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Umm el-Fahm for the Jordan Valley?

(Jerusalem Post)Herb Keinon - Uzi Arad, director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at Herzliya's Interdisciplinary Center and chairman of the prestigious Herzliya Conference, favors the idea of a grand land swap - trading the Israeli Arab towns of Umm el-Fahm, Taiba, and Baka al-Gharbiyeh to the Palestinians for settlements and West Bank mountain ridges. This land-for-land deal will be discussed at length at the upcoming conference, to begin on Dec. 13. Israel would hand over large Arab population areas contiguous with the West Bank, and in return receive the large settlement blocs and strategically vital, uninhabited areas along the Jordan River and in the southern Hebron Hills. Arad proposes to repartition the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean along today's demographic lines in a way that will ensure territorial contiguity. Arad rails against the idea that the 1949 armistice line, known today as the "green line," is sacrosanct. Umm el-Fahm, he recalls, became part of Israel in 1951 as a result of a secret deal between David Ben-Gurion and Jordan's King Abdullah I. The Palestinians of Umm el-Fahm consider themselves Palestinians, they have mixed loyalties to Israel, about one-third are Islamic radicals, many of them have trade relations with the West Bank and they are contiguous to it. "So rather than them being - in their own eyes - second-class citizens here, let them be patriotic, first-class citizens in their own entity," Arad says. Arad argues that unilateral disengagement from Gaza will hurt Israel's future negotiating position: "You should never make unilateral concessions, never. Look at the manual in Harvard on negotiations - negotiations do not proceed by leaps of unilateral concessions, because these types of concessions corrupt the process. When you then want to turn to real reciprocal concessions, the other side is spoiled, because its expectations have risen."
2004-12-03 00:00:00
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