A Durable Peace (51 page)

Jerusalem, too, has been the subject of renewed Arab demands. Arafat has long and often said that there will be no peace so
long as the PLO flag does not fly over the city. The West has often taken this statement at face value, and every peace plan
to date that Westerners have offered has been in some fashion gerrymandered to allow an Arab flag to fly over some section
of Jerusalem—usually over what the media like to refer to as “Arab East Jerusalem.” Of course, there is nothing exclusively
or even mainly “Arab” about eastern Jerusalem. This part of the city consists
of those portions of Jerusalem that the Jordanian Legion was able to tear away by force in 1948. Many Jews lived there at
the time, but the Jordanians expelled them. Today these sections of the city have 150,000 Jewish residents and a similar number
of Arab residents. (Unlike the Jordanians, who expelled the Jews when they conquered this portion of the city in 1948, Israel
left the Arab population intact and offered it Israeli citizenship.)

Eastern Jerusalem includes the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the City of David. It was the capital of ancient Israel
for twelve centuries, the very heart and soul of all Jewish aspiration to return and rebuild the Land of Israel. Israel could
not under any circumstances negotiate over any aspect of Jerusalem, any more than Americans would negotiate over Washington,
Englishmen over London, or Frenchmen over Paris. Israel is prepared to offer the Arabs full and equal rights
in
Jerusalem—but no rights
over
Jerusalem.

The tremendous significance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people—as well as the indelible physical facts of Jewish neighborhoods
such as Gilo, Ramot, Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Neve Ya’akov built in eastern Jerusalem since 1967—make
the notion that somehow Jerusalem will be redivided sheer fantasy. Yet it is not only Arabs who cling to this fantasy. In
practically every foreign ministry in the West, including the U.S. State Department, there are maps that do not include East
Jerusalem as part of a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Indeed, most governments refuse to recognize even
West
Jerusalem as part of Israel, on the grounds that “the final status of Jerusalem remains to be negotiated,” in the hope that
it will be internationalized—this in recognition of its “special status,” reflecting its unique importance not only to Judaism
but to Islam and Christianity as well. But it is
only
under Jewish rule that Jerusalem has become a city open to all faiths, with the holy sites of all religions protected equally
for the first time in history. The Jewish belief in the universal meaning of Jerusalem has made it today a truly universal
city. To pry the city away from the one people that has ensured unimpeded access to it for all, to put it under a UN-type
administration, would not
merely violate the historic right of the Jewish people to its one and only capital. It would assure a descent into factionalism,
where shrill partisans of Islam like the followers of Khomeini and Qaddafi would return the city to the divisions and sectarian
strife that characterized it before 1967—something for which no rational person could possibly wish. This is why Israel, within
the context of a peace agreement with the Arabs, is prepared to guarantee free access to Moslems wishing to make pilgrimages
to their holy places in Jerusalem, but will in no way alter Israel’s ability to maintain Jerusalem as a peaceful and open
city under Israeli sovereignty.

It will be objected that in keeping sovereignty over Jerusalem and the remaining territories, Israel is expecting the Arabs
to renounce their claim to what they consider part of their domain. This is precisely the case. An entire century of Arab
wars has been waged against the Jews because the Arabs have refused to in any way temper their doctrine of never giving up
what they claim to be Arab lands. In fact, in its entire recorded history, the Arab nation has
never
given up a single inch of land willingly, for the sake of peace or for the sake of anything else. This fact was confirmed
to the point of absurdity after the cession of the entire Sinai (more than twice the size of all of Israel), when Egypt refused
to reciprocate by ceding Israel a few hundred yards on which the Israelis had partially built a luxury hotel—leading to a
crisis of several years that finally ended when Israel gave up the land in 1989.

