It’s A Tricky Marriage And Divorce

With the world’s attention turned elsewhere, it has been easy to lose track of what the Israelis and Palestinians have been up to lately.

And that is a mistake - because what they have been up to is weaving an agreement of immense importance.

It is an agreement to begin the partition of historic Palestine - a division of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab.

When Israel agreed to turn over control of the Gaza Strip to Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, nearly two years ago, it was getting rid of a problem, cutting off what Israelis thought of as a cancerous limb.

But the draft understanding announced last week between Israel and Arafat is something different.

It involves Israel ceding to Arafat control of four major West Bank Arab towns - Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm and Qalqilya - as well as phased-in Palestinian control of three others - Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron.

If that understanding is implemented - and that’s still a big if - you no longer are talking about Israel just getting rid of a problem.

You are talking about Israel giving up some of its strategic assets, the very space that allowed Israelis to breathe more easily after the Six Day War.

You are talking about Israel giving up territory at the heart of the biblical land of Israel, which is the West Bank.

You are talking about Israel giving Arafat control of Arab towns, not over the horizon in Gaza, but over the hill from Tel Aviv.

You are talking about the most fateful decision any Israeli government could make.

There was a time in the 1940s when Jews begged for such a partition of historic Palestine, but the Arabs refused. There was a time in the 1970s when the Palestinians agreed to such partition, but the Israelis refused.

What is fascinating about this moment, says Tel Aviv University political scientist Mark Heller, is that “for the first time in 100 years, both sides have accepted partition at the same time.”

Why?

Because 28 years of Israelis occupying the West Bank and seven years of Palestinians rising up against that occupation have left both communities exhausted from grinding against each other and desperate to live apart.

Indeed, the reason the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have made the most progress with the least amount of U.S. help is because they are running on their own internal energy - the energy of two communities who want to separate.

But while that impulse was a necessary condition for beginning this partition process, it was not sufficient. Arafat also needed to demonstrate a willingness and an ability to control the land Israel would be ceding to him through separation.

The biggest development in Israeli-Palestinian relations in the last six months has been Arafat’s ability to curb terrorism from Gaza, as well as his ability to generate enough foreign investment and trickle-down corruption to boost the Gaza economy significantly.

No doubt, there will be more violence. But without daily acts of terrorism against Israelis, Israel’s right-wing Likud Party has found it difficult to whip up opposition among the Israeli public to these latest moves.

What we are witnessing now are the first baby steps toward partition.

How far and how fast the two sides get down that road will depend on whether they find imaginative ways to separate their two intertwined populations without uprooting many Arabs or Jews.

And it will depend on Arafat continuing to quash terrorism.

This is a performance-based partition.

Which is what makes it so messy. The two communities cannot live apart peacefully unless their leaders work together to create a political, economic and security environment in which each community can thrive.

In other words, there can be no Israeli-Palestinian separation without cooperation. And there can be no cooperation without separation.

The two sides are writing a marriage contract and a divorce agreement at the same time - and that’s messy.

Of course, there never will be total separation between these two peoples. They are too intertwined in too small a space for that. But they can be separated enough for the majority of each community to live its daily life without interference from the other.

If Arafat and Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin can pull off even the first steps toward that end, they will have justified their Nobel Peace Prizes.

They will have accepted what none of their predecessors has - that theirs is a land with two peoples, and neither will be at home unless the other is as well.