What is to Prevent a Federal Solution?
Two Peoples--One Land:
Federal Solutions for Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan
Daniel J. Elazar
If the ideas presented in the foregoing chapters are so good and
the approach so reasonable, why have the parties to the conflict
not embraced them already? In part, of course, it is because
rational solutions are not necessarily practical ones in the real
world of political conflict. More than one people has preferred
protracted conflict to surrendering cherished hopes,
expectations, or ways. More than one nation has opted for
misgovernment by their own kind rather than better government
involving outsiders. Politics generally is far more a matter of
managing symbols and emotions than in proposing abstract rational
plans. If that is generally so, how much more so is it in the
case of intense political conflict of the kind that has engaged
Jews and Arabs in this land at least since World War I.
Symbolic and Emotional Demands1
A major obstacle to a federal solution is its failure to meet the
symbolic and emotional demands of one or another of the parties,
right now, principally the Palestinians. Since the beginning of
the Zionist enterprise, the Palestinians have insisted on their
dream of removing Israel and the Zionists entirely from their
midst and gaining political control over the entire land. That
is one of the major reasons why the various proposals for federal
solutions in the inter-war period made by one or another Zionist
leader across the entire spectrum from Hashomer Hatzair on the
left to the Revisionists on the right were rejected by the
Palestinian Arabs, who were simply unwilling to compromise in any
way, manner or form. That is why they also rejected the
Peel Commission recommendations for partition in 1937 and
the United Nations partition plan in 1947.
Only now are there serious signs that some segment of the
Palestinian population and leadership are willing to give up
their cherished dream, at least to relegate it to the status of a
vision for the end of time rather than a practical political
platform upon which to base the continuation of the "armed
struggle," as they call it. Many of those Palestinian moderates
are now speaking in terms of a confederation, either between
Palestine and Jordan, or between Palestine and Israel, or linking
all three. But even they are essentially demanding Palestinian
statehood first and foremost, with confederation as something of
a cosmetic cover that will give them an opportunity to have what
they see as their cake and eat it too.
It is for this reason that the Israeli hardliners reject federal
solutions since they are not convinced that the Palestinians are
prepared for real peace with Israel based on the abandonment of
their dream. They are not willing to risk giving the
Palestinians anything like statehood, even in a controlled
context, believing, like the Palestinians, that the federal
framework will be at most cosmetic, thus posing an intolerable
risk to Israel and for many of them what is more important,
forcing Israel to cut its connections with part of historic Eretz
Israel.
In a curious but understandable way there seems to be greater
understanding of Palestinian aspirations among Israeli hardliners
than among the moderates, in the sense that the hardliners can
put themselves in the Palestinians' place and assume that what
the Palestinians are seeking is what they would be seeking in the
same situation, namely a separate state. Thus, rather than
treating the apparent willingness on the part of an increasing
number of Palestinians to compromise on the issue as a starting
point, to be brought along further through negotiations, they
treat it as the absolute "bottom-line" position, rejecting both a
separate state and any negotiations with those who advocate it.
On the other hand, those hardliners raise another obstacle having
to do with the symbols of statehood. The Israeli government has
been adamantly opposed to granting the Palestinians any symbols
of statehood, ranging from flying a Palestinian flag to using the
term "state" in the designation of their entity. The
Palestinians, on the other hand, seek the maximum in symbolic
satisfaction to the point where the symbols may play more of a
role than the reality. If a federal solution is to be reached it
will have to include appropriate symbolic satisfaction for the
Palestinians. It will require an Israeli reassessment of its
fears. In an age, when every football club, not to speak of
every city, has its own flag and song, and where there are more
than twice as many states within federations known by that term
or a symbolically equivalent one than there are internationally
recognized politically sovereign states, it need not be that
difficult but it will be.
Timing
A second factor is timing. In politics, timing is of the
essence. The best idea coming at the wrong time is doomed to be
rejected. Among the options proposed in the previous chapter are
several that could have worked had the timing been right but
which now are no longer viable because their time has come and
gone. More than that, where there is more than one separate
party involved, the timing of all must be synchronized if there
is to be resolution of the conflicts between them.2
The history of the conflict between the Israelis and the
Palestinians has been punctuated by unsynchronized timing. To
give only a few examples, when the Jews were prepared for
partition between 1937 and 1947, the Arabs were not and the
partition plan failed. When the Jews were reconciled to a state
within the boundaries established by the 1949 armistice
agreements, leaving the rest of western Palestine in Jordanian or
Egyptian hands, the Arabs were not and launched the Six-Day War
which ended that status quo. Now, when a growing number of
Palestinians seem to be ready for partition, it is too late,
while those who would like to return to the status quo ante June
5, 1967, find that it is also too late.3 Today the signs are
very strong that all parties are converging on some kind of a
federal solution after having exhausted every other possibility,
which offers the hope that perhaps their timing can be
synchronized. Even now, unsynchronized timing is more likely
than anything else to prevent a solution of any kind, not only a
federal solution.
