Israel faces a major predicament in the Palestinian demographic mass across all of historic Palestine. We are talking about 7 million Palestinians spread across Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Palestine occupied in 1948.
اضافة اعلان
This mass is under various pressures: forced naturalization, as with the Palestinians of 1948; the conversion of Jerusalem's citizens into residents with temporary identities; what happened to Gazans during the war and the attempts to displace them; and finally the situation in the West Bank, a mass that Israel wants to divide, fragment and turn into four contradictory blocs.
All the plans for displacement to Jordan, the attempts to return Jordan to the West Bank, the scheme to turn the West Bank into separated cities each with its own civil or tribal ruler, and all the attempts at killing, displacement and land theft have not solved the crisis of Palestinian demography. Had Israel known it would face this reality, it would not have allowed a single Palestinian to remain after the 1948 and 1967 wars, but it was compelled to for various considerations, and today it is facing the cost of their remaining.
The West Bank equals 22 percent of the area of historic Palestine and is divided into three zones. Israel has by now almost entirely taken control of Area C, which makes up 60 percent of the whole West Bank, that is, of the 22 percent of historic Palestine. It now wants to squeeze the Palestinians into Areas A and B. Area A in the West Bank covers roughly 1,000.2 square kilometers, while Area B covers about 1,035.0 square kilometers, and more than 3 million Palestinians live in them. Many of them own property in the Palestinian countryside, especially in Area C, and they also face the danger of house demolitions, along with the demolitions and forced removals suffered by the West Bank's refugee camps, in miniature rehearsals of displacement.
Faced with Israel's predicament, former Israeli Foreign and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently put forward a plan proposing the cancellation of the Oslo Accords, with Israel imposing its sovereignty over Area C in the West Bank, while responsibility for Areas A and B would be transferred to be run in agreement with Jordan. In other words, the aim is to load the population file onto Jordan and delegate security and administrative powers to it in place of the nearly collapsed Oslo-era Authority, amid a bleak future given present conditions.
Thus Israel moves from a plan to occupy the entire West Bank to a plan to turn the occupation issue into one of demographic, administrative and security management, which it wants to load onto Jordan. This leaves the question of what interest Jordan has in being drawn into the West Bank file as a substitute for the occupation, performing security tasks against the Palestinians on behalf of Israel and its agencies and institutions. Jordan has no interest in this, nor in any diluted formula of confederation or federation, including a confederation with Israel, which certain quarters inside the occupying state are proposing out of a feeling of suffocation under the Palestinian mass.
Nor should we forget the Israeli Foreign Ministry statement of a few days ago, which lamented Jordan's 1988 decision and what it considered a violation of international law in Jordan's withdrawal of Jordanian citizenship from the people of the West Bank. This is a rare kind of impudence, because the occupier does not speak about occupying the entire West Bank and Jerusalem, yet laments over Jordanian citizenship. It came at a time when the Israeli finance minister had earlier said that every West Bank resident holding a second citizenship must leave for the country of that citizenship. The story is clear: Israel today has no legal bridge for getting rid of the Palestinians through a state of citizenship.
Israel is stuck among unworkable solutions, from the alternative homeland in Jordan, to a functional confederation, to persuading Jordan to return to a security role in two zones of the West Bank. This reality indicates that Israel will not, in the end, leave Jordan alone, and will try by every means to solve the West Bank problem at Jordan's expense.
We are facing a great danger today. The historic West Bank no longer exists for Jordan to return to govern it, and there is no Palestinian state for a political union between two countries to be built upon, while a security substitute is sought to manage the Palestinians on Israel's behalf.
