Self-Rule and Shared Rule
Two Peoples--One Land:
Federal Solutions for Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan
Daniel J. Elazar
Three Parties -- Three Ambivalences
Since the dust of the Six-Day War settled in mid-June 1967, the
inhabitants of that land on both sides of the Jordan from the
Mediterranean to the eastern desert known to the Jews as Eretz
Israel, to the Arabs, at least in recent times, as Falastin, and
to the rest of the world as Palestine, have been at once torn
apart and paralyzed by ambivalence as to how to deal with the
land's future and theirs within it. Of the three principal
players in the game, Israel and its Jews, the Palestinian Arabs,
and Jordan and its Hashemite ruling family, each has its own set
of ambivalences.
For Israeli Jews, all of Eretz Israel is equally promised. Hence
they feel the same historic or religious right to be in Judea and
Samaria as they do to be in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Yet they also
know that even from the point of view of narrow Jewish
self-interest, the addition of the Arab populations of Judea,
Samaria and Gaza to the Jewish state will pose demographic and
political threats to its Jewishness. Many Israeli Jews are also
concerned with the principle of ruling another people that does
not want to be part of a Jewish Israel.
The Palestinian Arabs have their ambivalences. As a group, they
are as firm as ever in their belief in their historic right to
all of Falastin, and that, except for the very small number of
descendents of the old Jewish minority in the country, the Jews
are interlopers in illegal possession of Palestinian Arab land.
On the other hand they know they cannot defeat Israel in the
foreseeable future and at most can hope to acquire a separate
state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. But they are not
at all certain that they should settle for such a state and
certainly have doubts as to whether they should settle for
anything less. Many of them are also perturbed by the
possibility of losing the benefits of over twenty years of
Israeli rule which have helped them define a Palestinian identity
as separate from that of Jordan and other Arabs and a level of
freedom and prosperity unequaled anywhere in the Arab world
outside of Lebanon in its good days.
The Kingdom of Jordan, with its Hashemite ruler, is equally
ambivalent. In the years since the Six-Day War, Jordan east of
the river has made considerable progress in nation and
state-building under Hashemite leadership. Should it risk that
progress by seeking to reclaim the West Bank with its hundreds of
thousands of self-assertive Palestinians who may constitute a
threat to the Kingdom of Jordan and its present Hashemite
identity no less (and perhaps more) than they would to the State
of Israel and its Jewish identity? On the other hand, can Jordan
abandon that territory and any presence in Jerusalem which raises
it from a small kingdom to the custodian of major Muslim holy
places?
Each of these ambivalences has brought deep divisions within each
community and years of political paralysis in their wake.
Periodically, windows of opportunity for peace have opened; to
date none have been sufficient.
Searching for a Solution
Renewed activity in the search for a solution to the problem of
who should rule where in Eretz Israel/Palestine has given new
impetus to the search for a solution to the conflict between
Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan. The resolution of the
problem of who governs where and what in Eretz Israel/Palestine
requires that the world recognize what all the parties to the
conflict do, that the land which stretches from the Mediterranean
to the eastern desert is one. It is presently shared by Israel,
the Jewish state to the west, and Jordan, an Arab state to the
east, with a strip of territory roughly in between whose future
is unsettled. The territory in dispute is inhabited principally
by Palestinian Arabs and increasingly by a Jewish minority.
Years ago, Moshe Dayan stated, "We must recognize the fact that
we have two peoples living in the same land, each desirous of
preserving its own national and cultural integrity."1 However the
Land of Israel and the two peoples are defined, few thoughtful
people disagree with such a statement. In essence, this is the
problem whose solution is the key to peace in the area. How can
two peoples who are fated to live in physical proximity create a
life together that will enable them to preserve their respective
national and cultural integrities? This question has taken on new
significance as the pace of the peacemaking process in the Middle
East increases.
