Against a Palestinian State

...implementation of the Camp David accords has snagged largely on the question of linking normalization of Egyptian-Israeli relations with progress towards political autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza...

...Why do we not champion Armenian nationalism...

...Clearly, the Palestinians fail to qualify as a people by the first two standards...

...Michael Davis Against a Palestinian State An independent Palestinian state would be PLO- dominated, friendly to the Soviet Union, subversive of less radical Arab neighbors, and bent on Israel's destruction...

...The Israeli experience, moreover, provides few useful parallels for Palestinian nationalists...

...Guarantees of limited autonomy for the Maronite and Palestinian communities in Lebanon could help to end the civil war there and encourage their adherence to the Greater Syrian confederation...

...Many Arabs who favor the creation of an independent Palestinian state believe they could dump there both the unwanted Palestinian refugees and the Palestine problem...

...Even uprooted from their homes, Palestinians remain Arabs, sharing religion, language, and culture with their fellows...

...for an independent Palestinian state, these restrictions might take the form of limitations on its armed forces...

...Even in democratic Western Europe, there are "peoples" who somehow have escaped the logic of the times...

...Pan-Arabism, though in temporary eclipse, remains a potent force, one to which Arabs dissatisfied with individual * Foreign Affairs, Winter 1978-1979national regimes may appeal...

...and (3) an independent, sovereign Palestinian state, recognized by Israel, would defuse tensions in the region...

...Already, several forms of political organization for the Palestinian Arabs appear to have proved unworkable...

...The creation of an impoverished, revanchist, and irredentist West Bank Palestinian nation-state is unlikely to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East...

...The PLO already has demonstrated its dedication to democratic principles by assassinating rivals on the West Bank...

...Its population owed various loyalties: to their sects, villages, clans, and families...

...It is necessary to give the Palestinians a state, Ajami argues, because only then can Palestinian radicalism be tamed, and the Arabs' relations with Israel and with each other be regularized...

...If the guerrilla state were formally allied with the Soviet Union, it might summon the aid of Soviet troops to defend it from Israeli reprisals, and thus enormously increase the stakes in another round of Middle East war...

...In sum, the Palestinian state would be a tiny, divided entity of doubtful economic viability, with large numbers of its citizens (especially its professionals and skilled workers) living and working outside its borders...

...The tides of history have left the Middle East scattered with social groups whom we generally recognize as peoples: Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Circassians, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, etc...

...Khalidi dismisses Israeli security fears, pointing out that a Palestinian state would not possess sufficient conventional military power to destroy Israel...

...for the bedouin, it grew from their particular desert-dwelling style of life...

...Other peoples in the region have developed their particularity and cohesion over centuries, even millennia...

...There is, then, a real risk that an independent Palestinian state will assume the form, not of a peaceful good neighbor, but of an irredentist guerrilla state bent on the destruction of Israel and perhaps the subversion of its less radical Arab allies...

...In addition, many Palestinians who are willing to come to terms with Israel ironically see in the Jewish state the rationale for a Palestinian Arab republic...

...Egypt demands that Israel move expeditiously to grant full autonomy to the Palestinians in the occupied territories...

...Our interests in the Middle East put limits on our sympathies for the Kurds...

...Jordan in 1970 and Syria in 1976 killed far more Palestinians than the Israelis ever have...

...Foreigners cannot offer blueprints for the future political organization of the Middle East...

...If the Palestinians are to be regarded as a people, it must be by virtue of their history and culture (it is in this sense that the Egyptians, Syrians, and bedouin may be termed "peoples...

...Twelve years of Israeli occupation have not integrated the Palestinian Arabs into the Jewish state...

...Such guarantees might also permit Syria to extract itself from Lebanon, ending its bloody and seemingly endless intervention...

...Are these forces converging in such a way as to produce an independent Palestinian state...

...One alternative begins with the premise that the Palestine problem arises not from the absence of a Palestinian Arab state, but from the presence of too many states...

...Why not Kurdish nationalism...

...The argument that the Palestinian Arabs "logically" deserve their own sovereign state is further weakened by a survey of those populations which today enjoy national sovereignty and those which do not...

...It imagines not the creation of yet another Arab state, on the West Bank, but the incorporation of that Palestinian homeland into a greater association of Arab entities now artificially divided into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan...

