DAVID TWERSKY
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peared in the
Times
and the
Washington Post
during the past few
months). But the problem is that the P.L.O. conception of the pro–
posed international peace conference (a view supported, thus far, by
the Soviet Union) would have the power to impose a settlement on
the region. Given the correlation of forces among the permanent
members of the Security Council and the Arab states, Israel and the
United States would be badly outgunned.
It
is merely another ver–
sion of the UN (or EEC) trusteeship proposal: Israel would be forced
out of the territories and would not gain peace .
Palestinians have not given up "the right of return ," their claim
that their countrymen who left Israel in
1948
must be allowed to
return to their homes in Jaffa, Haifa , Ramla, and Lod. But even the
most dovish Israeli rejects this claim as counterproductive and
historically illegitimate. (For one thing, an equal number of Jews
were expelled from Arab lands in the
1948-1955
period. For another,
most Palestinians weren't expelled). It is another way Palestinians
have of modifying and hedging their acceptance of Israel's right to
exist. The militant faction is powerful enough to have prevented
Palestinians from taking advantage of occasional possibilities - par–
tition in
1947,
Camp David in
1977,
the Shultz initiative in
1988-
which would have moved the situation toward a compromise settle–
ment.
There are those who explain the failure of the Palestinian
leadership-Abba Eban has said that the P.L.O. never misses an
opportunity to miss an opportunity - as a series of tactical blunders .
In
1977,
they feared Camp David autonomy would strangle Pales–
tinian statehood (although the break-away Israeli right rejected
Camp David because they thought autonomy would lead directly to
a Palestinian state), and in
1988,
they rejected the Shultz initiative
because it is too Jordanian-oriented and pro-Israeli. But the other
possibility, the one that plagues many Israelis , is that the P.L.O. has
no Israeli option. Furthermore , the Palestinian state proposal ig–
nores the necessity of considering Jordan in the solution . Jordan
may not be Palestine, as the Israeli right disingenuously insists, but
it is linked to Palestine by history, economics, and demography. A
majority of its population, including the parliament and the King's
cabinet, is Palestinian.
If the Israeli right is wrong in insisting that the Palestinians
already have a solution in Jordan , the left (and the Arabs) are mis–
taken in saying that a Palestinian solution can ignore Jordan alto–
gether. A Palestinian solution that ignores the Jordanian connec–
tion - which is what the phrase "national self-determination" for the
