A greater Palestine?
A Palestinian state of the West Bank and Gaza is no longer on the cards, irrespective of the make-up of the coming Israeli government. Israel instead has created the strategic conditions, including a near Israeli public consensus, for the expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank. This is what the wall and the planned retention of Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and large settlement blocks foretell. Israel will likely let eviction happen by haemorrhage, rather than engineer a 1948-style ethnic cleansing. It may not feel impelled to act soon, waiting for the fall of the Hashemite monarchy, which Israel seems to anticipate and which could only be hastened by the continuous exit of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan. Ariel Sharon’s wish for a Palestine state in Jordan thus would be fulfilled. Gaza could dissolve imperceptibly into populous Egypt. Such a momentous “checkmate”, however, is not destiny for the Palestinians. The leadership needs to think beyond the mental checkpoints around Ramallah and devise a new political vision and a commensurate strategy of action.
This vision, I submit, must rest on turning the current demographic fragmentation of the Palestinians into an asset, by redefining their geopolitical space to encompass a state in Greater Palestine, the territory that was Palestine before Winston Churchill in 1922 split it by fiat into Palestine and Transjordan. Today there are approximately eight million Palestinians in that area: 1.2 millions in Israel, 1.15 millions in Gaza, two millions in the West Bank and 3.2 millions in Jordan. In 30 years or so, they will double to 16 million strong. If the last century of strife has taught us anything, it is that they will fight fiercely for a state in which they are equal citizens. At a time when the advocacy of democracy has become a political mantra in the region, it is historically retrograde that the people who constitute the majority in Greater Palestine remain subject to dispossession by Israel and sub-citizens in Jordan.
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