The conventional responses to the question have been either
unification of the land under the government of one of the
parties to the dispute with the other becoming a permanent
minority or partition into two or three separate states. Since
1967, there have been strong voices raised in Israel on behalf of
unification through "absorption" of the territories occupied by
Israel in response to Jordanian aggression. There have been
other strong voices raised on behalf of repartition of the land
west of the Jordan River, whether through a complete Israeli
withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, a withdrawal with "minor
territorial adjustments," or a major redrawing of the boundaries
along the lines of the Allon Plan. This conventional response has
failed to bring peace. It must be replaced by a very different
response involving sharing rather than separatism, federalism
rather than partition. When all is said and done, federalism
involves the combination of self-rule and shared rule, an
arrangement where two or more peoples or polities find it
necessary and desirable to live together within some kind of
constitutional framework that will allow all the parties to
preserve their respective integrities while securing peace and
stability through power-sharing in those spheres where it is
necessary.
Quite clearly, any suggestions for a solution to the problem of
the territories must be predicated upon the resolution of certain
larger political and socio-psychological problems. At the same
time, the prevailing conditions regarding the possibilities for
peace can be summarized as follows:
All parties agree that some kind of settlement is necessary
and desirable in the wake of the intifada and the PLO peace
initiatives.
The suspicions and mistrust between Israel and the Arabs will
only begin to diminish significantly some time in the future
even if a settlement is achieved now.
At the very least, the security situation will require that
Israel retain military control over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza
for an indefinite period while the political situation
requires that the Palestinian Arabs acquire meaningful
control over their own destiny as a collectivity.
Any realistic settlement will have to provide ever-widening
options for the political normalization of the relationship
between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
Aside from any other considerations, these four conditions rule
out simply returning the territories to Jordanian (or Egyptian)
rule. They also seem to rule out any unilateral Israeli action
to incorporate the territories into the Jewish State without
providing some means of self-determination for their Arab
inhabitants. Nor is an entirely separate Palestinian state west
of the Jordan River a reasonable option. For Israel, it could
not help but be a nest for continued terrorist activity.
One need only consider the situation in Ireland to understand
why. The Irish Republic has no interest in encouraging trouble
in Northern Ireland. On the contrary, the Irish government would
like to avoid trouble. Even so, with all the goodwill in the
world, it cannot prevent the IRA from using Eire as a staging
ground for terrorist activities in Ulster, and a haven afterwards
except, perhaps, through draconian measures that would be
intolerable for its own citizens.
Even a responsibly led Palestinian state, if independent, could
not be expected to have nearly the same desire for peace as Eire,
and would be even less able to control its "crazies." Such a
state would be small and poor in relation to its neighbors and
would therefore be extremely vulnerable to extremist control.
A two-state arrangement confined to the western third of the
original Land of Israel has its drawbacks for the Palestinians as
well. Today, at least half of the Palestinians in the land live
in Jordan, so such an arrangement would permanently divide the
Palestinians rather than unite them.
The solution mooted in some quarters is the creation of a
"Palestine" entity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which
would then be linked with Jordan in some kind of federal
relationship (federation or confederation) in which Israel
would have no integral role. This would do little to solve the
fundamental problem of terrorism anymore than did full Jordanian
control between 1948 and 1967.
Both King Hussein and President Ronald Reagan have proposed such
a federal solution and Yasser Arafat has endorsed it as leader of
the PLO. This plan was designed as an alternative between the
PLO aim, as stated in its 1964 covenant, of an entirely
independent Palestinian state in those territories as a beginning
toward the establishment of Palestinian rule over the entire
country, including both Israel and Jordan, and the position of
the present Israeli government to remain in the territories in
dispute so that all of the land west of the Jordan River will be
linked to the Jewish state and all that east of the Jordan within
an Arab state, whether under Hashemite rule or ruled by its
Palestinian majority. Under such a plan Israel would have no
formal status in the territories it transfers and will have to
rely on treaties to protect its security. While any solution
will require major concessions by both sides, the concessions
demanded of Israel to date are so great that the likelihood of
obtaining Israeli agreement is minimal. Moreover, it would place
the West Bank Palestinians in jeopardy and hence would be
unacceptable to them.
