For Israel Security is Linked to Sovereignty

Months before the July 2000 Camp David Summit between Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Israel had been revising it positions on the subject of borders and security in preparation for final status talks. Martin Indyk, who had just come back as the US ambassador to Israel, recalls in his memoirs that Barak initially had been reluctant to agree to an Israeli withdrawal from the Jordan Valley, but when the Palestinian negotiators were shown Israel's territorial needs on a map, in May 2000, they stormed out of the negotiations.

According to Indyk, the IDF Planning Branch came up with what he characterized as "a more reasonable approach," that the Palestinians might not reject: after three years, a US-led multinational force would be deployed in the Jordan Valley, which would include the IDF. The new approach would be based on the IDF returning to the Jordan Valley and crossing into Palestinian territory in the event that a threat emerged from the Eastern Front.
Anyone who has studied the history of Camp David, and the negotiations in the months that followed, will recall that later the US took this Israeli idea and threw out the involvement of the IDF in the multinational force, calling for it to be removed at the end of the three years. Once Israeli control of the Jordan Valley had been conceded, it became easier for the Palestinians to erode Israel's security presence.  What was left was a purely multinational force defending Israel, instead of the IDF.

Every Israeli government that enters permanent status negotiations with the Palestinians faces the same dilemmas that the Barak government confronted a decade ago. Israel has a legal right to "defensible borders" instead of the pre-1967 line that was never an international border but only an armistice line created in 1949.  This was the essence of the territorial clause of UN Security Council Resolution 242, from November 1967.  But when negotiations begin, the more territory Israel demands on retaining for its security, the harder it becomes to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.

For that reason, the idea emerged on the Israeli side in past negotiations of replacing "defensible borders" with Israeli "security arrangements" that could be placed in territory that was formally under Palestinian sovereignty. Thus instead of demanding Israeli sovereignty over vital territories where the IDF hoped to keep an early-warning station or where it planned on deploying brigades, Israel could acquiesce to giving these territories to the Palestinians, as long as it retained access for military purposes. In short, it was possible to separate security from sovereignty.

There are two risks that emerge from this approach. First, once Israel concedes its claim to sovereignty over vital territories, it becomes much easier to erode Israeli security demands in the course of negotiations. That is precisely what happened in 2000. Second, even if the Palestinians agreed to an Israeli military presence inside a Palestinian state (and Mahmud Abbas has already ruled that out in public statements), they will be motivated to direct all their political energies to getting it removed, in the first years after an agreement is reached. According to past precedents in the Middle East, an extra-territorial military presence won't last.  In the end, using this diplomatic strategy of "security arrangements," Israel could lose both the territory and the security it hoped to achieve.

At this stage, Israel rightfully will be seeking to focus the upcoming direct talks on the issue of security, before getting to other issues, like borders. But by focusing first on security, Israel must not give the US the impression that it does not have territorial claims, as well, through which it will seek to safeguard the security needs it plans to present. Israel must take into account that the administration may decide to publish an Obama Plan if the negotiations reach a deadlock.  Under such circumstances, it must make sure that its most vital interests will be taken into account, and find full expression in what Washington may in the end propose.

This article originally appeared in Hebrew in Yisrael Hayom.