Israel Matzav

More 'Palestinians' favor 'one-state solution'

An increasing number of 'Palestinians' are favoring a 'one-state solution.' This does not - as was classically assumed - mean that they necessarily want to dismantle the State of Israel. In fact, as many as 96% of the residents of Wadi Ara - the 'triangle' in the Galilee that is overwhelmingly Arab - say they would not want to live under the 'Palestinian Authority' under any circumstances.

Rather, what it means is that the Arabs of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (and maybe even Gaza) want to become equal citizens of Israel just as the 'Israeli Arabs' are today. At the moment, this would likely mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state - and therefore we should resist this idea. However, if one looks at the demographic trends, this may be an option for us in the future. The Arab population of Judea and Samaria is actually shrinking, while the population of Israel and Jordan is rapidly growing.

This is a lengthy and important article. However, it is manageable enough that I can give you a few excerpts. Still, I urge you to read the whole thing.

One can sense a great change among Palestinians—a new lack of trust in the possibility of a Palestinian state. In Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron, people are talking and writing about this. It is interesting that the shift is taking place at the very time when the whole world is united in pressing Israel to help the Palestinians create a state of their own. The Obama administration, the European Union, Russia, those Arab states that still maintain their initiative of almost a decade ago (to establish peace with Israel in exchange for its withdrawal to the 1967 border)—all of them seek a two-state solution. Even Netanyahu’s Israel is ready for it. So who thinks that it’s no longer a useful idea? The Palestinians—but not all of them, of course.

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In the past, thousands of young Arab citizens of Israel supported the PLO. One example is the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who left Israel to work with the PLO. But for the past few years the aspiration of many has been in the opposite direction. Some Palestinians who defined themselves as PLO loyalists have returned, or asked to return, and become regular Israeli citizens. One of them, Sabri Jiryis, editor of Palestinian journals and the head of the PLO archive, has come back to his birthplace, the village of Fasuta in the Galilee. After the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, researchers asked Israeli Arabs if they would like to live under Palestinian national rule. Those polled lived in “the triangle,” the Arab areas of Israel closest to the West Bank border. The response of the majority of those polled (approximately 80 percent) was always negative. In the past few years, this majority has grown. In one of the last polls, 96 percent of the villagers of Wadi Ara said that they were not willing to accept any arrangement in which the Palestinian Authority would rule their area.


EXTRAORDINARY THINGS are now happening, without much publicity, in another Palestinian community, that of the 300,000 Arabs of East Jerusalem. In the past few years, tens of thousands of them have applied to the Ministry of the Interior for full Israeli citizenship. In 1967, when East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel, its inhabitants were given “temporary resident” status, not citizenship. This resembles the U.S. green card, except that it does not serve as a way-station to full citizenship. Temporary residents have all the rights and obligations of a regular citizen—they pay taxes and receive the benefits of the social welfare system. But they cannot vote in parliamentary elections or carry an Israeli passport.

That they can’t vote for Knesset members has not bothered the Jerusalem Arabs, nor has the lack of a passport—the government gives travelers an Israeli “Laisser-Passer.” The problem, from their vantage point, is that they can lose their temporary resident status if they don’t continue to live in Jerusalem. Indeed, the Interior Ministry has taken away temporary resident cards from thousands of Jerusalem Arabs who moved to areas in the West Bank or who have lived overseas for a few years.

Hence the growing number of requests for full Israeli citizenship. There are many difficulties in the way. The most serious is that such a request is considered as collaboration with the enemy, the conqueror, and therefore a betrayal of Palestinian nationalism. That’s why so few applied in the years after the 1967 War—and most of them were Jerusalem Arabs who married Israeli Arabs. The PLO and the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah have decided to fight the new trend. They sent representatives to the East Jerusalem office of the Interior Ministry and warned those standing on line not to request the citizenship application forms.

Despite the warnings, the number of applicants is growing. A spokesman for the ministry told me that in the last two years, about twelve thousand Palestinians from East Jerusalem have received Israeli citizenship. What is most significant here is that there isn’t any embarrassment about applying for it. A Palestinian journalist told me, “Not only are they not embarrassed, they are proud that they have succeeded in getting Israeli citizenship.” This is the strongest possible example of the low point that Palestinian nationalism has reached—at least in the eyes of the Palestinians of Jerusalem. They now believe that the Israeli (Jewish) presence in the eastern part of the city is so powerful that it cannot be shaken or dislodged. The city won’t be divided, and so they are adapting to a situation that will lead in the end to a single state.

THE DECLINE OF the Palestinian national movement can be seen in even sharper relief in the center of its power on the West Bank. Since its founding in 1964, the PLO’s three leading bodies have been the National Council, the Central Council, and the Executive Committee. Representation in those bodies was apportioned among the various Palestinian organizations that existed fifty years ago. This proportional representation remains as it was, and it has turned the PLO into an outdated, pathetic, useless institution that barely functions. Its whole purpose is to provide meager salaries to its functionaries. In its councils and committees, Marxist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has split into factions over the years, are still represented, as are the Democratic Front, the Communist Party, and other ephemeral organizations whose existence has been forgotten and who have almost no public support.

By contrast, the PLO has no representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two movements that together probably have the support of more than a third of the Palestinian public.

Abu Mazen continues to convene the councils of the PLO, but it is hard to find people who take seriously their deliberations and decisions. The Israeli and Arab media report every utterance made by the leaders of Hamas, but pay much less attention to the pronouncements of PLO spokesmen.

