Tsvi Bisk

Tsvi Bisk – Mitigating the Middle East Conundrum

By Tsvi Bisk

Posted on May 15, 2023

Tsvi Bisk – Mitigating the Middle East Conundrum

The following is condensed from an essay that appeared in World Affairs (Winter 2022), a responsa to Prof. Alon Ben-Meir’s proposed Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian Confederation.

Let’s be honest. The Two-State solution is dead, Israel cannot annex the occupied territories for both political and demographic reasons, and the present situation of the neither here nor there occupation cannot continue forever. Instead, we should be mitigating tensions while working to create a confederation of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, focused on ethnic and national self-determination rather than “final borders”. ‘Mitigate’ is the operative word here, not solve, or resolve, or reinvent, or any other grand-sounding slogan proposed by politicians dreaming of a Nobel Peace Prize. Confederation as an aim is not a farfetched concept. The original UN partition plan had in effect dictated an Israeli-Palestinian Federation by calling for a common currency and infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, etc.). Following are some preliminary ideas we might entertain on the way to creating the confederation.. I divide them into two categories: outside-in and inside-out, which can be pursued simultaneously on a multi-track basis.

Outside-in means continuing to diminish general Arab-Israeli tensions by creating a Middle Eastern environment more amenable to civilized discourse while serving as a foundation for further progress. Examples are the Egyptian and Jordanian normalization agreements and the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. I include Israel’s unofficial ties with Saudi Arabia and Oman as well as its working relationship with Qatar. Inside-out refers to improving the ongoing Israel-Palestine relationship.

Outside-in and inside-out are complementary, each reinforcing possibilities in the other. Israel-Egyptian peace created a dynamic that eventually led to Madrid/Oslo and de facto diplomatic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Jordan, fearing Israel would use this to turn the Hashemite Kingdom into Palestine, decided to formalize its decades-long working relationship with Israel and conclude a peace treaty. This led other Arab League states to develop informal economic and quasi-diplomatic relations with Israel decades before the Abraham Accords. Over 50,000 Israeli tourists a year had been visiting Morocco before the Accords and according to the Manufacturers Association of Israel about 200 Israeli companies were already doing business in the UAE before the Accords. The Iranian threat prompted the Gulf States to formalize existing de facto relationships. This gave both Morocco and Sudan a good excuse to follow suit. In the Middle East the political/economic hipbone is connected to the economic/political thighbone.

But first we must debunk the “Evil of Oslo” myth and demonstrate how it benefited both sides.

Israel and Oslo

The Soviet Union reestablished diplomatic relations enabling more than one million Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel.
China and India established diplomatic relations, introducing an explosion of economic activity. East Asia is now Israel’s second biggest trading partner, after the EU, having surpassed the United States. The resultant economic dynamism enabled Israel to absorb the one million Russian Jews whose engineering and scientific skills contributed substantially to Israel becoming Silicon Wadi. Israel’s population increased by 35 percent from 4.7 million to 6.3 million during the 1990s.
Seventy-one countries established (or reestablished) diplomatic relations with Israel between 1991 and 2000, including 30 African and six Muslim
The Vatican established relations in 1993, a theological earthquake of historic import. The Jewish state was officially kosher, having preached for millennia that Jewish statelessness and suffering were God’s punishment for not accepting Jesus.
Israeli trade offices opened in Morocco, Oman, and Qatar. The Gulf States canceled the Arab Boycott in 1994. A wave of foreign investment
Formal peace was established with Jordan in 1994.
Israel’s free trade agreement with the European Union was upgraded, improving Israel’s competitiveness in EU markets.
The United Nations General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as racism.
Israeli sports branches, having been barred by Asian sports associations due to the Arab boycott, were accepted into European sports associations.

Opponents of the accords cite the thousands of Jewish casualties subsequent to the accords. But while not demeaning the carnage following the accords, from a historical viewpoint the accords were a tremendous ‘grand-strategic’ triumph for the reasons cited above. We tend to forget that a wave of terror swept the country after the deal with Egypt – the second most significant ‘grand-strategic’ achievement in Israel’s history, second only to the War of Independence (which cost 6000 dead or 1% of the population). For Israel, peacemaking is part of Israel’s war for existence, and in wars there are casualties.

