Who Needs Lines on a Map?

By SHLOMO MAITAL
An article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is the likely winner of the Kadima primaries contest for her party's leadership. She may then try to form a new government. She will find that the current Knesset is dysfunctional, torn apart by narrow self-interest, and she will fail. This will lead to national elections in February or March - the sixth since 1996. We Israelis love democracy so much, we have elections every two years or so. Polls predict Likud Chair Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu will win the largest number of Knesset seats, making him the next Prime Minister. If Kadima is the second largest party in the Knesset, defeating Ehud Barak and Labor, Bibi might ask Livni and Kadima to join his coalition, making her Foreign Minister again. If all this unfolds, it will be important to understand Tzipi Livni's policy credo. She is tough, smart, impeccably honest and ambitious. But I believe she is on the wrong track. And she is not alone. She spoke to reporters at a Jerusalem press conference on August 21 about Washington's goal for Israel and the Palestinians to reach a Palestinian statehood agreement by year's end. She said that she and her counterpart, former Palestinian Authority prime minister Ahmed Qurei, were going far beyond "vague ideas about how much of the West Bank land Israel would give up." "We need to line the borders on the map," she said, according to Haaretz. But why? Why do we need to line the borders on the map? When managers face seemingly intractable problems, we teach them to reframe them - to ask the question in a different way, from a different perspective. Mathematicians do this all the time. Political leaders on every side of the Mideast dispute, including America, are asking the wrong question. The question, "Where should the borders between Israel and the Palestinian state run?" may never have an agreed, consensual and stable answer. What, then, is the right question? It is: "How can Israel and the Palestinian Authority work together to improve the lives of each group's citizens?" How can we make borders no more than lines on a map? In other words, how can we make borders more porous, let people and goods flow across them, do business together and create jobs and wealth together, rather than define borders and build high walls along them? It saddens me that we Israelis are Olympic champs at navel-gazing. If we would only open our eyes and look at the world instead of fixating on our own backyard, we might have wiser policies that focus on core issues. In Europe, France and Germany made permanent peace after fighting each other through three bloody wars in 75 years. How? They reframed their conflict. Led by Jean Monnet, they asked, how can we trade and grow wealthy together and built the Single Market. It is a model we could follow in the Mideast. When countries do business together and trade freely, borders lose importance. A few years ago, I recall driving between Netherlands and Germany. To my surprise, only a tiny sign indicated that we had crossed the border into Germany. Nothing more. By making internal European borders irrelevant, Europe has created enormous wealth for its citizens. And that process has barely begun. Today's world is plagued by numerous border disputes, some with exotic names few could locate on the map, such as Ngorno Karabach (in Azerbaijan). While widely scattered over the globe, the root cause of these conflicts is similar. "Economics and business today are global," Henry Kissinger said in 2006. "But politics are local." On the one hand, we have created a globalized world in which money, goods, services, technology, information and even people leap borders and embrace the world. Centripetal (toward the center) force thus concentrates wealth in the hands of huge global companies that disdain borders. This system, largely designed by America at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, has created enormous wealth. To participate in this global wealth, countries must open their borders to the free flow of trade and money. But even as borders become porous, countries are finding it vital to secure their borders, due to the threat of terrorism and illegal immigration. And as small ethnic groups find it desirable to split away, new lines are drawn on the map - a kind of centrifugal force. These two colliding forces are wreaking havoc in today's world. Once, being a citizen of a powerful nation-state brought advantages. Today, global markets have reduced those advantages. You can raise money, start companies and build wealth in the Netherlands Antilles almost as well as in the Netherlands - in fact better, because you face lower taxes and less bureaucracy. The result: Countries are increasingly splitting along ethnic lines, as the advantages of such fragmentation grow. According to the University of Durham's Border Research Institute, "Borders are hardening rather than softening as states seek to protect their populations from perceived external threats." Borders are not only hardening, they are proliferating. In 1914, there were only 74 countries in a colonialized world. Today there are over 200 - 33 of them formed since 