The recent agreement between Israel and the PLO raises the prospect of peace in the Holy Land, a prospect that all decent people support. Peace raises risks for Israel: the possibility that Arab extremists would use the West Bank to undermine Israeli security, or even Israel's existence. Risks are involved for the Palestinians also: the possibility that Israel will refrain from moving forward toward genuine self-rule for the Palestinians. I have always believed that these risks were outweighed by the risks of continued conflict to the security and interests of all parties. I began to search in the early 1970s for a peaceful solution that would not be an inordinate risk for Israel. I tested the solution discussed in part below in a five-hour-long, detailed conversation with a hawkish, right-wing Israeli politician, a former leading general, who eventually agreed that Israel could return the Sinai and the Golan Heights--provided that its Arab neighbors would make a genuine peace and that it could retain a blocking force on the Jordan River--without major threat to its security.
In 1975, with the coauthorship of Cherif Bassiouni, who was recently proposed by the United States as the war crimes prosecutor in the case of the former Yugoslavia, I published a peace plan (revised in 1977) for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This plan, and the 1977 commentary on it, was endorsed privately by President Anwar Sadat, who incidentally wrote me a long letter two weeks before he proposed visiting Jerusalem.
ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN SECURITY NEEDED
Prior to the second-stage disengagement in the Sinai, Egyptian Ambassador Ghorbal had requested Bassiouni to ask me to induce the Israeli government to accept this plan as the quid pro quo for the second-stage disengagement. Somehow U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger learned of this proposal and, in addition to another invidious remark I will not report, told Ghorbal that he would get him a better deal if he withdrew the request that Bassiouni had transmitted to me.
Many things have changed since 1977. Demands for compensation and return of the 1948 refugees to former homes are muted now and, therefore, are less urgent considerations. The reader will see, however, how the reasonable requirement that Jews who fled Arab lands be compensated for their losses would offset the threat that compensation for Palestinian refugees would have posed to the economic viability of Israel. The considerations that the security of Israel must be weighed with respect to the return of refugees and that each party would have primary responsibility for its own diaspora would have had similar consequences for the
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