Political Culture
The third barrier to a solution is that of culture. It is
actually a two-fold barrier. Do the parties involved have a
political culture sufficiently open to federal solutions and
capable of living with them in the proper spirit of cooperation
and compromise? Are the cultures of the specific parties
involved sufficiently compatible to enable them to live together?
These are extremely difficult questions to answer, in theory as
well as in practice.4
Scholars of federalism generally agree that there is such a thing
as a federal political culture and that the most successful
federal systems are those whose population is informed by that
culture -- Switzerland, for example, or the United States. On
the other hand, there are successful federal experiments where
the people involved do not have a clearly federal political
culture but have a political culture that is sufficiently
predisposed to enable federal institutions to take root and
function. Not a single member state of the European Community,
for example, has what can be referred to as a clearly federal
political culture and, for that matter, none has a political
culture unambiguously sympathetic to cooperation and sharing.
Some have political cultures that are downright antithetical to
federalism -- France, for example. Others have mixtures in which
the antithetical elements have all too often been dominant --
Germany, for example. Others have tendencies towards anarchism
-- Spain, for example, -- or ethnic exclusivism -- Belgium, for
example. Even Britain and the Netherlands, the two countries
perhaps most predisposed, have rejected federalism at one time or
another in their histories, relying instead on a kind of mild
decentralization which seems suitable to their respective
political cultures. Nevertheless, the European Community is
developing well. It has moved forward from a league to a loose
confederation and is now about to become a more united
confederation, and has shown itself to be able to live with the
political cultural problems that it has inherited.
After all, culture, like everything else, changes, even if it
does so slowly, with great effort, and only under the right
circumstances. While culture is one of the most stable of human
forces, one that molds laws and institutions, it is also molded
by laws and institutions -- and circumstances.
Still, there are some political cultures which are unlikely to
ever be amenable to federal arrangements. Unfortunately, Arab
political culture seems at first glance to fall into this
category. Certainly, twentieth century experiments with
federalism in the Arab world have, with one exception, the United
Arab Emirates, all failed, if they ever went beyond paper
proclamations in the first place. Nor has the history of Arab
empire and state building suggested anything other than a very
hierarchical and personalistic approach to governing, both
antithetical to constitutionalized power-sharing. Arabic
political thought includes nothing that even approaches a theory
of federalism. Rather it tends to emphasize the realities of
hierarchical and personalized rule, more concerned with how
hierarchical rulers can be brought to be just than with how
ruling hierarchies can be constitutionally limited, not to speak
of being replaced by federal or confederal structures.5
That is not the whole story, however. Among Bedouin tribes there
is a kind of confederalism that is organic to their
interrelationships and necessary for the preservation of
inter-tribal peace. Scholars have studied Bedouin leagues and
confederations and have uncovered the elements that make them
possible including an interesting combination of the principles
of kinship and consent whereby tribal confederations are
justified through the identification of common ancestors, so that
all the tribes involved become, for example, the bani yakub or
bani yusuf (sons of Jacob or sons of Joseph).6
These Bedouin patterns were systematically surpressed with the
formation of the Arab empires, or, more recently, states whose
traditional hierarchical patterns were in modern times reinforced
by European conceptions of centralized statehood, convergent with
traditional ideas on the subject. Thus modern Arab states have
been notably centralized and hierarchical wherever they could be.
As noted above, the one exception is the United Arab Emirates, a
confederation labelled a federation. It is worth closer
examination, especially in the context of this discussion.7 The
UAE is essentially a Bedouin confederation in contemporary dress.
It is almost a personal union of sheikhs or, in its case, emirs.