If there is an advance in the current discussions over previous
American plans, it has to do with the formal affirmation of the
need for federal linkage at least between Jordan and the
Palestinians. When he was Israel's prime minister, Menachem
Begin suggested a confederation between Israel west of the Jordan
and Jordan to the east with autonomy for the Palestinians, a
proposal that apparently has Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's
support as well. Shimon Peres has long preferred a federal
solution although he often speaks of repartition. King Hussein's
federal proposals preceded the Reagan federal option by a decade
and PLO leader Yasser Arafat has acquiesced to a confederal
arrangement with Jordan, however reluctantly. Thus all parties
to the dispute have come to recognize that a federal solution of
one kind or another is necessary to break out of the impasse.
Each of the federal solutions put on the table to date by each of
the parties involved, lacks appropriate recognition of one of the
three publics within the land. Thus Reagan and Hussein would
have excluded Israel from an integral relationship to their
proposed federation while Begin excluded the Palestinians except
to the extent that they would have autonomy within Israel. At
least until recently, the PLO excluded both Israel and Jordan in
its long-term projection, intending to absorb both in its
proposed Palestinian state. Any successful plan must include all
three; thus the existing plans are all inadequate as proposed.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, through its Institute
for Federal Studies, has long since recognized this fundamental
truth, and has been advocating exploration of federal
arrangements involving some combination of self-rule and shared
rule to link all three parties, since its founding in 1976.2
Early in 1977, we identified eleven possible options for a
federal solution and from time to time we have put forth one of
those options or some combination of options for public
consideration. While they attracted attention among influential
circles, the time was not viewed as ripe for moving past limited
goals such as autonomy. Today we believe that the time is right.
Certainly, Israeli thinking about possible solutions to the
problem has been stimulated in new directions because of Israel's
dilemma with regard to the future of the territories.
On one hand, few Israelis wish to be colonial rulers over a large
mass of Arabs even if that were possible on more than an interim
basis. Moreover, most Israelis recognize the seriousness of
the demographic problem involved in simply absorbing those Arabs
into an expanded Israel. On the other hand, the self-same
Israelis are deeply concerned about the security problems
inherent in any reduction of the Israeli presence in the
territories, not to speak of the widespread Jewish sense of
historical ties to a region which was the classic heartland of
ancient Israel, one in which the name of almost every town
evokes biblical allusions. Looming over the Israelis' dilemma is
the intransigence of all of the Arabs, Palestinian or others, to
concede any future role to Israel in the territories beyond a
limited interim period, a position clearly unacceptable to all
but the tiniest percentage of Israeli Jews.
Looking Toward Federalism
A solution based on federal principles is one that combines
self-rule (or self-government) and shared rule (or federal
government) over the territories in dispute between the Jewish
and Arab states and in connection with those people, the
Palestinians, who represent the nub of the problem. However
difficult this is of achievement, it is the only possible outcome
which has a chance of success. A move in this direction, we
would suggest, requires a recognition by all parties of
the failure of the exclusive sovereignty model to provide the basis
for an acceptable solution to the problem of Judea, Samaria and
Gaza.
The use of the term "federal" in this context brings us back to
its ancient origins, first in the biblical term brit, then the
Latin foedus (both literally "covenant"), from which the modern
"federal" is derived. The original use of the term deals with
contractual linkages that involve power sharing -- among
individuals, among groups, among states.3 The usage is more
appropriate than the definition of modern federation, which
represents only one aspect of the federal idea and one
application of the federal principle.
Federal arrangements embody legal and structural elements, but
they do so in order to achieve power sharing, and to maintain and
enhance pluralism in some sense. they are not designed for the
sake of these elements. The legal and structural arrangements
are part of a governmental technology meant to achieve certain
political goals; they are not ends in themselves.4
West Asia, the original home of the federal principle dating back
to the tribal federations of Israelite times, as part of the
Middle East, so far has proved rather inhospitable to modern
federalism. Almost every attempt at federation in the Middle
East has failed. The only one currently extant is the United
Arab Emirates, the federation of the oil sheikhdoms in the
Persian Gulf. It works because it is a confederation (not a
federation) of emirs rather than of peoples. This inhospitality
to federation does not mean that all forms of federalism would be
equally unacceptable in the region. What is required is a
consideration of the other possibilities inherent in the federal
idea.5
Federalism is far more than modern federation or confederation.