...For many observers, only the creation of an independent Palestinian state will satisfy both the Arab desire for autonomy and the Israeli need for security...

...it holds scores of subject peoples which, despite the guarantees of the Soviet constitution, have no power to express independent national aspirations...

...Might not such a confederation, its aggrandizing tendencies checked by the autonomy of its constituent communities, be competent to live at peace with itself and its Israeli neighbors...

...But the military danger to Israel of a sovereign Palestinian state would not lie in an improbable strike of Palestinian armored brigades at Tel Aviv...

...The Palestinians themselves are not strong enough to bring about such a state...

...Could not this tradition be secularized and carried forward in the form of a Greater Syrian confederation, in which the Palestinian community could at once enjoy autonomy in a West Bank homeland, the dignity of citizenship in a larger Arab nation, the right to travel abroad, and the privilege to live and work throughout the confederation...

...Both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, they reason, have been persecuted, dispossessed, and scattered in a Diaspora...

...The momentum towards peace appears at a dangerous impasse...

...Indeed, one may question whether the Arab states-or most of them-desire an independent Arab Palestine...

...The Middle East is full of "peoples" denied national self-expression...

...Proponents of Palestinian statehood argue that the twentieth century is the age of nationalism and that the plethora of independent nation-states today is the expression of the historical political logic of our time...

...they must be resolved by the inhabitants of the region themselves...

...Partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, first proposed during the British mandate by the Peel Commission in 1937 and embodied in United Nations resolutions in 1947, is seen as the only practical way to adjudicate the claims to two legitimate, competing national movements to the same small piece of territory...

...Few of the 1948 generation of refugees would be tempted to return to a poor, truncated Palestinian state which did not include their birthplaces...

...Is this not an Arab Bantustan...

...The last great European empire is the Soviet, only half the population of which is Russian...

...Before 1947 members of these families freely moved in and out of Palestine, and it is doubtful whether those living west of the Jordan considered themselves a people apart from their cousins elsewhere in the region...

...Even in a time of peace, and with massive Arab and possibly American investment, there are decided limits to how many returning refugees the new state could add to the 1.2 million Arabs already living there...

...An association of the Jordanian kingdom with a Palestinian West Bank homeland might be a first step in bringing such a confederation into being...

...This brings us to the third questionable assumption: that the existence of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by Israel, would contribute to peace...

...In fact, power and will and interest and chance determine the gestation of states-logic has little to do with it...

...The nations which would border an independent Arab Palestine do not wish to see established in their midst a radical, irredentist state, perhaps allied to the Soviet Union, and a threat to the security of their regimes...

...For the Egyptians, this ethnic identity arose from the isolation of the Nile Valley and the civilizations which developed there...

...The case for an independent Palestinian Arab state rests on three principal assumptions: (1) the Palestinians constitute a "people...

...There is certainly nothing logical about the independence and sovereignty of, say, Equitorial Guinea, Upper Volta, Papua New Guinea, or Western Samoa...

...Zionists sought in an independent Israel a refuge from the Gentile...

...and (3) a long history of shared cultural associations...

...Separated politically from other Arabs by the artificial boundaries of the British mandate, shouldered off their land by waves of Jewish immigrants, and cynically manipulated and sacrificed by their Arab neighbors and erstwhile champions, the Palestinians developed a sense of separate identity precisely as they suffered repeated blows from several directions...

...In the absence of elections, of course, no one can say whom the Palestinians would choose as leaders of their state...

...Palestinian" merely refer to the diverse inhabitants of a geographical region known as Palestine...

...and if the Jews need an independent state to guarantee their survival as a people, the same logic must obtain for the Palestinians...

...Not only did Jewish immigration and the creation of Israel stimulate Palestinian nationalism, but the very arguments used to support an independent Israel may be expropriated to serve the cause of an independent Arab Palestine...

...But beyond question, if a rump Palestinian state were established on the West Bank and in Gaza, very large numbers of the expatriate Palestinians would continue to dwell outside its borders...

...It is not enough that they inhabit the geographic region long known as "Palestine" (although geographic proximity in the long run may help to foster deeper associations...

