up representation in the Knesset and the other institutions of Greater Israel. That would be a more likely path to peace, dignity and prosperity than the mad attempts at “negotiated settlements” punctuated by sporadic episodes of destructive violence.