Moreover, rather than erecting an extensive overarching
governmental structure, the confederal institutions are confined
to a few collegial bodies in which all of the rulers are
involved, while common tasks or functions are assigned to
different emirates to provide for all. The exceptions are where
the balance of power would be threatened, as in the case of the
armed forces where each emirate contributes its share to a
decentralized military force, or where sufficient confidence and
consensus have been established to allow the federal institutions
to actually carry out limited tasks.
More recently there have been some political thinkers in the Arab
and Islamic worlds that have advanced the idea that the Arabs are
by their very nature a federal nation, that is to say a single
nation divided into peoples and states without losing their
common nationhood. This view has deep historical roots as well
as contemporary manifestations and is, in its way, also an
extension of the Bedouin foundations of Arab society. Thus
Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis and others speak of themselves as
peoples within a common Arab nation. The names of their states
reflect this self-understanding, e.g., the Egyptian Arab
Republic, the Syrian Arab Republic. The history of the Arab
League and other efforts at joint action among the Arab states
reflects both the reality and the problematics of this
understanding. Like Bedouin tribes, Arab states will engage in
conflict with one another even to the point of war without losing
the sense that they are part of a common nation or umma, even as
they preserve their separate wataniya or peoplehood.8
What of the Palestinians in all of this? It is clear that
Palestinian nationalism as it has developed has not been to
create a separate Palestinian nation as distinct from the Arab
nation as a whole but to develop the separate identity of a
Palestinian people within the Arab nation. This dual identity is
legitimate within the context of Arab nationalism.
In theory this should predispose them toward federal solutions
but as we have seen the Arab nation itself has been unable to
create mechanisms to resolve its internal conflicts, much less
find a connection with non-Arabs. Indeed, Islamic doctrine
almost prevents anything other than a superior-subordinate
relationship with non-Muslims. Traditionally, Jews and
Christians may live in a Muslim society as dhimmi, protected
inferior peoples, because they are "peoples of the book," i.e.,
recognize scriptures holy to Islam, but they are not equals nor
are they potential partners in governance. Of necessity, federal
arrangements are based upon covenants or compacts. In Islam,
covenants are invariably hierarchical, regulating or regularizing
the relationship between superior and subordinate as in the
Covenant of Omar which established the status of the dhimmi.9
On the other hand, in more prosaic ways traditional Palestinian
society was highly decentralized, with each village essentially
self-contained within the context of whatever external rule was
imposed on the land. Rule was shared among the dominant hamulot
(clans) and leadership was in the hands of the heads of the
notable families. All adult males were part of the village
militia and could be called upon to defend village interests or
to war with adjacent targets of opportunity. As such they had a
share in village affairs.10
This system prevailed through the 1948 war and indeed was the
basis for Palestinian resistance to the establishment of the
Jewish state. It was effectively destroyed when the Palestinian
villages came under either Jordanian, Egyptian or Israeli rule.
The villagers were disarmed and more formal systems of local
government were introduced, embracing elements of the older
system only insofar as necessary.
In the interim, in Jordan, the oldest form of Arabic state rule
had been reconstituted in more modern form. The ruling Hashemite
family is the oldest ruling family in the Arab world and King
Hussein is very conscious of the family's past glories. Hashemite
consolidation of power in Jordan was based on the ability of
Hussein's grandfather, Abdullah, to win over the Bedouin tribes,
make them the basis of his army, and thus retain power even in
the face of the influx of Palestinian Arabs after 1948. Hussein
has continued in this tradition and Jordan in many respects is a
benign garrison state whose military character is hidden in the
trappings of Arab traditionalism.11
Where does that leave the possibility of a federal solution? As
Arabs, both the Palestinians and Hashemite Jordan are not
easily open to federal arrangements with non-Arabs, especially
since the latter are also non-Muslims. Hashemite Jordan will be
the toughest nut to crack, since the Palestinians do have a
certain tradition of informal power-sharing between village and
state. At the same time, semi-formal arrangements are not
entirely foreign to either and circumstances may be such that
appropriate institutions can be constructed that will not so
contradict the political culture of the Arabs involved as to be
doomed to fail.
What of the Israeli Jews? As Jews they come out of a long
tradition of federalism and a deeply federal political culture
going back to the Bible with its tribal federation and covenants.
