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Home , Borders of Israel, Ghazi Falah, Green Line (Israel)

4. BOUNDARIES IN FLUX: THE "" BOUNDARY BETWEEN AND THE � PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

David Newman Durham, UK: University of Durham, International Boundaries Research Unit (1995), pp. 52

Reviewed by Ghazi Falah*

Let me start from the basics. This is not a book or article published in a peer-review journal. It is a monograph of 52 pages that includes 19 figures and one table. The actual written text probably does not exceed 30 pages. This monograph has gained some publicity in Israel. That is partly because it was published by the University of Durham International Boundaries Research Unit, a widely known research center specializing in boundaries. It has also received attention as a result of the author's untiring efforts to pass his own published work on to the media in Israel for popularization. Despite all the publicity of this monograph, it contains precious little that is new. There is no real research based on fresh empirical data. The maps attached to the text are mostly culled from other authors and were previously published. Even the author's own maps, illustrations and caricature images here have also appeared in his previous publications. In short, I am reluctant to consider this monograph as a genuine breakthrough of any kind. To be fair to Newman and to the publisher, one may argue that while this monograph is a part of series called Boundary � Territory Briefing it does not need to be more than a briefing. From this vantage, there is no doubt that Newman has succeeded in assembling a comprehensive text with first-rate illustrations - albeit as a whole reflective of the dominant discourse among Israeli geographers and their geographic hegemony. As the author states at the outset, this "[b]riefing examines the changing functional char- acteristics of the 'green line' boundary during the past forty years." Does the author bring a balanced picture of these functional changes? Is a balanced and multi-sided perspective even part of bis armature for discussion? The answer to this question will emerge below. It should be noted that the boundary between Israel and the is also known as the 'green line' boundary, but this was not addressed in this monograph. This study, however, is related to the boundary between the West Bank and Israel's pre- . The study is organized around ten headings (or sections). The first five headings are directly concerned with issues related to the evolution of the boundary and the changing of its function over four periods or stages. Indeed, here the author follows Falah's paper' cited below, though no specific credit is given. The remaining headings/sections focus on the 'green line' within the context of the ongoing Israel-Palestinian peace process. The introduction forms the first section and here he quotes a long citation from a recent book by Israel's ex-Prime Minister, Shimon Peres. This

* Professor, Department of Geography, University of Wales, Lampeter, UK. 1 Falah, De- and Re-Politicising the 'Green Line' between Israeli and the West Bank: The Dynamics of Settling a along a 'Provisional' Boundary, unpublished paper presented at the Colloque International Cultures et regions Transfrontalieres en Europe, Andorra, May 1991.1. citation is related to the future . Tellingly, according to Peres, "the future boundary should reflect [the] population distributions as they exist today" and that the boun- daries should be "soft borders, not rigid, impermeable ones." In other words, we have here a clear political message - its ultimate aim is to disregard the Palestinian refugee claims and completely ignore all those villages and towns which were depopulated and destroyed by Israel on the eve of its creation in 1948-1949 and thereafter.2 In addition, the future border of any Palestinian political entity has to be open for Israel for any possible purposes. Unfortu- nately, as I will explain below, the author follows a rationale similar to that lurking behind the thinking of Peres. In the introduction, Newman speculates that the and the will likely ... ` jockey for their own respective territorial demands" for demarcating the border of the future Palestinian state once created. This process might indeed occur. The author misses an impor- tant point, however, when he reduces the West Bank to a disputed territory. He never inti- mates or admits that wc are dealing with a case of an occupied territory that was taken by force from its indigenous people. The second section consists of a description of the course of the boundary. The fact that the author has used Hebrew names for the places hc mentioned here and never bothered to write the original name of the place (at least in parentheses next to the Hebrew name) renders this text of little use to the Palestinian readers or to those Palestinian leaders to whom he dedicates this monograph. The third section comprises a discussion on the demarcation of the 'green line' and sub- section on the impact of this boundary on the geography of the area between the years 1949- 1967. There is a need here to correct Newman's text in few places. On page 6 he claims that "pre-State Zionist colonization had focused on the plains rather than the mountains. This was due to both the lack of available land for agricultural cultivation in the mountains, coupled with the existence of the densely populated upland areas of Arab settlement". What is disputed here is the second part of the statement. Because it implicitly suggests that the Palestinians have no objection to sell their lands to Jewish buyers. Here the author is clearly voicing an Israeli posi- tion : as if history were flowing on according to Israeli initiatives and plans and the local Pales- tinians were and are merely a passive object. Needless to say, the total amount of lands pos- sessed by Jews does not exceed 6.8 percent of (mostly purchased from non-Palestinian absentee owners who usually owned large tracts in the plains) and the land pur- chased from native Palestinians does not amount to even a quarter of one percent of Palestine.3 Another similar statement made by the author is related to the 1948 War. He claims that "the Israeli army did not, at that time, advance further into the upland regions of the West Bank." The reasons for that according to the author are as follows: "When it was proposed...to take advantage of the situation and to advance east as far as the regions, the leadership of the time decided that it was of greater importance to advance southwards and capture the Negcv, ...." If this statement is to be considered valid, i.e., to say that the occupation of what became later the West Bank was a matter of choice, one wonders why the Israeli army was not able to recapture the of . At the beginning of the War, the Jewish forces conquered this area but were eventually displaced by the of Jordan.

2 Falah, The 1998 Israeli-Palestinian War and its Aftermath: The Transformation and De-Significa- tion ofPalestine's Cultural Landscape, 86 Ann. Ass'n Am. Geographers 256-285 (1996). 3 Falah, Pre-State Jewish Colonization in Northern Palestine and its Impact on Local Seden- tarization, 17 J. Historical Geography 289-309 (1991).