There is a range and variety of federal principles and
arrangements available for our consideration. At one extreme
there are unions such as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland which utilize federative principles to grant a
measure of local autonomy to Scotland, Wales, and Ulster while
giving them a real share in the union government. There are
consociational arrangements as in the Netherlands which, when
given a contractual base, involve federal principles. There are
associated state arrangements such as those between India and
Bhutan, in which bothparties retain their political sovereignty
and federacies such as the United States and Puerto Rico where
sovereignty is shared. There are special functional links that
involve federative arrangements, as in the case of the Benelux
countries, although they do not lead to federation or
confederation. Even leagues such as NATO, if they are
sufficiently binding, involve applications of the federal
principle and, in a very different way, so do condominiums as in
the case of Spain, France, and Andorra.
All of the foregoing are principally political expressions of the
federal principle. All have their parallel in the economic
realm. A parallel of federation can be seen in the European
Economic Community. Common markets can be seen as parallels to
confederations, and customs unions resemble associated state
arrangements. Free trade areas are forms of leagues. Joint
enterprises represent the equivalent of special functional links.
The guild system is an economic version of consociationalism and
joint stock companies are, in effect, condominiums.
So we have options, not only in the political but also in the
economic realm. Sometimes they are merged and linked. The
United States is both an economic community and a political
federation. In some cases, they are quite separable, and the
economic link is not paralleled by a political link. If we were
to look, we would find parallels in religious organizations and
in other forms of social organization as well.
There are also varieties of arrangements and ways in which
federal systems of one kind or another are structured. For
example, there are federal systems that are simple matrices --
the United States, Canada and Switzerland -- composed of
constitutionally equal constituent units with an over-arching
government in which inequalities are so dispersed that the matrix
remains whole. There are heartland-borderland federal
arrangements such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics --
to the extent that its federal system is meaningful; the
borderlands are the ethnic republics, and the heartland is the
Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic.
There are two-unit federations, a difficult form, but one that
exists in a limited way in Czechoslovakia. There are associated
state relationships, such as Denmark and the Faroe Islands, in
which the links are asymmetrical. There are condominiums such as
Andorra. The variety of arrangements is such that the
combination of self-rule and shared rule, the basic elements in
any federal arrangement, can be achieved in a number of different
ways.
Even the precedents offer us great range. Of the 160 plus
"sovereign" states in the world today only ten or eleven are
ethnically homogeneous, according to Ivo Duchacek, the primary
student of the subject.6 The over 150 that are ethnically
heterogeneous must reach some kind of intergroup accommodation
within them. For some, the "accommodation" is simply to
exterminate the ethnic minorities. For others it is to forcibly
assimilate them. Still others encourage and foster multi-ethnic
societies. Some kind of accommodation, however, some way of
coping with this situation, is a requisite on the world scene
today. The homogeneous nation-state embracing a population of
individual citizens undivided by permanent group ties, which was
the goal of the sovereignty movement as it grew out of the
European context, has simply not been achieved, nor is it likely
to be in the foreseeable future.
Fifty-eight of those states are involved in some sixty different
arrangements involving federal principles in some way to
accommodate this heterogeneity. Seventeen are federations.
Aside from those federal arrangements conventionally understood,
examples include the U.S.-Puerto Rican model (a federacy or
associated state arrangement), the model of Scotland within the
United Kingdom, with its legal-religious-administrative
constitutional home rule; what has emerged once again in
Catalonia and the Basque region in Spain -- namely autonomous
regional government; the kind of arrangement that prevails
between Finland and the Aaland Islands -- a constitutionally
independent county within its framework; the tri-partite
linguistic regions into which Belgium is divided; and the
autonomous provinces within the republics of Yugoslavia.7
Most of the foregoing are relatively well established examples of
the combination of self-rule and shared rule arrangements. More
recently there have emerged some new expressions of the federal
principle. I have already mentioned the European Community,
originally an economic league, now a political-economic
confederation. There is also the example of Chandigar in India,
a Union Territory (federal district) which serves simultaneously
as the capital of two states, Punjab and Haryana. Its buildings
are literally divided in half, so that on each floor one wing
houses a particular function serving Punjab, and the other wing
the parallel functions serving Haryana. There is the
relationship between the German Federal Republic and West Berlin,
in which West Berlin is nominally an occupied area but, in fact,
functions as an associated state of the German Federal Republic.