Most diaspora Jewish communities were built on federal principles
preserving that political culture as an integral part of the
Jewish political experience. Elsewhere I have written of this at
length. Thus in terms of political heritage, Jews are
predisposed to constitutionalized power-sharing.12
Nevertheless, Israeli Jews confront a major problem in that the
Zionist movement drew so heavily from European sources,
particularly European conceptions of the centralized reified
state, that Zionism has fostered a monistic ideology even as it
built a movement on consociational principles which were
basically federal in character. So when it comes to political
relationships Israelis "think federal" while in their ideology of
statehood they are extremely monistic.13 The results are visible
within the Israeli polity in the dysfunctional relationship
between the formal state hierarchy and the highly individualistic
bargaining behavior of the Israelis -- even those within the
hierarchy.14 Relatively speaking, this is a modest and far from
insurmountable problem. In this case Jewish political culture is
a powerful force for overcoming ideology if circumstances
warrant.
Leadership
Yet another factor is leadership. All the favorable conditions
can be present and the timing right, yet without leadership bold
enough to take the necessary steps at the right moment, the
opportunity is lost. There is little question that without David
Ben-Gurion the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel would not have
accepted partition. It was his vision, authority, and power that
cut through the fears and reluctances of the people including
many of his closest and most influential colleagues. It was a
lack of the right kind of leadership on the Palestinian side that
brought them to disaster after disaster when they had the
advantage over the Jews.
Whether or not Israel, the Palestinians and Jordan will be
blessed with the right leadership at all and if so all at the
right time is an open question. In the last analysis, however,
it may be the most critical question of all. In political
affairs, public sentiment tends to be quite flexible, shifting as
leaders direct it, at least within very broad limits. People
take their cues from their political leaders, especially in
matters where they are not confident enough to make their own
critical judgements without outside points of reference. It is
true that there is a delicate interplay here between public
attitudes and the possibilities of leadership, but as we saw in
the case of the Israel-Egyptian peace, a dramatic gesture of
Sadat, fostered by prior quiet gestures by Menachem Begin,
transformed Israeli and Egyptian attitudes overnight. That is
leadership at its most powerful.
At the moment none of the recognized leaders of the three parties
has shown that he is capable of that kind of boldness, but even
that is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Political Will
Finally and perhaps most important of all, there is the matter of
will. As in anything else involving politics, the will to act or
not to act takes precedence over almost all other factors,
although it is clearly influenced by the others. Studies have
shown that the success or failure of federal arrangements depends
heavily on the presence or absence of the will to federate or the
ability to foster such a will. Indeed, federal arrangements may
depend more upon matters of will than some other forms of
political arrangement since such arrangements are in the last
analysis dependent upon the active consent of the parties
involved.
In the long history of the conflict over Eretz Israel/Palestine,
there have been literally dozens of proposals for federal
solutions, going back at least to 1917. None have gone beyond
the occasional pamphlet or meeting of do-gooders because there
has been no real will for such solutions, whether involving
federation, confederation, binational consociation,
cantonization, or what have you on the part of either side. Only
if that reality changes will the federal option become a serious
possibility.
To date not only has the will to federate not been present among
the parties but there has been a very strong contrary will,
particularly among the Palestinians. At this writing there seems
to be some change in that posture on the part of all three, again
particularly among certain Palestinians. That is the key to the
future.
The Demographic Problem
There are some very real objective ones as well. Perhaps first
and foremost is the demographic problem which works in both
directions. In the mid-1980s in all of western Eretz Israel,
Jews constituted 65 percent of the overall population and
non-Jews 35 percent. The latter, however, accounted for 55
percent of the natural increase, with Jews accounting for only 45
percent. That is not the whole story. The world over, as people
prosper, they have less children. Hence the fertility level
among the non-Jewish population has been declining rather rapidly
for a number of years following the natural processes familiar in
other parts of the world, while that among the Jews has
stabilized at a higher than expected level, reflecting some
measure of consciousness of Israel's need for more children.15
At least equally crucial as a variable is immigration and
emigration. For nearly two decades following the Six-Day War,
Arab emigration from the territories was continuous and
substantial as young Palestinians headed for the Arab oil states
and elsewhere in search of economic and career opportunities. In
the mid-1980s this process was reversed. The decline in oil
prices led to a decline in oil production, with a lessened need
for workers. In addition, the Gulf states decided that the
Palestinians were potential trouble-makers and preferred to
import more docile workers from the Indian subcontinent. Not
only did emigration slow, but there was a return of Palestinians
to the territories. Since the outbreak of the intifada, Arab
emigration again rose as some people seeking relief from the
disturbances turned elsewhere.16
On the Israeli side aliya (immigration) to Israel had slowed
considerably by the late 1970s, while yerida (emigration)
increased. Whereas emigration in the past consisted primarily of
earlier immigrants who either went back to their countries of
origin or on to try their luck in other countries, after the 1973
war, the principal source of emigration has been native-born
Israelis. Even according to the most cautious estimates, if all
the Jews who have left Israel since 1948 had remained, together
with their offspring, the current Jewish population would be at
least 15 percent and probably closer to 20 percent higher. This
situation had more or less stabilized by the mid-1980s. Then the
Soviet Union opened its doors and the great Soviet Jewish exodus
began, causing panic in the Arab world and suggesting to the Jews
that the Jewish majority in Eretz Israel would gain strength.17
In sum, there are too many variables to predict an Arab majority
west of the Jordan River as many of those advocating Israeli
withdrawal from the territories do. On the other hand, it is
unlikely that the Arab percentage of the population west of the
river will be less than what it is now. If all or most of those
Palestinians became Israeli citizens, as would have to be the
case if the territories were simply absorbed into a democratic
Israel, they would hold the balance of power in such a way that
Israel would be a binational state, demographically even if not
constitutionally.
