[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
70 90 percent of the West Bank) and with Jordan rather than the
Palestinian Arabs as the political beneficiary. But there were two
problems. First, no Arab ever accepted it as a basis for agreement,
not King Hussein of Jordan (who wanted back all the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem) or the Palestinians (the PLO wanted
all of Palestine, and for the Palestinians, not Jordan); and second,
it was unacceptable to the Israeli cabinet and, hence, never be-
came official Israeli policy.
Allon could not swing a majority in the cabinet. So the plan
both did and did not represent the policy and will of the Labor
Alignment, the amalgam of social democratic parties in which
Ahdut Ha Avodah was in a minority, and the successive Labor-
led coalition governments. Most Labor ministers vaguely sup-
ported the plan or some two-state variant. But the coalition
cabinet, which always included parties of the Right for a time,
also Herut-Gahal and, throughout, National Religious Party
representatives refused to endorse it. Indeed, within weeks, the
85
The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
Right declared, in the words of Menachem Begin, that it was in-
conceivable to hand over to any form of Gentile rule . . . even
one inch of our country 105 (though after 1967 he was gradually
and quietly to drop the Revisionists traditional claim to part of
Transjordan and to limit his vision of Greater Israel to historic
Palestine west of the river).106
So the Allon Plan had a twilight life. It was the only game in
town and it wasn t; it was both on and off the table. Labor min-
isters repeatedly discussed it with Jordan s King Hussein, Abdul-
lah s grandson. It appears that the Israelis initially offered Hus-
sein some 70 percent of the West Bank the hilly spine from
Hebron through Ramallah to Jenin and the territory to the west,
to the Qalqilya-Tulkarm line. Then, in the succession of secret
meetings with Eshkol s successor, Golda Meir, Allon himself,
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister Shimon Peres,
and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin they gradually upped the
ante, according to Hussein, to something like 90 per cent of the
territory, 98 per cent even, excluding Jerusalem. But the king
continued to demand all 100 percent, including East Jerusalem
I could not compromise, Hussein recalled and it was never
completely clear whether he was offering full peace in exchange
for the 100 percent (after all, he had signed on at the Khartoum
Summit in September 1967 to the rejectionist three nos ).107 So
nothing was ever resolved or agreed.
In terms of the settlement enterprise, down to 1977 the Allon
Plan more or less defined the contours of policy, meaning where
86
The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
settlements would be planted in the Jordan Valley and the
Judean Desert (along the Dead Sea), in the Etzion Bloc and the
Gaza Strip and Golan Heights and where not. But the plan
never served as the basis for a formal two-state proposal to the
Arabs.
The Arabs
In the 1920s and subsequently, the Palestine Arabs defined Pales-
tine, the country in which they lived and which they laid claim
to, as the territory bordered by the Jordan River and the Mediter-
ranean Sea and the area to the south, the Naqb (Negev) Desert,
down to the Gulf of Aqaba, following the contours of the British
Mandate borders. No clearly defined falastin having existed
before, administratively or politically, they had no other defini-
tion to go by. (The pre-Crusader Arab province, jund filastin,
with Ramla as its capital, had encompassed only part of the coun-
try. The north of Mandatory Palestine the Galilee and the
Jezreel, Beit Shean, and northern Jordan valleys had been part
of a separate province, jund urdunn, Jordan, whose capital was
Tiberias.) Under the Ottomans, as mentioned, Palestine had been
only a small part of a province, ruled from either Damascus or
Beirut, and had been divided into a number of subdistricts, or
sanjaks.
From inception, the Palestine Arab national movement, backed
by the national movements and societies in the surrounding Arab
countries, demanded that Palestine become an independent sov-
87
The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
ereign Arab state (except for the Syrian nationalists, who gener-
ally claimed and wanted Palestine as part of the future Syrian
state) and rejected the notion of sharing the country with the
Jews, either demographically, in a binational structure, or geo-
graphically, through partition.
The so-called Third Palestine Arab Congress, which can be
seen as the conceptive venue of the Palestine Arab national move-
ment, meeting in Haifa in mid-December 1920, called on the
new British rulers to establish a government to be chosen by
the Arabic-speaking people who had lived in Palestine before the
beginning of the [world] war. It completely, flatly rejected Jew-
ish claims to Palestine: Palestine is the holy land of the two
Christian and Muslim worlds and . . . its destiny may not pass
into other than Muslim and Christian hands. The Congress de-
nounced the Balfour Declaration as contrary to the laws of God
and man. 108 (At the time, there were some eighty thousand Jews
and seven hundred thousand Arabs in Palestine. About 10 per-
cent of the Arab population was Christian. The Muslims were
highly suspicious of their Christian neighbors. Many believed
that the Christians were happy with British rule and favored its
perpetuation. The reference in the congress s resolution to
Christian rule is an obvious sop to the British not an indica-
tion of a desire by the Muslims for power sharing with their
Christian compatriots or of a concern for Christian interests.)
Henceforward, the Palestine Arab national movement contin-
ued to insist on a national government for Palestine and inde-
88
The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
pendence and to demand that Britain halt the immigration of
alien Jews, many of them of a Bolshevik revolutionary type. 109
The leaders of the national movement rejected the Jewish claims
to the country and, indeed, the Jews ties to the land: We have
shown over and over again, they wrote to Colonial Secretary
Winston Churchill, that the supposed historic connection of
the Jews with Palestine rests upon very slender historic data.
The historic rights of the Arabs are far stronger . . . Palestine had
a native population before the Jews even went there and this
population has persisted all down the ages and never assimilated
with the Jewish tribes . . . Any religious sentiment which the
Jews might cherish for Palestine is exceeded by Christian and
Moslem sentiment for the country. The Jewish settlers were
coming to strangle the local Arab population, and British pol-
icy would mean the Arabs extinction sooner or later, the dis-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]