With all hope currently buried beneath the rubble of Gaza and Israel’s abandoned kibbutzim, it is hard not to despair about the prospects of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. The hostages have to be returned immediately and the killing of civilians has to stop, yet a ceasefire alone will not solve the fundamental challenge of achieving an enduring settlement, and while it is hard to make a plan amid such trauma, it is impossible to end years of violence without one.
And in reality, a blueprint does exist for an alternative to this deadly cycle of destruction and retribution. The attempts in the Oslo process (whose five-year timetable for a two-state solution did not materialise), the failed Clinton-Arafat-Barak Camp David talks and the doomed Obama 2013-14 initiatives are well documented. Less well known is the 2007-08 peace plan. After talking to some of its leading proponents in the past few days, I believe this will, sooner or later, offer anew the best starting point for delivering a durable peace.
After I became UK prime minister in 2007, I met the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and had intensive one-to-one discussions with the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and the Saudi King Abdullah – in the Downing Street flat, in Olmert’s home in Jerusalem and beneath vast shark-filled fish tanks in the king’s palace in Riyadh: perhaps a metaphor for the challenge. And in advance of a face-to-face meeting, these bold leaders, with the help of intermediaries, worked through the parameters of a 22-state pan-Arab agreement to recognise Israel, allowing it to be secure within its borders, side by side with an independent and economically viable Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.
By the summer of 2008, the two parties were “poring over maps”, as my team minuted. “We’ve got further than we did at Camp David or Taba [the 2001 Israeli-Palestinian talks],” a leading negotiator reported back. When I addressed the Knesset, the first British PM to do so, I outlined western support for such a deal, not shying away from the fact that a number of settlements would have to be abandoned and Greater Jerusalem divided.
“We were inches away,” Olmert records in his memoir, “within a hair’s breadth of fulfilling the dreams of millions of Israelis who longed for peace.” Indeed, a 2009 poll found that 78% of Israelis favoured such a solution. But then, as so often, events conspired against peace: changes of leadership in Israel, then the US and then Saudi Arabia, and the global financial crisis followed by a decade of rising protectionism, saw the diplomatic window of opportunity close.
However, two documents from that moment of promise remain of great potential significance today. The first is the original version of the plan, with a detailed territorial solution based on the 1967 borders, to be adjusted by between 4.6% and 6% – mainly through land swaps – and with the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem part of the future Palestinian state. According to former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice: “Olmert gave Abbas cause to believe that he was willing to reduce that number to 5.8%,” alongside the building of a tunnel or highway under Palestinian control linking Gaza to the West Bank.
An international fund would compensate uprooted Palestinians and Jews. The Holy Basin in Jerusalem, containing the sacred sites of the three great monotheistic religions, would be redefined as an international zone. The Palestinian state would control part of the Dead Sea coastline. As Rice said at the time: “Yitzhak Rabin had been killed for offering far less.” An agreed-upon international force in the Jordan valley would protect the border between Jordan and the new state. Israel would agree to the “right to return” of a number of as yet unquantified Palestinian refugees and President Bush signalled that the US would offer citizenship to 100,000 Palestinian refugees.
The second promising element was the proposed security arrangements agreed by Israel and the US. Both Israelis and Palestinians would have the right to defend themselves against terrorism. The Palestinians would not enter security or military treaties with those who did not recognise the state of Israel. Warning stations would be placed on mountaintops in the Palestinian state. If a foreign army moved near the border of Jerusalem, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could cross the border in coordination with Palestine.
Inevitably, the passage of time since 2008 requires some modification of the details and it will take time before any trust is restored. The Israeli defence minister has now proposed who might manage security in postwar Gaza, but it will need a clear international agreement on that and on the status of the Palestinian Authority, which has had no elections for 18 years and seems rudderless amid accusations of corruption. And, given that international promises to Gaza after military actions in 2002, 2008-09, 2014 and 2021 were never fully fulfilled, we will need dependable guarantees on who will pay for reconstruction and how the money will be spent free of fraud.
Settlement expansion has accelerated, from fewer than 300,000 people in 2008 to 700,000. “When the West Bank becomes home to a million Jewish settlers, an Israeli withdrawal will be impossible,” Olmert wrote recently, but by acting now “it is still possible to resettle the great majority of the settlers into settlement blocs that take up only a tiny part of the territory”.
But the seismic shifts in our geopolitics could enhance the possibility of a pan-Arab deal. It is now clear that as long as it is not detached from a solution on Palestine, the once elusive normalisation between the Arab world and Israel for which Olmert and Abdullah hoped – and which was gaining momentum before 7 October – is still within our grasp. But with the Palestinian cause now even more central to the global south’s struggles for self-determination and equality, Israel must also know it cannot ever absorb the Palestinians into one state or fall back on Donald Trump’s so-called Middle East peace plan.
Recent events have also made it clear that the west – in particular the US – cannot now succeed in any peace initiative by acting on its own. It needs to work with the rest of the world, building the widest possible global coalition designed to isolate those most opposed today to a two-state solution: the murderous Hamas and the reactionary clique surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu.
The consequences of doing nothing are too painful to contemplate, not just for Gaza but for the peace of the entire region. One year from now, ceasefire or not, hundreds of thousands of displaced, starving and sick Palestinians could be stranded in overcrowded refugee camps besides rubble-strewn alleyways, hollowed-out buildings and bombed-out infrastructure with no end in sight, and the cycle of violence will threaten to escalate yet again to engulf the region, entrapping a new generation of disaffected young people, who will be easy fodder for recruitment into a Hamas 2.0.
Breakthroughs in geopolitics are rare, but in the least propitious of circumstances – as I argued to the Saudis and Israelis in 2008 – Kennedy and Khrushchev delivered the first ever nuclear test ban treaty, and Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated the biggest reduction of nuclear weapons in history. The year 2024 starts in deep gloom – but with visionary leadership, building upon the 2007-08 plan, there could be light at the end of a very dark tunnel that still threatens, unless we act, to turn pitch black.
Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
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