“At some point, Mr Abbas must admit to his people that most of the refugees will never return to Israel: that is the price of partition.” This statement appeared on page 14 of the issue of The Economist dated 24-30 September 2011. The Economist is a weekly British journal that distributes over one million copies of every issue and to a large extent represents the mainstream of Western political and economic thought. The logic of partition is that there are two sides to the some coin. If there is going to be a Palestinian state, this means that there is going to be a Jewish state. The partition of the land means the separation of the people who live on it. For the Palestinians to have a separate state, and also have their people return to Israel, would be having one's cake and eating it at the same time. It is true that the Palestinians have the legal and moral right to return to their original homes, but one gives up one thing to get another: the Palestinians would be giving up their right of return in exchange for getting a state. To think otherwise would be eccentric logically and a form of self-deception. Yet, the politics of partition do not end there, since they affect Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Upon the formation of such a state, the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria would become the citizens of the new state. This would mean that in Jordan they would lose what little political rights they currently have, something that is being openly discussed by influential groups such as the retired military organisation in Jordan. Surplus people and the discontented would be pressured to move to their own state. In Lebanon and probably also in Syria, Palestinian refugees would be moved from temporary camps to permanent ones in the West Bank or Gaza. How would partition affect Palestinians in Israel? The first impact would be felt on the land exchange between Israel and the Palestinian state that has already been discussed by the two teams of negotiators. Land in Israel with majority Arab populations bordering the West Bank would be exchanged for Jewish settlements contiguous with Israel. The second impact would be on administrative exchange. Population centres with a Palestinian majority in Israel would be structured as communes to be politically administered by the Palestinian state, and settlements in the West Bank would become communes administrated by Israel. Such an arrangement already exists in Belgium between the French-speaking province (Wallonia) and the Dutch-speaking province (Flanders). In the Israeli-Palestinian case, the small fraction remaining would be pressured, as former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Levni put it, to “fulfil their national ambitions in their Palestinian state”. They would join the some 400,000 Palestinians internally displaced within Israel after 1948. This is the meaning of partition for which we need to be prepared and which we should not be surprised by, since it has happened repeatedly before. Meanwhile, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, admitted in a recent interview with an Israeli television station that the Palestinians would not return to their homes in Israel, though it is doubtful that he will have the courage to say the same thing directly to his own people. Many leaders of the PA have made similar statements, but they have received little attention. After the failed Camp David negotiations in 2000, the then US secretary of state, Madeline Albright, revealed that the Palestinian negotiators had privately promised to divert most refugees away from Israel, saying that they would be satisfied with the return of a nominal number of 100,000. There were also famous statements such as that by the late Yasser Arafat, former head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). “Who is going to return,” Arafat asked. “Millionaires from Brazil?” Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Ereikat also said that “we cannot expect Israel to commit suicide by taking back the refugees.” Prime Minister of the PA Salam Fayyad has said that “the refugees will be welcome in the Palestinian state.” Leaked Palestinian papers have left no doubt that the Palestinian Authority has given up the right of others to return. While the PA has been consistent in its behaviour and pronouncements, which have clearly shown its surrender, the goals of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip have not been consistent with its rhetoric. The latter supports the partition of historic Palestine and proposes a truce with Israel lasting 20 to 50 years. However, it continues to talk of the destruction of Israel and the “liberation” of all of Palestine. The Hamas leadership wants us to believe that the purpose of the truce is preparation for liberation. This is the kind of magical thinking that children usually outgrow by the time they are seven years old. Hamas has set up a quasi one-party state in Gaza that it will not easily abandon. Consider this: shortly after the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, the Hamas government's deputy minister of tourism was interviewed on Al-Jazeera after inspecting a tourist resort called Crazy Waters to say that his government had tourism plans for the next 10 years. What can explain the drive of the two Palestinian authorities to see the advent of a Palestinian state no matter how insignificant it may be and with no consideration for the rights of their own people? In January 2004, Ahmed Qurei, the then PA prime minister, threatened to call for a one-state solution in historic Palestine. Tayseer Khaled, a leader of the Palestinian Democratic Front and its representative on the PLO executive committee, was asked for his opinion. He replied that he was against a one-state solution because the “elites” of the Palestinians were not up to the level of the Israeli elites. These elites are the managerial class and their business allies. It is this managerial impulse, or the will to power, that is driving the leaders of Fatah, Hamas, and most of the other Palestinian factions. Hamas today is going down the same path as Fatah before it. It has not gone to the extent of directly collaborating with Israel on security matters because it is a younger organisation (established in 1987 compared to 1965 for Fatah). Organisations become bureaucratised over time, and they gradually abandon their original goals and devote their energies increasingly toward preserving and promoting themselves. Within the Hamas leadership, the managerial impulse has been overcoming the resistance impulse. With power come other privileges. The Palestinian authorities do not usually publish the salaries of their offices, but it recently became known that one such office-holder, Mohamed Mustafa, chairman of the Palestine Investment Authority, is paid $35,000 a month, the same salary as the president of the United States. The Palestinian people are energetic and resourceful, and they have survived the harsh conditions of exile and oppression. They are not afraid, as apparently are the likes of Khaled, to share a society and political entity with the Israelis. The Palestinian people have never had the opportunity to decide their own political future. In 1949, what later become known as the West Bank was annexed to the then kingdom of Transjordan following negotiations between David Ben-Gurion and King Abdullah and with the blessing of the British. This is recorded by the historian Avi Shlaim in his Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. This was followed by the divestment of the West Bank from Jordan in 1985. Then there were the secretive Oslo Accords in 1993, agreed on by just a few individuals. As though dealing with Israel and the two Palestinian authorities is not enough, Prince Hassan of Jordan is now talking about Jordan's “reclaiming” the West Bank, by doing so hoping to resume the mission of his grandfather. The partition of Palestine directly affects the lives of all Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and many other countries. Even if we manage to elect a national council that represents all Palestinians, the leadership of the factions and the managerial class cannot be entrusted with making decisions regarding the partition of historic Palestine. They are so desperate to have an entity to manage, no matter how insignificant it may be, that they are ready to accept a collection of reservations or a human warehouse. The leaders of the factions are already bickering about who will be the administrator of this prison, and they have brought with them over 80,000 prison guards to help them to do so. With equivalent populations to the West Bank and Gaza, the cities of Chicago and Los Angeles, which have much higher crime rates, each has fewer than 9,000 police. The Palestinian factions are leading their people into a trap, using the flag as bait. The Palestinian people should make a fateful decision of this sort through direct democracy by a referendum. This would require a census to be carried out and registration to be conducted by a neutral organisation. The mass media also has the ethical responsibility to open itself to debate on this issue. The referendum would be a means to mobilise the Palestinian people, especially the refugees, to think and prepare for their return to their homeland, rather than be satisfied by talk about the theoretical “right of return”. In lieu of a referendum, a poll could be conducted by a reputable organisation. Let the Palestinian people decide whether they want to pay the price for a state that, in the words of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, does not even have “room for intimacy between a male and a female pigeon, a state that you will despise the day it is announced.”
The writer teaches in the post-graduate programme of the Centre for Diplomatic and Strategic Studies in Paris.