On the one hand, this situation encourages Israel to find a way
to extricate itself from the dilemma of having to either rule
over a million and a half Palestinians in the territories without
removing itself entirely from the territories themselves, or to
incorporate them into their polity as full citizens along with
the territories. On the other hand, a federal solution, if not
properly designed, can end up linking Israel with an Arab
population larger than its Jewish population if Jordan is part of
the solution. Yet without Jordan most Israelis believe that too
much would have to be conceded in the way of separate statehood
to the Palestinians and Israel's security would be jeopardized.
Add to this the Palestinian refugees, at least some of whom would
find permanent homes in the territories west of the Jordan River,
and the demographic issue takes on additional force. No doubt
the refugee issue will be of major concern in any negotiations.
Under what conditions, if any, will Israel allow any refugees to
permanently cross the river from east to west?
The Influence of the Palestinians on the Israeli Arabs
We are already seeing what is in effect the binationalization of
the Land of Israel demographically through the growth of the Arab
population west of the Jordan and politically through the
reawakening of Palestinian consciousness among Israeli Arabs.
Many Israeli Arabs now have four identities: Israeli,
Palestinian, Arab, and, for most of them, Islamic as well.18
Since 1967, the Palestinian Arab leadership in the West Bank
has come to set the tone for an increasing number of Israeli
Arabs. There are those Palestinians who see this as a positive
good. It is their view that, in the long run, the reunification
of Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the old "green line" and
the Arabs' favorable balance in the population growth rate means
that within a generation or two the Palestinian Arabs will reach
parity with the Israeli Jews and will begin to surpass them in
numbers, at which time they could make their move toward
regaining control over all of "Falastin."
whatever the value of these long-term prospects, the younger
generation of Palestinians is not prepared to wait.
Elimination of the "Green Line" has affected Palestinian Arabs on
both sides in three areas: Nationalist institutions have emerged
to link Palestinians on both sides of the former border. New
channels of communication have developed, especially through the
East Jerusalem press whose newspapers are circulated throughout
the land. In recent years these newspapers have increased their
coverage of Israeli Arab affairs. Finally, both groups now share
common political symbols.19 This has been fostered by the growth
in Palestinian Arab educational attainment. In the first fifteen
years after 1967, the high school population in the territories
increased by 108 percent while the general population increased
by only 23 percent. This growth has continued. Proportionately,
more Palestinian students pass the Jordanian and Egyptian
matriculation exams than Israeli students pass the Israeli
equivalent.
Under Jordanian rule the West Bank was not allowed to develop any
universities. Under Israel's rule six have been established
along with nineteen other post-secondary institutions recognized
by the West Bank Committee for Higher Education. Altogether they
have well over 20,000 students, a post-secondary student
population proportionately almost as large as Israel's and far
greater than that of France or Britain. This is the highest
proportion of post-secondary students in the Arab Middle East.
This drive for education is paralleled among the Israeli Arabs.
Whereas in 1970 less than 30 percent of the Israeli Arabs
eligible attended high school, in the early 1980s over half of
those eligible did so. This tide has now gone on to Israel's
universities, helped by the fact that Israeli Arabs do not have
to serve in the Israeli army.
