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The window of opportunity widely believed to have been opened by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli settlements from Gaza, and by the election of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority, has prompted a debate in U.S. policy circles. The question is whether President George W. Bush is moving quickly enough to prevent the spreading Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank from foreclosing the possibility of the emergence of a Palestinian state.
Politically speaking, whether a viable Palestinian state is still possible is the wrong question, if only because by now it should be clear that Bush will not take the political risks entailed in ensuring the creation of such a state in the face of Sharon's determination to prevent it. The right question - the answer to which perhaps may yet invest the peace process with the energy and direction it now lacks - is whether there is still hope for the survival of Israel as a Jewish state.
For it is the Jewish state, far more so than a state for the Palestinian people, that is now threatened and in doubt. Whatever uncertainties exist about a Palestinian state, what is certain, even after Israel's disengagement from Gaza, is that it is only a matter of time before Arabs will constitute a majority of the population between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. When this happens, Israel will cease to be a Jewish state, both formally and in fact - unless it herds the majority Arab population into enclosed bantustans, and turns into an apartheid state.
It is a supreme irony that only a Palestinian state can assure the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. However as Sharon's settlement project continues and intensifies in the West Bank - not despite but because of the Gaza disengagement - and relentlessly diminishes and fragments the West Bank, Palestinians will sooner or later abandon a two-state solution and pursue the political logic of their own demography instead.
Palestinians will not settle for less than a state that is fully within the pre-1967 borders. Having already yielded to Israel half the territory acknowledged by the United Nations in its partition resolution of 1947 as their legitimate patrimony, Palestinians will not consent to additional Israeli annexations of the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, except in swaps for comparable territory on Israel's side of the border.
The capital of this Palestinian state, moreover, will have to be located in East Jerusalem. The chances of a Palestinian leader signing a peace accord that shuts Palestinians out of any part of Jerusalem are about as great as an Israeli leader signing a peace agreement that grants Palestinian refugees a "right of return" to Israel. Indeed, Palestinian agreement to a formula that redirects the refugees' right of return from Israel to a Palestinian state is entirely dependent on compromises in Israel's present position on territory and Jerusalem.
These difficult concessions by an Israeli government are conceivable only if it finally tells its citizens the truth - that only if a viable and successful Palestinian state comes into being alongside Israel can its Jews avoid being turned into a minority in their own state.
Those in Israel who believe that the world - including Israel's great friend and ally, the United States - will abide a Jewish apartheid regime that permanently disenfranchises and dominates by force of arms an Arab majority, or allow Israel to ethnically cleanse much of the West Bank through repressive economic and "security" measures, are deluding themselves. Unfortunately, some political parties in Israel call for such thinly disguised ethnic cleansing, and yet are seen by most Israelis as acceptable partners in their governments.
Indeed, Natan Sharansky, a former minister in Sharon's government, has been agitating to declare the private property of Arabs who live just outside the municipal borders of Jerusalem, but whose adjoining properties are located within those borders, as "abandoned." Such a designation would allow the government to confiscate these Arab properties without compensation or right of appeal. This from the man who has convinced Bush that Palestinians must be kept under Israeli occupation until Israel is ready to certify they have been transformed into democrats!
Inexorable demographic "facts on the ground" will be far more determining of Israel's future than the settlements and the so-called security fence that Israel is building largely on stolen Palestinian land. When this realization begins to break through the illusions that beset the peace process, Israel's supporters may finally understand that the question is not whether the window of opportunity is closing on a Palestinian state, but whether it is closing on a Jewish state.
Unfortunately, given the all too clever manipulations of Sharon and his advisor, Dov Weissglas, who believe (as Weissglas boasted recently in a Haaretz interview) that they have persuaded the United States to let the road map and the peace process remain in "formaldehyde," this realization is likely to come about only after that proverbial window will have slammed shut.
Henry Siegman is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former executive head of the American Jewish Congress. These views are his own.
