Greater Palestine: Matching Demography, Geography, and Heart
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Greater Palestine: Matching Demography, Geography, and Heart Sharif S. Elmusa1 Political Science Department, The American University in Cairo, 113 Kasr El-Aini Street, Cairo Egypt Demography matters. Witness South Africa from the village of Abbasiyya (now the town and Iraq, where blacks won majority rule and of Yehud), once told me that a Jewish man where Shiites and Kurds are asserting their from a settlement of Petah Tekfa said to her demographic weight. People, like buildings and a group of villagers in Hebrew-accented and roads, like swimming pools and tele- Arabic, “Ya khabibi inta rayekh yiji youm phone towers, are facts on the ground. Today tihij ib-balalsh” (“A day will come, love, there are more than 8 million Palestinians in when you’ll do the pilgrimage to Mecca for Greater Palestine,2 the Palestine that existed free”). In the highly revealing film Route 181, before Winston Churchill split it by fiat into jointly directed by an Arab and a Jew, Michel Palestine and Transjordan. Their number Khleifi and Eyal Sivan (2004), the randomly should double, in 30 years or so, to 16 interviewed Jews, almost without exception, million. They will need housing; they will advocate the expulsion of the Palestinians. It need food and roads; they will need water and is not a wordless wish, as Erskine Childers health care. They will become more educated (1971)called the Zionist desire to expel the and more productive. They will fight fiercely Palestinians, but a loud, emphatic, contemp- for a state in which they have equal citizen- tuous one. Eviction is not an easy act to ship rights, as the last 100 years have taught implement; the Palestinians would resist it, us. I submit here that the site of this state must and the Jordanians too. be re-imagined, and that Greater Palestine is Where would the Palestinians go? To the only viable alternative for the three major Transjordan; that is, across the Jordan River. ethnic communities that live in it: East Jorda- And what would happen then along the new, nians, Jews, and Palestinians. long front? Would the Palestinians look west The Israelis have been obsessed with and be stricken with historical amnesia? demography. This obsession has led them to Would they forget their land and their houses, fix their gaze eastward, where they wish the their hills and their sea? Would they give up Palestinians to vanish. Build a wall, they have al-Aqsa mosque and the church of the Nativ- told themselves lately, so you can’t see them, ity and the Holy Sepulchre? Or would perpet- so you can secure Israel behind the 1949 ual warfare between two irreconcilable foes armistice line, grab more land, found more be the outcome? Jewish settlements, expand those that exist This is for prophets to fathom; I am a already, and further fragment Palestinian political scientist with a limited horizon. I am space. That way you also carry the battle into reluctant to bring up the idea of ethnic cleans- the enemy’s remaining meagre territory in the ing; talking too often about an unspeakable West Bank. Soon the pressure cooker will subject can render it normal, thinkable, if not cause the Palestinians to evaporate, to inevitable. The topic of expulsion should become, indeed, a people without a land, as remain taboo, spoken of or imagined only Max Nordau, the Hungarian-born Zionist with gravity, with a sense of the forbidden. I orator, infamously called them (cited in bring it up because it happened twice before, Childers 1971, 168). My mother, who hailed in 1948 and in 1967, and because not much The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 8, No 3 (2005) 156-160 © 2005 by AWG – The Arab World Geographer, Toronto, Canada 157 Sharif S. Elmusa has changed in the Zionist vision of the Pales- symbolically, Palestinian towns and villages. tinians. The Likud Party, in cooperation with The Gaza Strip itself is a cage, encircled by a Labor, has largely prepared the strategic fence on three sides and an Israeli-patrolled ground for another exodus, if not in one wave, sea on the fourth, and is cut off from the West then gradually, by haemorrhage. The game of Bank. The medieval wall, constructed by the a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza government of Ariel Sharon and declared ille- is over. The Road Map is an illusion. Presi- gal by the International Court of Justice in dent Mahmoud Abbas, the rationalist “engi- The Hague, only exacerbates the situation. It neer of Oslo,” should draw the sobering, may help to protect Israelis from Palestinian logical conclusions. Otherwise, he may find violence, but it has exposed Palestinians even himself before long the political loner he further to Israel’s insatiable appetite for land. once was. Palestinians have already lost more land and Politically and