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Journalists in Ramallah estimate that, since 2000, about fifty thousand people have left the West Bank and Gaza. It is worth noting that despite the high birth rate among Palestinians, their number is shrinking in comparison to the great increase in the Israeli and Jordanian populations. This has important economic and social implications. In the past generation, over one million immigrants have come to Israel from the former Soviet Union, and a million Iraqis have moved to Jordan. In contrast, the West Bank and Gaza are stagnating—economically, socially, and, of course, politically. Among those who have left the West Bank and Gaza are many of the elites. Thousands have left Gaza, among them the leadership of Fatah, who have moved, mostly, to Cairo, Amman, or Ramallah. Most of the tens of thousands who left the West Bank went to Jordan. Among them were many members of Fatah’s Central Committee. As a journalist who visits Ramallah regularly, I can testify that on at least three occasions when I met senior members of Fatah, I found them living in empty houses. Family members—wives, children, and grandchildren—had left to live and work in Amman, where most of the senior members have houses and other property and some of them have businesses. They came back to Palestine immediately after the Oslo Accords with the intention of building the great national project of the Palestinian state. In its stead they got shootings, bombings, closure, and checkpoints. Why stay? The families left for Amman, and the senior party members come to Ramallah only for meetings and to hold down positions in the government, the Fatah movement, and the PLO organizations—from which they receive their salaries and payment for their expenses.

For most Palestinians, life east of the Jordan is not life in exile. They might not call Jordan their homeland, but they certainly wouldn’t call it a foreign country. Almost three million Palestinians live east of the Jordan (four million live in the West Bank and Gaza and over a million in Israel). About two million of the Palestinians in Jordan are registered as descendants of refugees from the 1948 War, but only a minority of them (about 17 percent, according to UN records) live in refugee camps. Some Jordanian camps have become villages and neighborhoods, in a process similar to what happened in the West Bank. But Palestinians have also built the most luxurious residential areas of the Jordanian capital. Anyone who visits neighborhoods like Shemisani or Adbun is impressed by the palatial villas. Most if not all of these belong to wealthy Palestinian families, some of them the children of refugees.


“THE CUNNING OF HISTORY” combined the Nakba, the catastrophic exile of Palestine’s Arabs in 1948, with the discovery and exploitation of oil in the Persian Gulf (known to Arabs as the Arab Gulf). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost home and homeland in 1948 left Gaza, Egypt, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and went to look for jobs in the oil-producing countries. In 1990, the number of Palestinians in these states was estimated to be over a million. About 400,000 of them were concentrated in oil-rich Kuwait. They went there to serve as teachers, technicians, managers, economists, construction contractors, engineers, bankers, and journalists. Arafat, who studied engineering in Egypt, arrived in Kuwait in 1957 to work as a highway construction engineer. It was there that he and his friends founded the Fatah organization. In those same years, Abu Mazen came to Qatar to work as a teacher. The best-known Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani (a member of the Popular Front killed by a car bomb in 1972), wrote a novel, Men in the Sun, about Palestinians whose aspiration was to reach the oil-rich countries—the “America of the Arabs.”

Large numbers of Palestinians, refugees and non-refugees, got rich. But after the first Gulf War, most of them were expelled from Kuwait. The reason for the expulsion was the support given by Arafat and the PLO to Saddam Hussein, who had promised to bomb Israel if he was attacked. But there was another factor behind the expulsion—the entry, on a massive scale, of cheap and efficient workers from Southeast Asia.

One way or another, the great majority of Palestinians who left the oil states in the past two decades went to Amman. They came with money, built the luxury neighborhoods of the city, and made Jordan their home. There are no precise statistics as to the number of Palestinians in Jordan and their percentage in the population. Jordanian sources speak of approximately 50 percent. The Palestinians say that it is at least 70 percent. What is clear is that the Palestinians are the economic and social backbone of the state. They are citizens with equal rights and responsibilities, occupy key positions in the kingdom, and since the events of Black September (1970) have never questioned the legitimacy of Hashemite rule. The heroes of the bloody confrontation of those days—Arafat on one side, King Hussein on the other—are no longer with us. Their heirs, Abu Mazen and Abdullah the Second, are to a large extent friends and allies. Both of them are committed to the struggle against Israel’s conquest and settlement of the West Bank.

From the vantage point of the Jordanian regime, the great nightmare is the possibility of riots and war in the West Bank, leading to Israeli annexation, which would send a wave of Palestinian refugees across the Jordan. The two previous inundations shook the stability of the regime in Amman. After 1948, Palestinians killed the first King Abdullah (in July 1951), and Egyptian-Palestinian subversion threatened to bring down Hashemite rule. Similarly, after the 1967 War, the second wave of Palestinian refugees precipitated the battle between Jordan and the PLO in 1970, a crisis, like the previous one, that the Jordanian regime barely survived.

What the Jordanians want is quiet and stability in the West Bank. And they want to see a Palestinian national entity, non-militant and non-revolutionary, which will collaborate with the conservative regime in Amman. This is also the objective of Abu Mazen and his colleagues from the Fatah leadership, most of whom have homes and property in Jordan.

Read it all (the emphases are all mine). My own view is that we wait to let time take care of things for us, and then end up with one state, which will have a large and permanent Jewish majority.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:44 PM