It is these students who form the militant cadres in the
territories who have taken the lead in the intifada, and in the
Arab villages in the Galilee and the Little Triangle. Indeed, the
correlation is so clear that in many cases students have marched
out en bloc from their classrooms to stone Israeli cars and
buses. These students have their choice of four frameworks for
activism -- the shabiba or youth committees for social work, a
youth movement aligned with the Fatah mainstream in the PLO (the
scout movement is also under Fatah's control); the Palestinian
Communist party's Federation of Secondary School Students, with
its youth committees for voluntary work; the youth movements of
the more radical factions in the PLO including George Habash's
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Naif Hawatmeh's
Democratic Front. Finally there are the Muslim fundamentalist
youth movements that have become so powerful in the Gaza District
and have grown in power in Judea and Samaria. At least three of
these divisions overlap into the ranks of the Israeli Arabs --
the Communist youth federation; the youth movement of the
Progressive List for Peace, the PLO-front organization; and the
fundamentalist youth movements.
The West Bank universities are not only hotbeds of Palestinian
nationalism but of fundamentalism as well. The first campus
Islamic bloc was formed at Al-Najah University in Nablus, the
West Bank's largest, in 1979 at the time of the Khoumeni
revolution in Iran. Hebron University, as a sharia college
specializing in Islamic law and letters, developed a strong
fundamentalist component from the first while the Islamic
University in Gaza, founded in 1979, was entirely fundamentalist
from its founding. By 1982, Islamic blocs had been established
in at least ten other institutions of higher education in the
territories. In six they controlled the student bodies. After
1983, Islamic fundamentalists began to lose ground because the
rest of Palestinian society did not respond to them, but they
have remained a powerful force, as seen in the intifada.
Not only is a federal solution not likely to please these
extremists but it will put Israel in a position of having to deal
with them or, at the very least, their influence among the Arabs
within the pre-1967 borders. This is not a pleasant prospect
although it is a necessary risk.
Palestinians' Fears of Jordan (and Vice-Versa)
Another problem that is often overlooked is the degree of
animosity between the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab
world, including and especially Jordan. By and large the
Palestinians feel abandoned and persecuted by their Arab
brethren. In fact, the forging a separate Palestinian identity
is in great part due to the response of other Arabs to the
Palestinians' plight and the unwillingness of the other Arab
states to absorb them or even to treat them well, or to support
their cause beyond a certain minimum.
Moreover, from time to time the other Arab states including
Jordan have attacked and persecuted the Palestinians on the
grounds that the Palestinian agitation for a return to Falastin
was leading to agitation against the other Arab regimes. Nor are
the Arabs wide of the mark on this. Jordan, in particular, has
much to fear since the Palestinians have made no secret that they
believe that it constitutes eastern Palestine. King Hussein has
been highly sensitive to any nuance of movement among the
Palestinians living in his kingdom and has reacted swiftly,
surely and brutally against same.
It is in Israel's interest to link any settlement with the
Palestinians to a joint Palestinian-Jordanian arrangement. But
it is not necessarily to the Palestinians' liking, although they
have indicated that they would accept such an arrangement if they
had no choice. So, while not insurmountable, this very practical
matter constitutes another barrier that must be overcome.
On the other hand, it may also offer possibilities for an
Israel-Palestinian agreement without Jordan, should the Israelis
be prepared to accept that. The Palestinians frequently suggest
that they are the "Jews of the Arab world," persecuted by their
brethren as the Jews have been in the past by the West. To date,
they have not convinced the Jews of this, in part because of
their not-so-hidden hostility toward the Jewish presence in what
they claim as their land.
Settlers and Borders
Another problem is that of borders. As indicated in Chapter 3,
there are federal options which could make this question
irrelevant, but they are the least likely to be acceptable at
this stage of the game. Those that are likely to be acceptable
will require the demarcation of borders, which means that Israel
and the Palestinians will have to come to an agreement as to
where the borders will be, even if they are to be open borders as
would be expected in any of the federal solutions being
discussed.
The drawing of borders in this case is, in the last analysis, a
zero-sum game. One side gains and the other side loses. Indeed,
the introduction of federal arrangements is principally a means
to prevent the zero-sum game from being the only game, that is to
say, to compensate for the zero-sum aspects of border delineation
by creating rights beyond the borders in question. A federal
solution can be seen as one that makes possible the sharing of
territorial rights, even if one party to it has primary rights
and the other secondary ones. The borders to be drawn will not
fully satisfy either side, but they will not only be open under
the terms of the federal arrangement but each side will have
rights across its primary borders in the larger territory of the
federal entity.