The West Berlin legislature automatically adopts the legislation
of the Federal Republic that relates to it, so as to function as
part of the larger whole. There are also the consociational
arrangements of the Netherlands, or even such phenomena as the
situation in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, whereby the
state serves as the governmental authority on one plane, and the
tribal authorities function on another -- a de facto, unwritten
arrangement that has acquired constitutional status and can only
be changed in any way by convening a shura, a kind of tribal
constituent assembly.
If there are over 160 states in the world, there are over 3,000
different ethnic and tribal groups that have a clear group
identity and consciousness.8 As Duchacek suggests, quite
correctly, few of them will have politically "sovereign" states
of their own, even if the tendency towards micro-states and
mini-states continues. The ratio is simply too great. Those
that will survive modernization (and some of them will not) will
no doubt seek some form of accommodation. They almost inevitably
will turn to federal arrangements if they possibly can.
The general problem of democracy versus nationalism in this
region complicates any exploration of federal options. By and
large, federal options have been viable where nationalism has
been democratic in its basic orientation. Where democracy is not
an integral part of nationalism, other problems are posed,
because one of the major contributions that federalist options
worthy of the name have to offer -- namely, the democratic
element -- is not considered a value by those who emphasize the
national element above all. This fact is well illustrated by the
reaction of the Arab world to almost all suggestions for
federation or autonomy that have been made. Others have made the
point that it is not surprising that the suggestion of democratic
self-rule to one segment of the Arab world, where the other
segments do not even seek it, falls on deaf ears. Certainly, the
fact that Israel and the Arab states surrounding it do not share
compatible regimes in that sense has strong implications for the
kinds of federal solutions that bear serious examination.
The Problem of Sovereignty
In general, the Middle East is suffering from a devastating
problem of overemphasis on political sovereignty. The Middle
East is, by its nature or its history, a mosaic of populations.
It is not an area easily divided into nation-states -- certainly
not ethno-religiously homogeneous ones, as assumed by the
original European model of nationalism.
Earlier attempts to govern the region have taken two forms.
There have been periods in which the Middle East has been broken
up into small national states. These have been eras of conflict.
There have also been eras in which the Middle East has been under
imperial rule. A great empire has been able to impose its will,
and if that empire wisely used such techniques as providing for
cultural autonomy within it, there was peace -- but peace, of
course, on an imperial basis; certainly not peace on a democratic
or republican basis.
At other times, imperial peace was organized around
ethno-religious communities -- millets -- granted internal
autonomy by the imperial authorities on a communal and
non-geographic basis, and capitulations whereby one power would
be granted extra-territorial rights in relation to its subjects
within the territory of another.
In the particular situation of Israel, the Palestinians, and
Jordan it should be apparent that there is an utter necessity for
inventing new devices that meet contemporary democratic and
nationalist standards, that reinforce the kinds of flexible
arrangements which the millet and capitulation systems once
provided. Today it is not a question of outsiders having special
status in the region, but rather of the peoples of the region
being able to work out special status arrangements for each other
across national boundaries, without eliminating either the
boundaries or the peoples.
This is the task of political invention that lies before us. We
can do no more than learn from the precedents; we cannot
transplant them to western Asia. This region is unique, and will
have to develop its own unique political inventions, just as
Europe and the Western Hemisphere had to develop theirs. While
recently we have seen signs of daring leadership, it is open to
question as to whether that daring leadership is also creative
leadership -- in the sense of being politically inventive. That
is not to fault the specific people involved. There have been
very few moments in history when political leadership has been
able to achieve great political inventions.
