DANIEL ELAZAR
DANIEL J. ELAZAR GUEST COLUMNIST How to create a win-win-win situation for Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. Why shared rule is the answer. All of a sudden, out of the blue, we have, to mix...
...They may want that, but do they want it at the price of tens of thousands of unemployed who will have no prospect for jobs, with all the political instability that will bring...
...And why not from joint efforts for tourism and economic development...
...Without shared-rule arrangements, there must be a winner and a loser...
...Difficult...
...For all three parties the realities of obtaining or preserving self-rule are tied in completely with the necessity for a certain amount of shared rule...
...For Jordan, this will encourage an energetic population west of the river to help Jordan grow economically and will minimize the possibility of political conflict with the Palestinians east of the river who might want to join their brethren west of it...
...If not, even the present Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road will be cut by Palestinian territory...
...Without federal solutions, we will either see stalemate or one party will lose everything...
...The Palestinians almost certainly know how dependent their economy will be on Israel...
...Take water, for instance...
...Finally, what about the Israeli settlers in the territories, and the Palestinian Arabs who will find themselves on the Israeli side of die line, if there are any border adjustments at all...
...The Jordanians have discovered, once again, that they are both in and out of the game...
...This will give them a political entity with sufficient self-rule, while at the same time offering possibilities for economic viability...
...Harsh...
...Professor Daniel J. Elazar is thefounder and president of the ferusalem Center for Public Affairs, an indejiendenl feioish think tank concerned with analyzing and solving hey problems facing Israel and world fewry...
...Should Israel and the Palestinian entity re-partition the city...
...How do we divide waters that flow across or underneath boundaries...
...The Palestinians have convinced the world that they are, for political purposes at least, a people, forged in the crucible of their struggle with the Jewish people, and their periodic rejection by the rest of the Arab world...
...Should the Palestinians be excluded from any role in its governance...
...Only dirough well-negotiated and well-administered sharing arrangements...
...If a proper combination of federal and confederal principles is introduced, so as to guarantee both self-rule and shared rule, we may even be able to extend those principles to Jerusalem in an appropriate way...
...My heart aches with hope that what is now merely an agreement on principles will work out in practice to the advantage of all...
...With them, all can gain...
...Making it work is, however, as I suggested nearly a quarter of a century ago, contingent upon finding the appropriate combination of self-rule and shared-rule solutions that will prevent the results from ending up as a zero-sum game in which each winner leaves the other side a loser...
...If we cannot share what cannot be divided, one or another of us will not be able to hold even what we can divide...
...And once they recognize their need for Israel as a place of employment, why should they not benefit from Israeli investments in their territory...
...it is up to them to get off the fence if they hope to remain players...
...One hopes, for Israel's sake, there will be...
...Or economics...
...He wrote or edited over 50 books and publications, including several exploring practical solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict...
...The Jewish people, in turn, has discovered that under present conditions they cannot hold on to exclusive control over lands occupied by others, no matter how important those lands might be for Israel's security...
...No, just realistic...
...Israel is much stronger than the Palestinians, who need all the help that they can get...
...That means that the Palestinians will gain more self-rule than they have had at any time in their past...
...To them, that's independence...
...Probably...
...It will not be easy, but it seems as if the parties, at least at the moment, have the will to make it work...
...Who knows...
...For Israel, this will give a firm constitutional basis to its security needs and to the maintenance of 130,000Jews who have settled in the territories beyond Jerusalem, not to speak of the Jews' historic rights to a presence in those territories, even if not an exclusive or ruling one...
...At the same time they want to be as free of us as they can...
...If the Palestinians are smart, they will get that help in federation (a close union with common citizenship and institutions) with Jordan and at the same time in confederation (a looser linkage between entities) with Israel...
...All of a sudden, out of the blue, we have, to mix metaphors, a new ball game...
...The idea is to make everyone winners...
...Without shared rule there cannot be any successful self-rule—for the simple reason that some things cannot be divided, only shared...
...Does anyone sincerely seeking peace want that...
...Should the Israelis be excluded from their holy places and not be able to get to them with the same ease as they do today...
...What about Jerusalem...
Vol. 18 • December 1993 • No. 6