This brings up the question of how such rights would be made
operational and protected: Who will have access to what? Under
what conditions? The matter of Jewish settlers will be an issue
for the Arabs. Jordan continues to exclude Jews from living
within its boundaries, while the Palestinians now have a large
number of Jewish settlements in their midst, with a substantial
population, which have to be accommodated one way or another.
Israel does not want to take back Palestinian refugees. The
Palestinians are uncomfortable with Jewish settlers in their
midst. The settlers do not want to be under Palestinian or any
other Arab rule. In each of these cases the tendency is to
insist on a win-lose solution when what is needed is a win-win
arrangement, which is what federalism offers.
Power-Sharing and Sovereignty
Any arrangement requires an institutional framework to make it
operational. In a federal arrangement the institutional
framework will involve power-sharing. In the case of this
conflict, the question is: What kind of power-sharing? In
connection with what functions? And over which people and
territories?
Will only the territories in dispute be subject to power-sharing
or will power-sharing extend to Israel and Jordan as well, at
least for some purposes? One assumes that there will have to be
different degrees of power-sharing, and they will have to be
determined in negotiations among partners who seek to make the
fewest concessions with regard to their territories and acquire
the most with regard to the others. What rights will Israeli
Jews, Palestinian and Jordanian Arabs have in each other's
primary territories? How will they relate to their own primary
territories if they are living outside the territorial borders
but within the confederation? What kind of access will they
have, daily and long-term? In other words, who will be able to
work, move and settle where? What about Jews and Palestinian
Arabs in the two diasporas outside of the land?
How will shared functions be administered? Who will determine
what is to be shared? Take the issue of water resources. Will
Jews and Arabs have an equal vote? If there is a three-unit
confederation, will there be three votes -- Jordan, Palestine and
Israel -- which will leave Israel at risk of being left
permanently in the minority on difficult issues. The control of
security would be another serious problem, although perhaps less
serious than some of the apparently more mundane issues that are
connected with the "sense of sovereignty." In each of these and
functional questions there will have to be very hard bargaining
and the resolution of each puts the whole enterprise at risk.
Jerusalem is seen by most observers to pose the most difficult
potential problem. In that case, federal solutions can be said
to offer the only real opportunity to find a way out of the
dilemma of who has what kind of presence in that city.
Finally, there is the issue of "sovereignty." Were all parties
to the conflict not addicted to modern European and post-modern
Third World notions of exclusive political sovereignty, this
would not be a difficult issue to resolve, but, alas, they are.
It may bring all efforts to naught as a result. Nevertheless, if
there is the will to federate, solutions can be found to the
sovereignty problem, including vesting sovereignty in the people
involved or in the covenants or other documents that establish
the relationship between them. There are precedents in
international law for these and other arrangements, but the issue
remains a difficult one given the predispositions of the parties.
Notes
1. On the influence of symbols and passions in political
decision-making, see Murray Edelman, Symbolic Uses of Politics
(Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1964); Martin Wishnatsky,
"Symbolic Politics and the Origins of the Cold War." Paper
prepared for the annual meeting of the America Poltical Science
Association, 1971.
2. On the influence of timing on political decision-making, see
Robert Daniel Tshirigi, The Politics of Indecision: Origins and
Implication of American Involvement with the Palestine Problem
(New York: Praeger, 1983).
3. On the history of the Palestine conflict, see Donald Peretz,
Israel and the Palestine Arabs (Washington, D.C.: American
Enterprise Institute, 1985); J.N. Moore ed., The Arab-Israeli
Conflict, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974);
Nadav Safran, From War to War: The Arab-Israeli Confrontation
1948-1967 (New York: Pegasus, 1969); Shlomo Avineri, ed., Israel
and the Palestinians: Reflections on the Clash of Two National
Movements (New York, 1971); Walter Laqueur, The Road to
Jerusalem: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York:
Macmillan, 1968) and ed., The Israel-Arab Reader (New York,
1968).
4. On federalism and political culture, see Daniel J. Elazar,
American Federalism: A View from the States, 3rd ed. (New York:
Harper and Row, 1984); Federalism and Community: A Comparative
View, special issue of Publius 5:2 (Spring 1975); Frederick A.O.
