Last week's Institute for National Security Studies Conference was impressive by any international standard. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was of course a major topic of discussion, though no breakthrough idea was presented beyond the land distribution paradigm.
The most pertinent remark came from panelist and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who asked how it could be that a country as creative as Israel has not come up with a more innovative idea for solving the conflict beyond repeating its desire to separate from the Palestinians.
Professor Yariv Marmor of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, taught me that to think outside the box, you need first to be familiar with the box, and with the lid in particular.
Four assumptions keep the lid on the box, and have been kept there by every American administration since the Clinton era:
- The solution to the conflict must be geographically confined to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
- The solution demands the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state.
- The border should be based on the 1967 borders, with minor corrections.
- The West Bank and the Gaza Strip must be one political entity.
These assumptions leave no room for negotiation and can only result in a dead end in talks.
The crisis in Gaza, for example, could have been solved had Egypt offered, with extensive international assistance, to expand the Gaza Strip into the open spaces of the Sinai Desert.
The prevalent Israeli and international discourse, accepted as self-evident, places the State of Israel at a conceptual crossroads between two possibilities: Either preserve a Jewish and democratic state within the 1967 borders with minor corrections for the settlement blocs, or end up with a binational state that would necessarily result in apartheid.
Creative thinking is required to spare us from the trap of having to choose between these two polar and impossible paths.
The creativity demonstrated by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity could serve as inspiration for escaping this fixation. Einstein did not discover anything new in the lab; he simply offered a different theory that centered on the invariance of the speed of light. Similarly, creative thinking about the conflict demands the recognition of the inability to divide this narrow country into two separate states.
It is not just the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria that makes it difficult to divide the territory. Difficulties come from a number of factors, including the communities, the environment, transportation, the economy, even water, sewage and electric infrastructure. The difficulty also lies in the consequences for security as a result of the division of the land.
What has emerged in the region since the Oslo Accords provides two models for examination: The Judea and Samaria model, divided into Areas A, B and C, a model representing a space where there is a type of coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis across areas of diverse government divisions; and the Gaza Strip model, which represents a binary division, where "we" are separated from "them" by a fence and a rigid border.
The path to thinking creatively about the conflict begins with investigating the difference in the patterns of security activity between Gaza and Judea and Samaria.
In the Gaza model of total separation, military force requiring a multitude of resources is required: tanks, fighter jets and high-intensity military action from time to time, in addition to the massive investment to eradicate the terror tunnel threat.
In the Judea and Samaria model, security is organized in a hybrid spatial balance, at daily meeting points between Israel and the Palestinians, in a dynamic of economic co-existence with an Israeli civilian presence, which precludes a massive military operation. When it comes to quality of life, the Judea and Samaria model is turning out to be more beneficial for both sides.
The key to the creative solution Friedman seeks lies in the study and development of the advantages of the hybrid spatial model emerging in Judea and Samaria, with longstanding governmental powers allocated to the Palestinian Authority in Areas A and B.
To break out of the box requires a willingness to bid farewell to the failed paradigm of absolute spatial separation when it comes to Judea and Samaria.
