Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump didn't adopt Meretz's diplomatic-strategic plan in the so-called "deal of the century" as Yossi Beilin suggested. The Meretz party did in fact came out against the plan, and rightfully so from their ideological standpoint. The "deal of the century" is an important and one must hope sustainable innovation, even though Trump is on his way out of the White House. Its realization is of vital interest to Israel in the future, and Jerusalem can act to promote it even if the circumstances in the US are less than optimal.
If we are nevertheless asked to compare it to the plans of the past, the deal of the century can be seen as inspired by the Allon Plan to partition the West Bank and Jordan and the territorial compromise strategy of some of the Labor party's hawks - foremost among them Yitzhak Rabin before his unsuccessful moves toward the 1993 Oslo Accords and Yigal Alon) between 1967 and 1967.
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In one important aspect, however, the deal of the century represents not the continuation of any previous plan but rather a welcome innovation: It revokes the Palestinian veto over the delineation of our eastern border. It allows us to implement the territorial part of the plan whether or not they approve and settle a large population in the Jordan Valley. We have a vital interest in seriously increasing the size of Beit Shan in the north and Maale Efrayim down Highway 5, in the center, and in establishing a new city in the south of the valley at the end of Highway 1. We must establish our eastern border and the periphery to the east of Jerusalem, including Maale Adumim: four big cities with large populations surrounded by adjacent communities and open spaces. We cannot allow Jerusalem to be a demographically challenged city at the end of a road. It must be a metropolis surrounded by populated spaces interconnected by iron tracks and highways. For Israel, an eastern border, one that cannot be challenged and that separates the Palestinians from the Arab world, is vital.
It's nice that Beilin seeks to artificially attribute the plan to his diplomatic worldview. It's a kind of admission of the futility of Meretz's old plan really. Even if the Trump peace plan is realized unilaterally and without the support of the incoming US administration, Israel will determine its own stable eastern border, vital to thwarting Palestinian plans to connect demographically with Palestinians and other Arabs in the East. It will limit the scope of Palestinian bargaining and foil their aspirations of preserving and possibly realizing the demographic threat from the East.
The existential threat hanging above the Labor party's and Meretz's heads ahead of the coming elections is the direct result of the collapse of the diplomatic worldview Meretz instilled in the Labor party. Herein lies the solution: a deep shift in the entire diplomatic and settlement strategy of the Zionist Labor camp. The Labor party should expect to see its end if it doesn't come to its senses and see that it must radically change its diplomatic strategy. Some kind of peace with the Palestinians can – possibly – be reached if, and only if, we cut them off from their demographic rear in the east.
It would be wrong to see such a change as a change in the Labor movement's identity. It was only in the 1990s that the Labor party underwent a process of Meretzification that saw it adopt the positions that had until that point in time been characteristic only of the party's dovish minority. Up until 1977, a majority of the members of its senior leadership were policy hawks who implemented a settlement policy that would have seen the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, and the northern Dead Sea area as under Israeli sovereignty.
But they weren't determined. They didn't understand that Israel must establish cities in the Jordan Valley and not just a scattered bunch of moshavim and kibbutzim. Urban settlement there was and remains a possibility because the Jordan Valley is an eastern frontier connected to the center of the country by relatively short roads. If the Labor movement's members want to reinvent themselves, they'll need to adopt a more updated and decisive version of the Allon Plan, alongside an effective social-democratic platform. They would be wise to admit their mistake, learn something from the public that abandoned them, and offer up a new diplomatic plan.
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