Demography matters. Witness South Africa and Iraq, where blacks won majority rule and where Shiites and Kurds are asserting their demographic weight. People, like buildings and roads, are facts on the ground. Today there are more than 8 million Palestinians in Greater Palestine, the Palestine that existed before Winston Churchill split it by fiat into Palestine and Transjordan. Their number should double, in 30 years or so, to 16 million. I submit here that the site of a Palestinian state must be re-imagined, and that Greater Palestine is the only viable alternative for the three major ethnic communities that live in it: East Jordanians, Jews, and Palestinians.
The Israelis have been obsessed with demography, fixing their gaze eastward, where they wish the Palestinians to vanish. In the highly revealing film Route 181, jointly directed by an Arab and a Jew, Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan (2004), the randomly interviewed Jews, almost without exception, advocate the expulsion of the Palestinians — not a wordless wish, but a loud, emphatic, contemptuous one. Eviction is not an easy act to implement; the Palestinians would resist it, and the Jordanians too.
The long-term Israeli policy of fragmenting Palestinian territory has reached a new zenith. What remains today is a land archipelago, comprised of isolated islands, Bantustans, cages — discontinuous geographies linked to one another only through the menace of Israeli-controlled roads and checkpoints. In short, the Palestinians have become caught in a fishnet of Jewish settlements, bypass roads, checkpoints, and military patrols — walled in and walled out. With a state like this, who needs apartheid?
Why did Israel force the Palestinians into this corner? There is only one explanation: Israel has never accepted the idea of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. Even a viable state in the West Bank and Gaza would not resolve the Palestinian Question, nor the question of Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor the right of return of Palestinian refugees. That would leave us in Greater Palestine with the Jordanian Question, too.
The time has come for a new vision and a commensurate strategy that would mobilize the Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan to create a single state in Greater Palestine that would include themselves, East Jordanians, and Jews. It would be large enough for everybody; no one has to be squeezed out. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees would become largely superfluous. The Jews would live in Eretz Israel, the Palestinians in Greater Palestine, and East Jordanians in Jordan, and those who hail from cities like Hebron and Nablus could, if they so wish, reunite with their roots.
The vision of a single state in Greater Palestine could come to fruition only through a strategy of Palestinian mass mobilization, non-violence, and dialogue with the other two communities. This applies to Israel as well, whose course has placed too much faith in force and the power of arms. A mini-state never inspired the Palestinian collective; how could a state comprised of fragments? A single state in Greater Palestine is the sane alternative to internecine conflict and despair, for all its inhabitants.
Source : Sharif S. Elmusa — The Arab World Geographer, 08.03.2005