Why Fayyad plan for Palestine has Israelis worried

JERUSALEM, Oct 16 — The future Palestinian state some Israeli strategists have in mind would be bordered entirely by Israel, with large areas in its middle under Israeli control.

Israel would own the Jordan Valley, part of the central West Bank highlands above it, plus uplands to the west overlooking Jerusalem and Israeli cities on the coastal plain.

The possibility of this blueprint becoming Israeli policy is deeply worrying to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Faced with the offer of peace talks on such a basis, his answer would be “forget it”, he said this week. It would be, Fayyad cautioned, a “Mickey Mouse” state nothing like what Palestinians seek.

Western-backed Fayyad clearly has the attention of Israeli conservatives in the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, headed by Dore Gold, an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Earlier this month it published an appreciative critique of what it called a positive and bold plan Fayyad unveiled in August, to build the institutional, administrative and physical framework necessary for Palestinian statehood over the next two years.

Fayyad, a US-educated economist and former senior World Bank official, is courageously challenging the Palestinian policy of liberation through armed struggle by proposing peaceful, proactive development, the Israeli paper said.

The plan already had robust US and European support and promises of aid in the billions. Israel also backs Palestinian economic development and reform from bottom up to establish a demilitarised state, the paper said.

Fayyad is challenging Palestinian hardliners of the dominant Fatah movement who are deeply suspicious of his vision of the need to do more than simply opposing Israeli occupation.

So far, so good. But unlike the familiar forms of Palestinian resistance which Israel has coped with, the Fayyad plan leads into dangerous, uncharted territory, the paper said.

“Fayyad’s intention is to create facts on the ground that will garner major international support and lead to pressure to transform recognition of a de facto Palestinian state in 2011 into a de jure state in the event that the Palestinian Authority and Israel fail to reach a negotiated solution,” it said.

Palestinian leaders who, like Fayyad, want peace with Israel expect a state with borders — give or take a few land swaps to accommodate major Israeli settlements — where they lay before the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel occupied the West Bank.

The state they want would border Israel to the north, west and south but its eastern border would be the Kingdom of Jordan, and its territory would be whole and contiguous, with a land link to the Gaza Strip enclave on the Mediterranean shore.

This is the assumption of the Fayyad plan, and it poses a grave threat to Israel’s security, said the analysis by Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari which Fayyad complimented for its professionalism, adding “although of course I do not agree with it”.

On legal and security grounds, the paper said, Israel cannot countenance such a development and should oppose it now.

“A unilaterally declared state that claims the pre-1967 lines as its border could end up thrusting Israel, the Palestinian Authority and other regional actors into a storm of instability and possibly armed conflict,” the analysts said.

They further claim that Fayyad’s “unilateral” project to create facts on the ground would violate the 1993 Olso Accords undertaking with Israel not to change the status of the West Bank pending peace negotiations.

Oslo was 16 years ago, Fayyad says, and the talks have still not ended the Israeli occupation. And pointing to some 100 Israeli West Bank settlements deemed illegal under international law, he says: “Look who’s talking about unilateralism.”

But the Israeli analysis said Netanyahu will insist on “defensible borders” for Israel in any two-state solution with the Palestinians.

“Israel’s requirement of ‘defensible borders’ involves its continuing control in so-called Area C including the strategically vital Jordan Valley and the high ground surrounding Jerusalem and overlooking Israel’s vulnerable cities along the Mediterranean coast,” the paper stated.

“The Jordan Valley serves as a vital barrier against any potential invasion from the east (and) an important natural barrier to the potential flow of rockets to West Bank hilltops overlooking Israel’s coastline” major airport and main cities.

Under the Oslo accords, the West Bank were divided into three zones, A, B and C, pending a permanent peace agreement.

Area C, where Israel maintains security and civil control, compromises more than 60 percent of West Bank territory. It includes the Jordan Valley where Israel has transformed the desert flats into lucrative agri-business settlements, west of the no-go military zone of border patrols and electronic fences on the frontier with Jordan.

This is the place where Fayyad envisages an international airport serving the new Palestinian state. — Reuters