...there was no sense of being "Palestinian" as distinct from being, say, "Syrian...

...Officially, the United States has not gone so far...

...The Arab caliphates maintained this tradition and the Ottomans continued it...

...The guiding principle of such a confederation could be, not the autarchic socialism which Nasser's Egypt and Baathist Syria and Iraq have applied with disappointing results, but an adaptation of a respected idea from the Islamic past...

...And what about legitimate peoples who in the second half of the twentieth century have been denied the right of national self-expression...

...But they waste little love on the Palestinian people...

...As every visitor to the area knows, the West Bank and Gaza are small (together slightly larger than Delaware), overpopulated, largely infertile, and relatively unendowed with mineral resources...

...Egypt, Syria, and Jordan have fought four wars, squandered billions of dollars, and lost thousands of lives for Palestine...

...The practical problems of creating such a confederation are of course immense...

...One is led to the conclusion that Palestinian self-consciousness and nationalism (as distinct from Arab nationalism) emerged after World War I and were quickened by the events of 1947-1948...

...The binding force of this newfound consciousness has been a shared sense of hurt and wrong...

...One may find among these groups either one or a combination of three defining traits: (1) a unique church or rite...

...A decentralized Greater Syrian confederation of autonomous communities, including a Palestinian homeland, might point the Arabs towards peace with Israel and with each other...

...rather, it would come from the territory of such a state being used as a base for repeated guerrilla forays into Israel...

...Lebanon is being destroyed today in part because of the presence of 400,000 indigestible Palestinians...

...Ought they to have a sovereign state of their own...

...2) as such, they want and by right should have a sovereign state of their own...

...And if the concept of a Bantustan is morally indefensible in South Africa, is it any less reprehensible in the Middle East...

...We know, however, that such restrictions are effective only so long as the international community has the will to enforce them, as the West's failure to stop Germany's rearmament in the 1930s demonstrated...

...they speak an Arabic virtually identical to that spoken by their Jordanian, Lebanese, and Syrian neighbors...

...The limited West Bank autonomy plan proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Begin-local elections, withdrawal of the military government, Israeli retention of the settlements, military facilities, and control of water resources-has failed to attract Arab support and is increasingly criticized within Israel itself...

...Do the Palestinians constitute a "people," or does the term Michael Davis is a career Foreign Service Officer who has served in the Middle East...

...The three million Palestinians are divided between Christians of various sects (10 percent) and Muslims (90 percent), mostly Sunni...

...It is unclear how many Palestinians would go there to live if offered the opportunity...

...All of these assumptions, shared in greater or lesser degree by advocates of Palestinian statehood, require critical examination...

...Nor can one count on "moderate" PLO leaders coming to the fore...

...The Maronites of Lebanon are a people, yet we do not support an independent Marounistan...

...Dhimmah was a reasonable and practical compromise between the particularism of ancient communities and the need for a wider political authority...

...Palestine's many rulers rarely administered the region as a unit...

...And of those who fled in 1948, tens of thousands came from Jaffa, Haifa, West Jerusalem, and other areas within the 1967 Israeli frontier unlikely to become part of the projected Palestinian state...

...2) a unique language or dialect...

...These are intriguing arguments and not without merit, but they minimize certain critical peculiarities of the Arab and Jewish experience...

...It seeks to reconcile the claims and loyalties of particular communities, be they Maronites in Lebanon or Palestinians on the West Bank, with a greater Arab nationalism...

...More than 100 states have achieved independence since 1945...

...Why do we refer to them as peoples, even though they (except for the Jews gathered in Israel) have no sovereign state of their own...

...Would we really care to see Basque and Catalan republics torn from today's Spain, Corsican and Breton nations carved out of France, or the United Kingdom broken into Scottish, Welsh, and English states...

...As Walid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar at the American University of Beirut, has observed, "the concepts of Pan-Arabism are functionally the most effective tools of change and legitimization in the hands of the Arab political elite...

...If this thesis is correct, then the Palestinians are a "people" of very recent coin-no more than two or three generations...

...Even today one meets Arab families with branches in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and Jerusalem (some with names like Qudsi and Nabulsi of Palestinian origin...

...There is little in the historical record, until recently, to suggest so...

