Washington – Pro-Israeli Group Offers Maps for Palestinian State

Washington – It speaks to the paralysis in the Middle East peace process that the most noteworthy development of the past week came when a mild-mannered analyst at a pro-Israel think tank unfurled three color-coded maps.

The analyst, David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wanted to show, in concrete terms, how negotiators could create a new Palestinian state in the West Bank, using the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel as a baseline, while taking into account the roughly 300,000 Jewish settlers who now live there.

The goal, Mr. Makovsky said, is to “demystify” the territorial hurdles that divide Israelis and Palestinians, and to debunk the notion that there is no way to reconcile the Palestinian demand for sovereignty over the West Bank with the Israeli demand for control over a majority of the settlers.

“In my view, it is definitely possible to deal with each other’s core demands,” he said. “There are land swaps that would offset whatever settlements Israel would retain. The impossible is attainable.”

To be sure, Mr. Makovsky’s maps are an academic exercise. Direct negotiations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, broke down in September, just three weeks after President Obama inaugurated them at the White House. By all accounts, the two scarcely confronted borders, let alone other thorny issues, and there is little sign that the impasse will end anytime soon.

Still, the maps are getting attention. Mr. Makovsky has given briefings to senior officials in Mr. Netanyahu’s government and the Palestinian Authority, as well as to the administration’s special envoy, George J. Mitchell, and members of the National Security Council. Mr. Makovsky is also close to Dennis B. Ross, a key Middle East adviser to Mr. Obama. “He has put forward some interesting ideas that could make a valuable contribution to a future agreement,” Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.

To some seasoned observers, the significance of the maps is less what they show than where they come from.

The Washington Institute was founded in 1985 by scholars affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobbying group. While the institute has earned a reputation for solid scholarship, and has wholeheartedly supported the peace process, it has remained a staunch supporter of Israel.

Still, this latest effort to prod Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas back into negotiations resonates with a broader frustration at the impasse among many American Jews.

“There is an increasing trend toward an ‘oy vey’ angst over how to save the two-state solution from the settlement juggernaut and by extension how to save Israeli democracy,” said Daniel Levy, a senior research fellow and co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.

“The specifics of his proposed one-to-one border swaps are interesting,” Mr. Levy said, “but the subtext reads: ‘Yikes! We need a border and an end to the settlement phenomenon now.’ ”

Mr. Levy, an unabashed liberal, said he was particularly struck by Mr. Makovsky’s so-called maximalist map, which shows that Israel could absorb 80 percent of its settler population by swapping land with the Palestinians equivalent to less than 5 percent of the West Bank.

That is less than a previous Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proposed to Mr. Abbas in 2008, when the two discussed land swaps. Mr. Olmert wanted a swap equivalent to 6.3 percent of the territory Israel seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; Mr. Abbas wanted to transfer only 1.9 percent. Mr. Netanyahu has not taken a position on the swaps. To some right-wing Israelis, any such maps are taboo.

Mathematical tradeoffs are sprinkled throughout these maps, which were a year in the making and draw heavily on statistical data. Mr. Makovsky said he was able to give the Palestinians quality land in exchange for what they would give up, and to ensure that a Palestinian state would not be cut up like a jigsaw puzzle.

To those unfamiliar with the ethnic and religious landscape of the West Bank, the maps can be bewildering – showing Israeli “fingers” jutting into Palestinian territory to absorb major settlements, with offsetting chunks of new Palestinian land, some along the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian border.

Critics point out that Mr. Makovsky’s exercise does not take into account other issues, like Israel’s security or the fate of Palestinian refugees. Nor does he contend with the status of Jerusalem, which some analysts believe will be the most contentious of all the issues that divide the sides.

But Mr. Makovsky says that is up to the parties; his job is merely to stimulate their thinking. A former journalist at The Jerusalem Post, he is reluctant to be drawn into partisan arguments.

Of course, nothing in the Middle East can be divorced from politics. On Mr. Makovsky’s maps, for example, Israel would not annex Hebron, a mostly Palestinian city that lies deep in the West Bank but has religious significance to both Jews and Muslims. Nor does he have a solution for Kiryat Arba, a settlement next to Hebron that is one of the most militant in the West Bank.

“It’s up to the parties to decide what to do with these settlers,” he said, conceding that when only 9,000 settlers were uprooted from Gaza after Israel withdrew in 2005, it caused years of political upheaval.

“I’m in the think-tank world to solve problems, not be polemical,” he said. “The idea here is to bring the two-state solution down to earth.”