Land swaps for peace
Jan 29th, 2008 by MESH
From MESH Admin
At last week’s Herzliya Conference, Tel Aviv University geographer Gideon Biger presented a futuristic plan for land swaps and border alterations among Israel, the Palestinians, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Biger, author of The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840-1947, proposes a map based on 1967—that is, each party would end up with the same net territory it possessed prior to the June 1967 Six-Day War. Biger has provided MESH with the map he displayed at the conference, illustrating the proposed swaps.
In Biger’s plan, parts of the West Bank where there are large Jewish settlement blocs, as well as part of the Jordan Valley, would be annexed to Israel. In exchange, the Palestinians would receive Israeli territory along the Green Line, and Egypt would relinquish territory between al-Arish and Rafah to the Palestinians. Israel would compensate Egypt with territory from Israel in the Paran Desert, as well as a corridor across the lower Negev to Jordan (a proposal revisited last week at MESH).
In the north, Biger also envisions a three-way swap. Israel would keep possession of a part of the Golan Heights. It would give Lebanon territory in the northern Galilee associated with the so-called “seven [Shiite] villages” abandoned in 1948. Lebanon, in turn, would relinquish territory to Syria, to compensate Syria for ceding part of the Golan Heights to Israel.
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I don’t know Gideon Biger and I wasn’t at the Herzliya Conference, so I can’t comment as to the spirit in which he recently proffered his “land swaps for peace” proposal. From where I sit in Washington, reading the MESH post brought me back to the good old days of Shimon Peres’ “New Middle East,” where friendly neighbors abound and regional peace is just around the corner.
The first thing that strikes me is the comprehensive and inter-dependent nature of the proposal, which prima facie makes it destined to fail.
Regarding the Palestinians, the notion of land swaps is not a new idea; Arafat agreed to a swap in 2000 at Camp David. No problem here, except the small matter that the Israelis will not find the prospect of providing more land to Hamas-controlled Gaza appealing. So Gaza—and Egypt—are out of the equation. Still, Israel could work out some arrangement with a future Palestinian state in the West Bank.
The challenges for this proposal on the Syria and Lebanon fronts are even more daunting. Syria has traditionally demonstrated little interest in creative solutions to negotiations with Israel.
Perhaps the best example of the phenomenon is how Syria responded to the spring 2007 Track II “Swiss Channel” talks between the Syrian-appointed (US-citizen) Abe Sulieman and former Israeli Foreign Ministry official Alon Liel. When it was publicized that the disposition of the Golan would ultimately be a nature reserve, the Syrians distanced themselves from Abe Suleiman, the brother of the former chief of internal security forces in Syria.
Worse—for the map proposal and for the Lebanese—it’s unlikely that Damascus, under the Asad regime, would ever come around to the idea of Lebanon ceding territory to Syria as a “swap.” Indeed, the Asad regime already views Lebanon essentially as Syrian territory. According to a report issued by a Lebanese NGO, the International Lebanese Committee for UNSCR 1559, as of last summer, Syria was occupying at least 177 square miles of Lebanese soil.
And this grim assessment of the prospects for Prof. Biger’s map doesn’t even take into account the issue of the Lebanese-Syrian dispute over the Sheba’a Farms.
I take no issue with the prospect of redefining Middle Eastern borders—I think this would be a discussion worth having. Prof. Biger’s map is interesting. But from a practical standpoint, it is hard to imagine the circumstances in which such an arrangement would be feasible.
David Schenker is a member of MESH.