1990. The colonial powers - Britain, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, France, Netherlands, Spain - drew random lines on the map, cutting across tribes and languages and ethnic groups, creating overly huge countries (Belgian Congo) and tiny, odd ones (Gambia, Equatorial Guinea). They then gave these "countries" independence, sowing the seeds for genocidal tribal massacres like that in Rwanda. The irrational lines on the map Britain and France drew in the Mideast in part sowed the seeds of today's conflicts. "International boundaries are the razor's edge on which hangs suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life and death to nations," said Lord Curzon, Britain's Foreign Secretary from 1919 to1924. It may have been true then. But it should not be true today. Today, the quality of life and the economic prosperity of nations depend crucially on how well nations integrate into world markets, not on where the lines on a map are drawn. Countries' wealth rests not on how much land they possess but what they do with the land they have. Look at Singapore, one of the world's wealthiest nations, with only 330 square miles (850 sq km) of land. The opening of the Beijing Olympics coincided with the start of a short bloody war in Georgia. The outcome of that war led to declarations of independence by Abkhazia, with about 160,000 people and two-fifths the area of green-line Israel, and South Ossetia, with about 45,000 ethnic Ossetians and a quarter the area of Israel. The result: several more new lines on the map. They are ridiculous. Neither 'country' is viable; each is highly dependent on Russian aid; and by declaring independence, a new conflict has been ignited that can last a century, leaving only losers and no winners. However the lines on the map between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are drawn, a new conflict will begin immediately if those on the Palestinian side remain poor and grow poorer and those on the Israeli side are rich and grow richer. So the core issue is not the borders but the economics: How can the Palestinian state make a living? Answer: only by trading with its wealthy neighbor, Israel. But, if it does so, the borders become irrelevant, serving only as a line on the map easily and frequently crossed by people and by goods. Take, for instance, the Golan. Syria insists it be returned as a precondition for peace. Suppose it is. How will that in any way improve Syria's crumbling economy, high unemployment, backward technology and corrupt system? But, suppose instead, trucks rumble across the border, bringing Israeli goods in return for those from Syria. The transformation would be dramatic. A fantasy? Three years ago, Druze apple growers in Majdal Shams - the apple capital of the Golan - sent truckloads of apples to Syria, through Kuneitra, when a surplus crop threatened their prices, even though Israel and Syria are at war. Israel is completing a tremendously costly 736-kilometer fence along its West Bank border. It is costing billions. I understand why Israel is building this fence. But as an economist I deeply regret the enormous sunk cost. One day, the fence will be torn down. Instead, the money could have been invested in projects that improve the Palestinians' lives rather than ruin them. Here are two ways Israel could improve the lives of the Palestinians, including those in Gaza, and the lives of the residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and the Western Negev as well. • Build a safe passage from Gaza to the West Bank. The distance is only 36 km, 18 minutes by truck or train. But today, they are farther away than the distance to the moon. A closed rail line or roadway could, with one opening stroke, transform the new Palestinian state from two disconnected regions to a viable integrated economy. But it would remain closed unless Hamas were to guarantee absolute security and nonviolence; it would instantly close again if such violence were to occur. • Authorize a deep-water port in Gaza, linked to a train line that runs right into the port. Many jobs would be created and an alternative to the Suez Canal would suddenly exist. Tel Aviv University Professor Seev Hirsch called for such a port as early as 1979. Competition with the inefficient Ashdod and Haifa ports, where workers recently again declared a slowdown, would be healthy. And again - violence and terror will shut the port instantly. Both these measures would give the Palestinians much benefit, and hence much to lose if they choose violence. Today, they feel they have little to lose. So, Tzipi Livni, ask not, where should the lines on the map be drawn between Israel and Palestine. Ask instead, how can we do business together, you and us, to make your lives and our lives safer and better? How can we make borders less important, rather than the central issue? Peace ultimately is not a legal agreement, based on agreed borders. It is a state of mind between two peoples who may not love each other but who have much to lose by going to war, because they are busy doing busi-ness with one another and growing more prosperous. • The author is academic director, TIM-Tel Aviv. An article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.