But the time has finally come to recognize that peace will be possible only when both sides are willing to strike a compromise
that gives each the minimum it needs to live. The Zionist movement and the State of Israel are by now well acquainted with
compromising on ideology for the sake of coexistence and peace, having done so at least four times in this century. In 1919
the Zionists bitterly gave up on their claim to the Litani River (now in southern Lebanon), which was to have been the main
water source for the new Jewish state. In 1922 four-fifths of the Jewish National Home was made off-limits to Jews so that
there could be a territory, Jordan, reserved for the Arabs of Palestine. This was much more painful, for
it meant giving up on a large portion of biblical Israel and agreeing that the Jewish state would be only forty miles wide.
But for the sake of peace, the Jews have given up on this claim as well, and they asked the Palestinian-Jordanian state four
times the size of Israel to give them nothing in return. In the 1979 treaty with Egypt, Israel compromised many of its most
cherished principles for the sake of peace. In giving up the Sinai, it conceded vast lands, transferred thousands of Jews
from their homes, razed houses, schools, and farms that had been built from the desert over fifteen years, and utterly renounced
every one of the Jewish historical, strategic, and economic claims to land where the Jewish people had received the Law of
Moses and become a nation. In 1989, Israel gave Taba, near Eilat, to Egypt for the sake of peace and once again, in the 1993
Oslo Accords, Israel ceded land to the Palestinians.

For three-quarters of a century the Jews have repeatedly compromised on substantive strategic, historical, and moral claims
in order to placate their Arab neighbors in the hope of buying peace. It is impossible that peace should be attained by asking
the Jews to compromise on everything and the Arabs to compromise on nothing. The Arabs, possessing lands over five hundred
times greater in area than Israel’s, must now do a small fraction of what Israel has done: For the very first time in their
long history of expansionism and intolerance, they must compromise. For the sake of peace, they must renounce their claims
to part of the four ten-thousandths—.0004—of the lands they desire, which constitutes the very heart of the Jewish homeland
and the protective wall of the Jewish state. If the Arabs are unwilling to make even this microscopic one-time concession,
if they are still so possessed by the fantasy of an exclusively Arab realm that they cannot bring themselves to compromise
on an inch of land to make the Middle East habitable for the Jewish state, it is hard to make the case that they are in fact
ready for peace.

But what about the other side, the question of the Arabs in the zones of Judea and Samaria? The fact that Israel is extremely
circumscribed
in the territorial compromises it is capable of making necessarily raises the question of the future of these people. By hanging
on to territory, Israel, it is said, might gain the security inherent in better terrain, but it would encumber itself with
a hostile population.

True enough. But this dilemma has been put behind us by the implementation of the early stages of the Oslo Accords. Israel
transferred to Palestinian control most of the territory in the Gaza district, which encompasses
all
the Palestinian residents of that area. Further, in the West Bank, Israel transferred to Palestinian control the lands that
encompass a full 98 percent of the Palestinian population (the remaining 2 percent are composed in part of nomadic Bedouin
who move from place to place). Thus the question of Israel’s retaining a hostile population has become a moot point. As of
1995 the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank live under Palestinian rule. The remaining issues to be resolved are
not over the human rights of the Palestinians or their civil enfranchisement. That is an issue that they have yet to resolve
among themselves: individual rights, freedom of the press, pluralism, and democracy are matters that the Palestinians have
to resolve between themselves and the Palestinian Authority that rules them. Israel, however interested an observer, has no
part in this debate. The Israelis and the Palestinians must resolve two pivotal questions:

(1) the disposition of the remaining territory of Judea and Samaria; and

(2) the political status of the self-governing Palestinian entity and its relationship to the State of Israel.

