The Geopolitics Of Israel's Border Question

Saul B Cohen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000301823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study addresses possible border adjustments between Israel and a potential Palestinian political entity, and with Syria on the Golan. It also addresses the complexities of the territorial imperative.

Chapter I.
International Conflict and Borders

The subject of this volume is the geopolitics of Israel’s border question. Many feel that the Arab-Israeli conflict is unique because it has been so protracted and seemingly intractable. Certainly the conflict has very special features: the historic roots of two peoples in the same land, the stake of three major international religions in its holy sites and places, and the large diasporas that provide support to the respective national causes.

However, the Arab-Israeli conflict is produced by forces in international relations that are universal in nature. All over the world peoples and states are caught up in the struggles over sovereignty and borders. This is part of the process of nation-building and state-formation. With the rapid increase in the number of sovereign states since the decline of western colonialism, these struggles have increased in frequency and intensity.

A historical and contemporary overview of border disputes is therefore relevant to understanding the Arab-Israeli situation. Analogous cases present useful insights, as does an evolutionary or developmental approach to the setting of boundaries. The general treatment in this chapter provides a broad perspective for understanding the evolution of Israel’s borders to their present stage, as well as for appreciating the boundary changes that are proposed.

Disputes Over Sovereignty and Boundaries

The number of actual and potential conflicts in the world over territory has increased substantially since the close of World War II, and particularly in the last two decades. Together with, and often a consequence of the Cold War, such disputes are responsible for most of the global geopolitical instability of our times.

The rising curve of territorial dispute is the result of a radically changed world geopolitical map. This map began to take shape at the end of World War II when western colonialism crumbled in the face of European military exhaustion and the yearnings of subject peoples for independence. When the United Nations was founded in 1945, its sovereign member states numbered only 51. At that time, three-quarters of the land area of the earth had the status of some form of political dependency. By 1950, the figure had increased only moderately to 60 sovereign states. By 1955, the rise of anti colonial pressures brought the number to 76. In the next two decades, however, there was a doubling to 144. In 1982, the figure stood at 157 members, and by 1986 it was 175.

The emergence of these new, structurally and politically immature states has generated a new cycle of territorial conflicts. Many of the boundaries imposed by and inherited from the colonial powers are in dispute on the grounds that they violate the pre-colonial territorial order. The situation has been exacerbated by the irredentist drives of minority groupings often arbitrarily included within colonial-drawn boundaries, or located in these new states as a result of post-colonial wars of independence. Moreover, regional and great power rivals have exploited territorial frictions for their own ends.

The elements that contribute to dispute over territory and boundaries are numerous and often intertwined. The most salient among them are: strategic and tactical land space; strategic water space; land access to the sea; strategic minerals; water resources for irrigation, drinking and electric power; historic claims; drives for racial, ethnic or religious unification; minority struggles for independence; refugee populations; distraction from domestic turmoil; and major power rivalries.

A list of nearly one hundred disputes, both active and latent is presented in an Appendix. This list is not all-inclusive, but it does cover nearly all that have the potential for war. Most of today’s territorial disputes tend to be resolved through force of arms, or the threat to apply such force. Thus, just as the USSR imposed territorial settlements in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II, China won its border claims over India, and Vietnam regained territories from Cambodia. Indonesia absorbed West Irian, as did Nigeria the Cameroun. Negotiated solutions, such as the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, are rarer events. In most cases, the stronger and victorious power simply dictates the nature of the settlement.

While territorial conflicts within the developing world are on the increase, this is not the case in the developed world. More and more, major powers are reluctant to resort to force in border disputes between themselves because of the threat that minor military actions may escalate into all-out war. Thus, while there were armed clashes between China and the USSR in Central Asia and the Far Eastern province between 1960 and 1969, especially over Damansky Island in the Ussuri River in 1969, the two powers have since pursued diplomatic solutions.¹ Also, India and China, having fought over territorial issues in 1959 in the Northeast Frontier of India and in Ladakh in 1962, then agreed to abstain from further force. The absence of violence in European territorial disputes is also a reflection of how Great Powers - the US and the USSR, and more broadly NATO and COMECON - have accepted the post World War II boundary status quo because of the fear that war in Europe would lead to nuclear war.²

Instead, border conflicts are concentrated in other continental regions, especially the world’s three Shatterbelts - the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Subsaharan Africia. In these Shatterbelts the major powers have less of an interest in preventing disputes from erupting, than in encouraging conflict when it appears to serve their strategic or ideological purposes, and in containing the fighting once advantage has been gained by their satellite, or if stalemate has resulted.

Past Border Disputes

Border disputes, many seemingly intractable, have been resolved for reasons varying with the circumstances. Contending nations have, on occasion, recognized that there were no real winners and losers in major, protracted warfare. A classic example is France and Germany relative to Alsace and Lorraine. Disputes were also resolved because of the abilities of colonial powers to act with some degree of dispassion in imposing territorial settlements – e.g., in 1927 Portugal gave Belgium one square mile at the mouth of the Congo near Matadi to enable Belgian Congo port facilities to be expanded. In exchange, Belgium ceded 1,350 square miles of the Congo to Angola with the provision that the Portuguese build a railroad from Benguela on the Angolan coast to Katanga. Exchange of territories also characterized past efforts to resolve border conflicts peacefully – e.g., in 1909 Bolivia and Peru accepted an arbitration award and demarcated their border, and in 1922–23, France and Britain exchanged territory along the Lebanon-Palestine-Syria frontier.

