The corridor card

In the course of peace negotiations over the years, Israel has undervalued the corridor as a factor in land swaps.

By YOSSI ALPHER
palestinian woman 311 (photo credit: AP)
palestinian woman 311
(photo credit: AP)
The concept of land swaps between Israel and a future Palestinian state appears to be a byproduct of Palestinian adherence to the narrative of the 1967 Green Line as the border of a Palestinian state. Those Israelis who accept the 1967 border as the basis for a final-status territorial agreement, yet who acknowledge that it will be impossible to remove the better part of the settlers who live in settlement blocs or even in individual settlements near the Green Line, appear to have persuaded the PLO leadership that land swaps can allow Israel to hold onto these settlements while giving the Palestinians the equivalent of the land mass within the 1967 borders – if not, in all cases, the actual Green Line itself.
Palestinians never tire of pointing out that agreement to the 1967 borders constitutes a huge concession on their part: They are accepting a state on only 22 percent or 23% of the original mandatory area of Palestine that they claimed when the conflict began. Accordingly, say PLO negotiators, agreement to swaps constitutes yet another concession.
When final-status talks began around 10 years ago, the Barak government did not readily accept the Palestinian territorial narrative; it began by offering the PLO about half the West Bank, along with all of the Gaza Strip. Territorial swaps were not an issue. UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 was cited: It grants Israel “secure and recognized boundaries” and does not mention the Green Line. Slowly, over the ensuing years, in a display of negotiating skill that generally put the other side to shame, PLO negotiators wore away their Israeli counterparts as well as the international community on this issue. Today, even the current right-wing coalition could conceivably accept the swap principle – if it ever enters negotiations with the PLO.
This is quite remarkable. There is nothing sacred about the 1967 line, which is, after all, an armistice line that separated Israel and Jordan (West Bank) and Israel and Egypt (Gaza Strip) and is not an international border.
EVEN THAT growing sector of the Israeli polity that accepts the 1967 line and the swaps principle as the basis for a future final-status agreement has great difficulty drawing the necessary lines on the map, for two reasons. On the one hand, settlement blocs have to be attached to Israel in a fashion that provides some form of tactical security, particularly with regard to their link to the rest of the country; Ariel is an obvious case in point. Yet adding security buffers to settlement blocs increases the total percentage of land annexed. Herein lies the second dilemma: finding enough empty land to offer the PLO in return, in keeping with the one-on-one swap principle.
Does it have to be empty land? Some Israelis have suggested redrawing the Green Line so as to place within Palestinian territory certain villages and towns populated by Arab citizens of Israel and located adjacent to the Green Line. This idea has gained popularity as the leadership of the Palestinian community inside Israel adopts increasingly radical positions that reject the Jewish nature of the state and positions itself as a possible Palestinian nationalist element even after a two-state solution.
Perhaps for this reason, the PLO rejects this idea. Moreover, any attempt to include Arab villages as part of land swaps, or even to cede them unilaterally, would almost certainly encounter both international condemnation and appeals to the High Court of Justice.
Finally, there is the corridor issue. Israel pledged, in the OsloAccords, to treat the West Bank and Gaza as “a single territorialunit.” But it never pledged specifically to grant the Palestinian statea land corridor to link Gaza and the West Bank across some 40 km of itsterritory. Moreover, that the West Bank and Gaza no longer function asa single political unit is the fault of Palestinians, not Israelis.
Yet a corridor is absolutely vital to a future Palestinian state. WereIsrael to offer to remove all the settlements, thereby obviating theneed for swaps, but to reject the corridor principle, the PLO would bein a quandary because the resultant state would not hold together.Accordingly, in the course of peace negotiations over the years Israelhas undervalued the corridor as a factor in land swaps. It is “worth”all the settlement blocs together.

The writer is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of Internet publications. He is
former director of the Jaffee Centerfor Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. This article was firstpublished by www.bitterlemons.org and is reprinted with permission.