...they must have a history of self-conscious separateness, a sense of ethnic or cultural identity which differentiates them from their Arab neighbors...

...they can encourage Arabs and Israelis to imagine forms of association other than the nation-state...

...Even in the Arab world, according to Fouad Ajami, a professor of politics at Princeton, the nationalism of individual states has cut deeply into Arab consciousness-the Pan-Arab romanticism of Nasser and Qaddafi giving way to the pragmatic self-interest nationalism of Sadat and the Saudi royal family.* The Arabs have maintained a system of states for nearly 60 years...

...Nor have the armies of the Arab confrontation states proved able to midwife ** Foreign Affairs, July 1978...

...Many advocates of Palestinian independence will allow that "sovereignty," once granted, may be subject to internationally imposed restrictions, as with Japan and Austria...

...The Palestinian Arabs seek in nationalism a way to participate politically in the Arab nation...

...a Palestinian state in the face of Israeli opposition...

...In this way, Herzl's dream of a refuge for world Jewry in Palestine might yet be reconciled with the Arab dream of a great Arab nation extending from the Atlantic to the Gulf...

...it has called for a Palestinian "homeland," but has stopped short of calling that homeland a state...

...The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the U.S...

...they were born in the Diaspora...

...Sources close to the PLO say that no peace is possible without at least an independent Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza...

...Even if the PLO moderates assume titular leadership of the Palestinian state, their past record permits little confidence in their ability to control events within their own house...

...Few Palestinians desire to return to Jordanian rule...

...The PLO is a loose coalition whose "moderate" leaders are capable of chameleon-like changes of posture, depending on their interlocutors and the political climate, and incapable of disciplining their extremist colleagues...

...Although for some critics the questions of "people" and "nation" are self-determined-the Palestinians are a people if they believe themselves to be one-it remains to be seen whether Palestinian nationalism can survive the resolution of the grievances which gave it birth...

...Nor do the Palestinians have a unique language...

...May the Palestinians be defined as a people in this historical-cultural sense...

...In a transition period between military rule and independence, the Israelis could encourage an indigenous moderate leadership to emerge in the West Bank and Gaza as an alternative to the Palestine Liberation Organization, But it is doubtful whether the heavily armed PLO, after its long struggle, would allow a more moderate rival party to rule a Palestinian state its guns helped bring into being, even if the moderates won a fair election...

...And might not, over time, as economic, technical, and social forces work their symbiotic way throughout that region, Israel find advantage in a closer, confederal relationship with its Arab neighbors...

...Zionism, on the other hand, did not flourish until large numbers of Jews felt alienated from the non-Jewish world...

...One may call this association by its historic name of "Greater Syria," as long as it is understood that this term does not denote a hegemonic state based in Damascus, but rather a confederation of autonomous Arab and non-Arab communities...

...Because Turkey is an ally and strong, and the Armenian massacres were long ago...

...Further, since an overwhelming majority of Arabs embrace Islam, the contemporary resurgence of conservative Islam may stimulate renewed interest in a Pan-Arabic political institution which reconciles spiritual and temporal demands in a more satisfactory way than the narrowly-based nation-state...

...Department of State or the United States Government...

...the Israelis resist...

...Probably more than half the 1.5 million expatriate Palestinians have no living memory of their "homeland...

...The imperial model of supranational political organization collapsed in World War I and new forms of voluntary association cannot fully be realized until all peoples are free to express themselves nationally...

...the Israeli government refuses to accept such a state...

...only the Palestinians are outside it...

...Let us grant, however, the premise that the Palestinians are a "people"-or at least a people in a state of becoming...

...Certainly, they wish to see the Palestine problem go away...

...They and scores of other states were born as European imperialism exhausted itself, and their boundaries were drawn long ago in foreign chancelleries in nice disregard of ethnic and topographical circumstances...

...There exists in Islam the honorable tradition of "dhimmah," under which the reigning political power granted non-Muslim religious communities a large measure of autonomy over their own affairs, especially in the realms of worship, language, education, taxes, and certain civil matters...

...What then is to be done...

...Continuous guerrilla raids would undoubtedly provoke heavy Israeli reprisals, and possibly drag the entire region back into war (it should be remembered that such raids from the Gaza strip occasioned the 1956 Sinai War...