A Washington strategy guru, both Jewish and Zionist, remarked to me matter-of-factly a couple of months ago: "We shall not see a resolution of the Israel-Palestine issue in our lifetimes."
I agreed with him, and that was while Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was still in charge.
Much comment in recent days has assumed that real progress was possible in what is called the Middle East peace process if the old bear had survived in power. This view seems ill-founded. Sharon was -- with great political difficulty -- able to lead Israel out of Gaza because only a small minority of Jewish settlers valued anything that was there.
He surely had no intention of allowing any dispensation on the West Bank that might enable the Palestinians to create an economically and socially viable state, never mind to achieve the self-respect indispensable to responsible behavior.
Sharon, like most Israelis, wants peace but is also committed to ensuring that Israel's permanent borders are a substantial improvement on those of 1948. The persistence of Israel's ambitions on the West Bank represents an absolute barrier to any meaningful accord, whoever leads the government in Jerusalem.
Yet Israeli hawks say: "What is sacrosanct about the 1948 map? Those borders merely reflected the ground we held when fighting stopped, after the Arab states tried to crush Israel at birth. Half the world is dissatisfied with its frontiers, and seeks to amend them. Why should we be different?"
It is indisputably true that many frontiers are contested. All over the world, nations jostle for each other's land, and sometimes fight for it. Border lines in atlases tend to represent pious expressions of hope, rather than facts acknowledged in both adjoining territories. We might fare better in assessing the Israel-Palestine conflict if we viewed it in the context of other such disputes.
Most sizeable sovereign states harbor minorities with rival allegiances. The longstanding confrontation between India and Pakistan about Kashmir is the most dangerous example, because it is capable of precipitating a nuclear showdown. Only this month, Russia highlighted its eagerness to regain hegemony over Ukraine.
China's obsession with recovering Taiwan is the greatest threat to peace in Asia. Indonesia is a teeming muddle of peoples. Many have in common only the fact that they once belonged to the Dutch East Indies, and a significant number would prefer to shed their allegiance to Jakarta.
Tokyo still seethes about Soviet possession of the Kurile Islands, Japan's so-called Northern Territories, seized in 1945 and followed by the forcible deportation of about 400,000 Japanese residents. To this day, Russian coastguards periodically fire on Japanese fishermen who stray too close inshore. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow showed some signs of being willing to relinquish the Kuriles. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian line has hardened decisively again.
South American states succumb to periodic outbreaks of border conflict. The future of Quebec within Canada remains as bitterly disputed today as for the past two and a half centuries. There is also the Balkan ferment and a Cypriot partition imposed by the Turkish army. The issue of Gibraltar poisons British relations with Spain.
Many Germans and Poles remain deeply resentful about the redrawing of their borders by the victors in 1945. Amazingly, few people are even aware that Russia then annexed a substantial part of eastern Poland, together with useful Baltic coastal territory in old East Prussia. Poland was given land from defeated Germany by way of compensation. Millions of ethnic Germans were forcibly transferred westwards.
For the UK there is, of course, the small matter of Northern Ireland. Few citizens of the UK would have deemed it possible 40 years ago that we would play host to a long and bloody border dispute through the last third of the 20th century.
Yet this is what has taken place.
Even if few Irish people had the mind to resort to arms, the majority have always resented the 1921 settlement, which granted the south independence at the price of partitioning Ireland to accommodate the wishes of a million Protestants in the north.
It is likely that, before we are all dead, we shall see a significant shrinkage of the borders of the UK to accommodate the reunification of Ireland. It is likewise not impossible that, within the next half-century, Scotland will opt for independence.
I am not here concerned with the merits of either scenario. Rather, I am reflecting on the fact that the frontiers of even long-established states can alter significantly with circumstances.
Unsurprisingly, though many powers have retreated from overseas empires, none has surrendered land close to home except in the face of overwhelming political, economic or military force majeure. A common denominator in almost all border disputes -- whether conducted over decades or centuries -- is that rival governments assert their determination never to cede "sovereign territory." How commonly is that phrase abused.
It surely makes more sense to consider the Middle Eastern conflict against this background, of widespread impatience with inconvenient frontiers, than to perceive the predicament of Israelis and Palestinians as unique. It seems hardly surprising that some Israelis want to assert what they perceive as historic territorial claims in Judea and Samaria, when so many other peoples are doing the same sort of thing in other places.
Yet this does not make Israelis wise to do so. Most nations with territorial demands are reaching out to minorities of their own peoples from which they have become separated. Israel, by contrast, is seeking to colonize -- or, as Jewish settlers would claim, recolonize -- land currently inhabited either by Palestinians or by no one at all, like parts of the Jordan valley.
The key question in seeking to resolve a border dispute should always be: What outcome is most likely to lead to future tranquility?
It seems almost lunatic for Israel to seek to live as a neighbor with a Palestinian community dominated by Israeli strategic roads, fortified settlements and a vast wall. The only plausible outcome is a chronically embittered society, which continues to behave with reckless and violent irresponsibility because it perceives no incentive to do otherwise.
It is sometimes said that only Israelis and Palestinians can resolve their differences, that even the US has no real power of mediation. Yet the history of territorial disputes suggests that resolutions are seldom achieved by rational bilateral negotiation.
They are almost always imposed either by a dominant third party, or by some decisive catastrophe on the spot, usually a war or a pogrom.
Even those of us sympathetic to the Palestinians should acknowledge that the Arabs' defeat in 1967, overlaid on their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist, constituted a decisive event, which made some change in Israel's 1948 borders inevitable.
Yet the arrogance of military supremacy has caused Israel's ambitions to overreach themselves. I fear that the Washington friend whom I quoted at the outset was probably right. The Israelis will remain insufficiently despairing to make indispensable territorial concessions. The Americans will not oblige them to do so. The Palestinians will remain unable to muster a credible negotiating position.
Sharon's departure will not alter these fundamentals.
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