Resolving the territorial issue, though an extremely complex matter, has been made somewhat less difficult because of the
fact that the remaining territories are largely uninhabited by Palestinians (more precisely, they are inhabited by Jews).
This terrain includes, however, areas that are crucial for Israel’s defense and vital
national interests. Accordingly, Israel seeks a final peace settlement with the Palestinians that would leave it with indispensable
security zones. First and foremost, it requires a land buffer that includes the Jordan Valley and the hills directly overlooking
it and that would extend southward to the ridges above the Dead Sea. At its deepest point, this buffer will be about 12 miles
wide, a minimal depth given the fact that Israel faces a threat from a potential eastern front, which might include thousands
of Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian tanks. During the Cold War, NATO’s generals assessed that they would need 180 miles of strategic
depth to ward off a similar threat from the east. Alas, Israel must live with strategic depth that is less than 10 percent
of that, but it cannot shrink this depth any further. Second, Israel must have a zone of separation between the Palestinian
areas and the crowded coastline where most of its population lives. This zone, whose widest point is a few miles, is narrower
than the eastern buffer, but is important in any future arrangement for minimizing terrorist infiltration from the Palestinian
areas to Israel’s major cities. Furthermore, Israel must retain a security cordon around Jerusalem to ensure that the city
is not choked by adjoining Palestinian areas. Israel must also keep its early warning stations at the heights of the Samarian
mountains, facilities that offer indispensible warning against air and ground attacks from the east. In addition, Israel must
maintain broad corridors of territory to facilitate movement from the coastline to the Jordan Valley buffer in times of emergency.
Those corridors, not accidentally, include much of the Jewish population in Judea-Samaria. Israel must protect the Jewish
communities and facilitate the citizens’ ability to live and travel securely. Equally, Israel must make sure that the main
aquifer that supplies some 40 percent of the country’s water, running at the lower part of the western slopes of the Judean
and Samarian hills, does not come under Palestinian control; it is, after all, impossible for the country to live with its
water siphoned off or contaminated by the Palestinian Authority. Israel must take into account other special security requirements,
such as controlling the areas abutting the Tel Aviv or Jerusalem airports
to prevent terrorists from firing at civilian aircraft from these positions. Finally, Israel must keep places sacrosanct to
Judaism and the Jewish people within its domain and guarantee unfettered access to them as was done in the Hebron agreements,
which left the Tomb of the Patriarchs under Israel’s control.

These are Israel’s minimal requirements to protect the life of the state. Obviously, full control of the West Bank, including
the Palestinian areas, would have given Israel much greater security in an insecure Middle East. Yet retaining the minimal
elements of defense enumerated above will enable Israel to transfer to the Palestinians additional areas that are not included
in these categories, thereby expanding the Palestinian domain without significantly hurting Israel’s security. Equally, Israel
is prepared to make special arrangements facilitating safe passage of Palestinians through its own territory, thus enabling
direct Palestinian travel between Gaza and the West Bank.

It is largely for these considerations that I negotiated the interim agreement at the Wye River Planation in 1998 with President
Clinton and Yasser Arafat. My principal objective at Wye was to limit the extent of further interim Israeli withdrawals so
as to leave Israel with sufficient territorial depth for its defense. As stipulated under the Oslo agreement, Israel was to
withdraw in three successive “disengagements” from additional territory in Judea-Samaria, which would be handed over to the
Palestinian Authority
prior
to the negotiations on a permanent peace agreement, or “final settlement.”

The Palestinian side had already received 27 percent of the territory from the Labor government. Based on its experience of
negotiating with that government, it expected Israel to cede in these withdrawals the bulk of the territory. As Arafat’s deputy,
Abu Maazen, explained to a senior official in my government upon the signing of the Hebron agreement in 1997: “What about
the 90 percent of the territory you promised us?” The response was: “We didn’t promise you anything of the kind.” Whatever
officials of the previous Labor government had whispered in Palestinian ears was irrelevant. What was relevant were the signed
contracts we inherited from Labor, and these did not obligate Israel to such dangerous withdrawals. Indeed,
since the Oslo Accords did not quantify the extent of redeployment, we proceeded to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority,
or more specifically with the United States, on much smaller redeployments. Ultimately we agreed in Wye that the first two
redeployments would amount to 13 percent of the territory. We also agreed with the U.S. that Israel would officially declare
that the third redeployment, which the U.S. recognized as an Israeli prerogative not subject to negotiation, would not exceed
an additional 1 percent.