So here we have the problematics of a federal solution. Israel
is substantially attuned to some such solution at this moment,
but everybody says -- properly -- "first you need a partner."
And the problem of finding a partner is the problem of resolving
the contradictions between democratic expectations and modern
nationalism in its classic Third World manifestations.
There are also certain additional difficulties. Both Israeli
Jews and Palestinian Arabs have diasporas to which they are
strongly linked and to whom they wish to remain linked. Moreover,
both Jews and Arabs are world peoples. The Arab Nation in its
various manifestations is a world people, linked additionally to
the Moslem world. The Jewish People, small though it is, is also
a world people. Even if we confine our efforts to the historic
land of the twelve tribes from the Mediterranean to the eastern
desert, we are not limiting matters entirely to the people within
pre-1967 Israel plus the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. We must
consider their relationships to the two world peoples, whose
concerns stretch beyond the immediate country or even the region
under consideration. Hence, there are clear limits at this point
to the possible levels of linkage.
Moreover, within the Arab world, loose linkages that allow for
respective national and political aspirations in general have
done better than efforts to create tight linkages. For different
reasons, the same has been true within the Jewish people. Thus,
there are some curiously symmetrical as well as asymmetrical
elements in our situation.
Another factor of great importance is that we are confronted with
different political cultures, one of which seems to be quite open
to power sharing, even quite committed to it, and the other quite
resistant. In sum, the peoples involved are in some respects too
similar and in some respects too different for easy linkage.
All of the foregoing possibilities and questions are explored in
the following pages. This book is written from an unabashedly
Israeli position. My first concern is the security of Israel.
At the same time I understand that Israel's security rests upon
achieving a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians that will
provide them with a sufficiently just outcome, one that they can
live with in the freedom and happiness that comes with
self-government.
In biblical times, Israel gave the world the federal principle
and was the first recorded experiment in federal polity. The
scene of the federalist revolution in the world has once again
shifted back to western Asia, and the larger Middle Eastern
region of which it is a part. The fate of this land is but one
of the major issues requiring federalist responses in the region.
The necessity for action is now clear to one and all. The tools
for action are available, and now the ingredients to initiate
action are here as well. For the first time in two generations,
the possibilities are here for us to achieve the historic task
that is set before us.
Notes
1. Moshe Dayan stated this frequently in speeches and other oral
communications. For the most comprehensive statement of his
position, see Moshe Dayan, Shall the Sword Devour Forever
(Jerusalem: Edanim, 1981) (Hebrew); Nathan Yanai, ed., Moshe
Dayan on Peace and Israel's Future (Jerusalem: Mininstry of
Defense and Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1988) (Hebrew).
2. A list of the JCPA publications in the field can be found in
the Bibliography.
3. For an overview of this theme, see Daniel J. Elazar and John
Kincaid, Workshop in Covenant and Politics Prospectus
(Philadelphia: Center for the Study of Federalism, 1979).
4. Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (University, Alabama:
University of Alabama Press, 1987), pp. 80-114.
5. On the United Arab Emirates and federal experiences in the
Middle East, see Ali Mohammed Kalifa, The United Arab Emirates:
Unity in Fragmentation (London: Croom Helm; Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1979); Gabriel Ben-Dor, Federalism in the Arab
World (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Federal Studies, 1978);
John Hearty, "Federalism in the United Arab Emirates: A Case
Study of Regional Integration" (Washington, D.C.: George
Washington University); "Federalism-Arab" in Yaakov Shimoni and
Eviator Levin, ed., Political Lexicon of the Middle East in the
Twentieth Century, Rev. ed. (Tel Aviv, 1974) (Hebrew) p. 291.
6. Ivo Duchacek, ed., Federalism and Ethnicity, a special issue
of Publius 7:4 (1977).
7. Daniel J. Elazar, et al. A Handbook of Federal and Autonomy
Arrangements (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
forthcoming).
8. Ivo Duchacek, op. cit.
