By Gwynne Dyer, ContributorJERUSALEM FELL to the Crusaders in 1099. The subsequent battles swayed to and fro, but the Crusaders held most of the eastern Mediterranean coast (what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria) for almost two centuries. Then the local people, overwhelmingly superior in numbers then as now, expelled them. It is an open question whether Israel will last that long.
Listen to Avraham Burg, speaker of Israel's Knesset (parliament) in 1999-2003. "It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun."
Israel's problem is not as acute as the one that faced the Crusader states, for at the moment it enjoys a huge technological and economic lead over the rest of the region. If there is still to be an Israel even 200 years from now, however, then it must make its peace with its neighbours in the next few decades, while it still holds all the cards.
None of Israel's current advantages a monopoly on nuclear weapons, conventional military superiority over all its neighbours combined, and an unconditional US guarantee of its security is likely to exist a hundred years from now. Some may be gone in 20 years. If Israel makes a deal with the Arabs while it still has the upper hand and creates trade and personal ties throughout the region, then it could become an established part of the neighbourhood and last a very long time. If not, then sooner or later it faces the fate of the Crusader states.
Palestinians are crucial in this context because there can be no lasting peace with the Arab world that does not reconcile the Palestinians.
After 30 years when no Arab country would consider making peace with Israel (1948-1978), we have just passed through a quarter-century when several Arab countries did make peace and even the Palestinians were willing to recognise Israel's right to exist in return for an independent homeland in what remained of their territory. That era may now be coming to an end.
Never mind who's to blame. There were people among both the Israelis and the Palestinians who were willing to settle for a compromise peace based on the division of former colonial Palestine into two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, and there were others who were not. The rejectionists on both sides have won, and the compromise deal, packaged in half a dozen different ways from the 1992 Oslo accords to the recent 'roadmap', is fading away.
In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is building a wall that will leave the Palestinians with only nine per cent of colonial Palestine and no peace treaty. In the occupied territories Palestinians are abandoning the 'two-state solution' and adopting the goal of a single non-ethnic state within the borders of old Palestine that includes both Jews and Arabs. It means another generation of waiting, of course, but what attracts them to that one-state solution is that within 15 years Palestinian Arabs will again outnumber Israeli Jews within the lands between the Jordan and the sea.
TWO-STATE SOLUTION
Professor Ali Jirbawi of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank put the new position very clearly in November: "We should say we accept a two-state solution, but that it means going back to the 1967 borders (before Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) and a fully independent and sovereign Palestinian state. We should give them six months. If there is no decision we should say that Israel, by its own choice, doesn't want a two-state solution. If Israel wants a one-state solution, we accept. But 20 years from now, we're going to ask for one person, one vote."
People like Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat still cling to the two-state goal, and Sharon stubbornly pursues his one-and-a-quarter state solution (which merely drives the Palestinians deeper into rejectionism), but the caravan is moving on.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