culturally, the Palestini- orchards as a consequence of the wall. The ans constitute a fairly homogenous nation. In fragmentation and isolation of their commu- spite of Israel’s effort to splinter them into an nities have been aggravated. In short, the ever-expanding number of categories— Palestinians have become caught in a fishnet Christians, Druze, Muslims, Gazans, of Jewish settlements, bypass roads, check- Jerusalemites, Jerichoites, residents of area points, and military patrols—walled in and A, B, or C, displaced persons,3 and walled out. Fear, insecurity, and a tremendous refugees—the Palestinians share a strong waste of time are their daily lot. With a state sense of common identity, solidified in their like this, who needs apartheid? long defence against the Zionist and Israeli Fragmentation and severe restrictions on onslaught. They have accumulated rich polit- the mobility of people and goods have turned ical experience and developed, under highly the Palestinian economy into a series of unfavourable circumstances, a civil society micro-economies attached to the Israeli econ- and para-state institutions that, imperfect as omy. Israeli control over international ports they are, could form the institutional nucleus prevents direct linkage of Palestinian markets of a viable state. They would not be, as is to Arab and international markets, except often the case, a state trying to forge a nation through Israeli mediation. A Palestinian state from a multiplicity of identities, a state- would thus be missing a critical component nation, but a nation fashioning a state. What of statehood: a unified national market joined excludes the possibility of a viable state is the directly to external markets. A viable state fragmented and vulnerable geography that cannot evolve without such a market. Israel has left them with. Why did Israel force the Palestinians into I will not dwell on this geography: the this corner? Why did it keep expanding settle- history of its making and its outline are well ments and building bypass roads after Oslo? known to anyone acquainted with the Why did it continue its tight control over the conflict. The long-term Israeli policy of frag- international ports and impede the movement menting the Palestinian territory has reached of goods to and from Jordan? Why did it a new zenith. What remains today is a land refuse to build a safe passage between Gaza archipelago, comprised of isolated islands, and the West Bank? Why did it, during the Bantustans, cages—call them what you will. pre-Oslo negotiations held in Washington, They are discontinuous geographies, and D.C., stubbornly refuse to demarcate the they can be linked to one another only borders of the settlements and agree to a through the menace of Israeli-controlled functional role over them, as the Palestinian roads and checkpoints. Jewish settlements in delegation headed by Dr. Haidar Abd Al- the West Bank, intentionally situated at Shafi had consistently demanded? There is higher elevations, dominate, physically and only one explanation: Israel has never The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 8, no 3 (2005) Greater Palestine: Matching Demography, Geography, and Heart 158 accepted the idea of a viable, sovereign Pales- Palestinian Question; the Jewish Question, tinian state. too, still lingers on. And there would be Pales- We must recall that before the 1991 tinian refugees who legitimately demand the Madrid conference Israel had traditionally right to return to the territory from which they rejected the idea of a Palestinian state on the were evicted. Israel exhibits no sign of grounds that it would be unviable. In an consenting to such a demand. That would attempt to rebut this thesis, and shortly before leave us in Greater Palestine with the Jordan- the conference, the Institute of Palestine ian Question, too. For if the refugees remain Studies in Washington, published a mono- in Jordan, East Jordanians, whose identity the graph by economist George Abed, The Jordanian monarchy fostered by pitting them Economic Viability of a Palestinian State. against the Palestinians, would be afraid that Abed argued that a Palestinian state in the sooner or later the Palestinians would take entire West Bank and Gaza would be viable, hold of the reins of power. The establishment given that certain economic and political of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and conditions were fulfilled. If the viability of a Gaza would intensify their apprehension. The Palestinian state was contested before Oslo, threat of instability would be ever present in when Jewish settlements were more sparse the kingdom. than today and the bypass roads and wall were The Palestinians nation has fallen a great not yet built, surely the debate now has been fall, and the time has come to put it together laid to rest. Israel used what was meant to be again.