Palestinians and Oslo

Self-appointed guardians of the purity of the Palestinian cause condemned Oslo as a Palestinian Versailles or a Palestinian Munich, rather than a major achievement of international legitimization which could have served as a foundation for progress in the struggle for Palestinian nationhood but for the corruption and incompetence of the PLO and the revanchism of Hamas. Major Palestinian achievements since Madrid/Oslo have included:

The creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), is internationally recognized as having governance over the majority of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This could have enabled the Palestinians to begin building robust national institutions if their leadership had not been so corrupt and incompetent.
Internationally recognized diplomatic status of the PLO as the exclusive interlocutor with Israel regarding permanent-status negotiations, granting the PNA state-like status and juridical (if not de facto) equality with Israel.
Massive financial aid from the EU and the United States.
Inclusion in the EU’s European Neighborhood Policy along with Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and others.
By 2000, 138 of the 193 UN members had established formal diplomatic relations with the Palestinians—up from 94 before Oslo.

What We Can Do

Events in Ukraine present us with an immediate opportunity to reinforce the positive geopolitical trends generated by the Abraham Accords. A natural gas pipeline from Saudi gas fields, ostensibly to Jordan, but hooking up with Israel’s existing pipeline to Ashkelon to be exported to Europe. The EU would be responsible for building an LNG facility off the coast according to the most rigorous environmental standards. Prominent American environmentalist Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that LNG shipped from the Gulf to Europe is one third as polluting as gas from the poorly maintained and leaky Siberian pipelines.
Israeli High-Tech is chronically short of engineers, computer scientists, and programmers. Israeli companies employ around 20,000 Ukrainian remote-working techies. Some 1,000 Palestinian engineers and computer scientists in the West Bank and Gaza already work remotely with several Israeli companies. INTEL has been hiring techies in Jordan for its various Israeli operations. The potential to leverage Israel’s human resource needs into a real geopolitical winner and instrument for peacemaking is enormous. Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinians have droves of skilled, underemployed The UAE has been investigating ways to invest in Israeli High-Tech. They could establish High-Tech Human Resource Centers in Ramallah, Amman and El Arish employing thousands of Arab techies, who would be dependent for their European standard of living on the economic dynamism of Israel while interacting with Israelis on a daily basis in a professional and unmediated way. This would be building the psychological, cultural, and human foundations for peace more than well-televised visits of heads of state.

Further Steps

The war in Syria has made Haifa Jordan’s de facto Mediterranean port. In the same vein a Red Sea Port Authority, coordinating the traffic and environmental challenges of the Aqaba and Eilat ports, could become an integral part of an Aqaba/Eilat Development Authority that would develop the ports and regional tourism, with mutual development of Arava agriculture—turning the Arava into the Imperial Valley of Europe. An outgrowth of this would be a comprehensive Red Sea Development Authority, which would include Egypt and Saudi Arabia, guaranteeing the peaceful development of the entire Red Sea. The seeds for this authority already exist. In 2018, Saudi Arabia created the Red Sea Development Company ostensibly to construct a gigantic project at the mouth of the Red Sea. Given that the Saudis were so concerned to get Israel’s approval for Egypt’s return of the islands in the straits of Tiran, they might be ready to play a discrete but central role in promoting these other developments, This could be one of the levers for Saudi Arabia to eventually formalize its relations with Israel as the UAE did.
Establish a Dead Sea Development Authority—with Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian representation—that would coordinate mineral extraction and tourism while ameliorating the environmental challenges of the rapidly shrinking water level. Israel would forego some of its relative economic prerogatives in favor of increased overall economic and political benefits.
Propose a Tri-State Tourism Authority including Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
Encourage the Arab Oil States to establish a research university in Jericho. There are thousands of Israeli and Arab academics working at universities around the world who cannot find work in their home countries and who could live in Jerusalem and Amman while staffing the university.
We could establish a Middle East Mayo Clinic, staffed by returning Israelis as well as Jewish and non-Jewish medical experts on sabbatical. Health care-oriented foundations like the Gates Foundation might find this an interesting concept.

The unmediated, interpersonal work relationships between Arabs and Jews necessary to make these ideas work will do more to de-demonize the “other” than all the holding hands, We Shall Overcome workshops, and seminars and conferences the human mind can conceive. Forests do not pop into existence in all their full-grown glorious majesty; neither does peace. Both grow slowly out of tiny seeds carefully planted and nourished. I offer the above as seeds that might potentially grow into a confederation model as the true path to peaceful coexistence.