Schwartz, Jr., Nigeria: The Tribes, The Nation or the Race
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1973); Ivo D. Duchachek,
Comparative Federalism: The Territorial Dimension of Politics
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); John Kincaid, ed.,
Poltical Culture, Public Policy and the American States
(Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983);
William Livingston, Federalism and Constitutional Change (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
5. On the Arab approach to government, see Bernard Lewis, The
Arabs in History, 5th ed. (London: Hutchinson University Library,
1975), and Politics and War in Islam (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975); George Lenczowski, ed., Political Elites
in the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise
Institute, 1975), and ed., The Poltical Awakening in the Middle
East (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970); Jacob Landau,
ed., Man, State amd Society in the Contemporary Middle East
(London: Pall Mall Press, 1972), ed., Middle Eastern Themes:
Papers in History and Politics (London: F. Cass, 1973), and ed.,
Electoral Politics in the Middle East: Issues, Voter and Elites
(London: Croom Helm, 1980); Michael C. Hudson, Arab Politics: The
Search for Legitimacy (New Haven and London: University Press,
1977).
6. On Bedouin tribal federations, see G.J. Obermeyer, Leadership
and Transition in Bedouin Society: A Case Study. Prepared for a
conference on "The Desert and the Sown: A New Conceptualization,"
March 17-21, 1972, at the American University in Cairo, and "The
Ritual and Politics of Oath in Tribal Society," Al-Abhath
(American University of Beirut) XXVI (1973-1977); Shirley Kay,
The Bedouin (New York: Crane Russak, 1978).
7. On the United Arab Emirates, see Ali Mohammed Kalifa, The
United Arab Emirates: Unity in Fragmentation (London: Croom Helm;
Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979); Kevin Fenelon, The
United Arab Emirates: An Economic and Social Survey, 2nd ed.
(London: Longman, 1976); Muhammed Morsy Abdullah, The United Arab
Emirates: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1978).
8. On the Arab concept of federal nationhood, see Adel Daher,
Current Trends in Arab Intellectual Thought (Rand Corporation,
1969); "Federalism-Arab" in Yaakov Shimoni and Eviatar Levin,
Political Lexicon of the Middle East in the Twentieth Century,
rev. ed. (Tel Aviv, 1974) (Hebrew), p. 291; Gabriel Ben-Dor,
Federalism in the Arab World (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for
Federal Studies, 1978).
9. On the Covenant of Omar and the Dhimmi, see Bat Ye'or and
David Littman, Protected Peoples Under Islam (Geneve: Centre
d'information et de documentation sur le Moyen-Orient, 1976); Bat
Ye'or, Dhimmi Peoples: Oppressed Nations (Geneve: Editions de
l'Avenir, 1978).
10. On Palestinian village society and government, see Joel S.
Migdal, et al., Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980); Richard T. Antoun, Arab
Village, A Social Structural Study of a Transjordanian Peasant
Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1972.
11. On Jordan's Hashemite goverment, see Anne Sinai and Allen
Pollack, eds., The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the West Bank:
The Middle East Confrontation States (New York: American Academic
Association for Peace in the Middle East, 1977); Ministry of
Information, Government in Jordan (Amman: Jordan Press
Foundation, 1978); Raphael Patai, The Kingdom of Jordan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958).
12. See, in particular, Daniel J. Elazar and Stuart A. Cohen, The
Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times
to the Present (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1985); Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent: The Jewish
Political Tradition and its Contemporary Uses (Ramat Gan:
Turtledove Publishing, 1981), and People and Polity: The
Organizational Dynamics of World Jewry (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1989).
13. On the monistic characteristics of Zionist and Israeli
thought, see Eliezer Schweid, "The Centrality of the State of
Israel in Jewish Life," Gesher 102-3 (Fall-Winter 1980).
14. Cf. Gerald Elliot Caiden, Israel's Administrative Culture
(Berkeley, California: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1970).
15. Yosef Levite, "Demographic Profile of Eretz Israel,"
Jerusalem Letter 79 (27 March 1985).
16. Hillel Frisch, "Arab Population Growth in the Territories --
Decline in the '70s, Upswing in the '80s," Survey of Arab Affairs
10 (23 November 1987).
17. Levite, "Demographic Profile."
18. Rafi Israeli, "The Arabs in Israel: A Surging New Identity,"
Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints 82 (1 January 1989).
19. Hillel Frisch, "The Binationalization of the Land of Israel,"
Jerusalem Letter 77 (20 January 1985).