In other instances, border conficts were resolved by the mass movement of people - by expulsion or by extermination. Thus, at the end of World War II, the Polish-German dispute over control of Western Poland was resolved with the mass expulsion of Germans from East and West Prussia, Poznan, Silesia and Eastern Pomerania, and the German-Czech dispute over Sudetenland was settled in the same way. The expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor in exchange for Turks from Greece helped to consolidate the modern Turkish state. The Paraguay-Brazil border conflict was “solved” when Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay teamed up to exterminate a large segment of the Paraguayan population in the bloody war of 1865–70.

The Chilean-Argentinian boundary dispute over the Andean region, which was resolved by arbitration in 1902, has been held up as a model of peaceful resolution (cf. the monument of the Christ of the Andes). However, contention has persisted in Tierra del Fuego over the islands in the Beagle Channel. In 1977, an international court of arbitration awarded the islands located at the eastern end of the channel to Chile, but Argentina rejected this decision. Mediation by the Vatican in 1980 affirmed Chilean ownership, but called for demilitarization. The dispute has brought the countries to the brink of war, although it is for the moment quiescent. Chile and Peru fought bitterly over the Tacna-Arica area (then the source of nearly all the world’s nitrates) in 1879, and Chile laid waste to Peru in defeating it - at the same time depriving Bolivia of its outlet to the sea. This historic struggle has been practically phased out by elimination over time of the Peruvian population, as the areas have been settled with Chileans.

The northwest frontier of India was a source of considerable concern to Great Britain, as was the demarcation of Russia’s borders in Central Asia. Establishment of Afghanistan as a buffer, essentially separating the British and Russian spheres of influence and including its eastern projection on the south side of the Pamirs to Chinese Turkestan, provided India with a secure boundary after centuries of warfare. Now of course, Afghanistan’s historic neutral role is being reversed, as the Soviet Union seeks to embrace the country within its military and political orbit, and irredentism in the Pushtu border region that straddles Pakistan and Afghanistan acquires new impetus.

The Turkish-Iraq border that was established in 1926 was noteworthy in that Iraq retained the Vilayet of Mosul, including both Kurdish and Arab peoples and the major petroleum resources of the region. In this case, Iraq considered oil a more positive benefit than the negative costs of absorbing more Kurds into the country. Kurdish nationalism has, however, remained a constant threat to the Iraqi state, as it has from time to time to Turkey and Iran which also have large Kurdish populations.

Over the centuries, then, border conflicts have been fought over grazing lands, farm lands, water rights, minority peoples, minerals, strategic heights and communication lanes, prestige, sense of history and the mystical qualities of territoriality.³ Most of these elements persist as ingredients of territorial dispute. The oil of the Middle East is indeed far more of a prize than was the iron ore of Lorraine or the nitrates of the Atacama. The headwaters of the Jordan, the Shatt al-Arab, or the damming of the Upper Parana, are sources of international contention as important as was the Euphrates between Rome and Persia, or the Rio Grande between the US and Mexico. The highway link from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is even more important to Israel than was the railroad for Turkey from Choban-Bey to Nisiben that skirted the Syrian border, and the irredentist dreams of the Ewes, Armenians, Kurds and Pushtus are no less a threat to regional peace than were the efforts of Anglo-Texans to break off from Mexico or the Macedonians to reestablish their ancient homeland. Moreover, Germany’s ambitions to embrace the Volksdeutsch of Central and Eastern Europe in a Greater Reich have their present echoes in Somalian ambitions for a Greater Somalia, or in Syrian dreams for a Greater Syria. Thus, past disputes over territory - its people and its resources – have generally been settled either through war, or through imposition of a settlement upon the warring parties by more powerful third parties. (The feudal era custom of resolving protracted conflict over territory through royal marriages has not had its modern counterpart.) The Middle East, Southeast Asia and Subsaharan Africa are reliving this history of conflict.

Current Analogies

Cyprus

As mentioned previously, an understanding of the Arab-Israeli territorial dispute can be enhanced by a review of analogous, if not identical situations in this unstable world of ours. One such case is the Greek-Turkish conflict over Cyprus. As Zionist leadership accepted the United Nations Partition Proposal of 1947, so did Turkey and the Turkish-Cypriot minority support partitioning the island before Britain granted Cyprus independence in 1960. On the other hand, the Greek-Cypriot majority had favored enosis – political union of the entire island with Greece. Here the parallel with the Palestine case breaks down, because most Palestinian Arabs called for independence from mandatory rule and control of the land west of the Jordan, rather than union with Hashemite Jordan.

After the Turkish invasion of 1974, the sovereignty of a united Cyprus became an issue once again. A partition line was drawn by Turkish force of arms to create a Turkish sector embracing forty percent of the total island area, whereas the 120,000 Turkish Cypriots represent slightly fewer than twenty percent of the total Cypriot population. Thereafter the dispute between Turkish and Greek Cypriots expanded into a boundary conflict. The location of the ceasefire boundary led to population flight and transfer, and confirmed the division of the city of Nicosia.

The question of national sovereignty remains central to the dispute. Turkey’s policy favoring a “bi-zonal, bi-communal independent federal state” on Cyprus no longer espouses outright partition and the establishment of an independent state. However, the existence of a Turkish Federated State governed by an autonomous Turkish Cypriot administration makes for de facto partition that could ultimately result in a separate sovereignty.⁴

Moreover, even though most Greek Cypriots now accept the concept of a Cypriot bi-communal state rather than a centralized state or enosis with Greece, they insist that only twenty percent of the land area should be reserved for Turkish administration; they reject the proposition that the Turkish community be granted virtual parity in such federal institutions as the presidency and the highest judiciary; and they demand that 180,000 Greek refugees be allowed to return to the Turkish portion of the island. The most recent United Nations draft agreement for a neutral and nonaligned Federal Republic of Cyprus with two autonomous states, weighted voting and veto power for a Turkish vice president, was rejected by the Greek Cypriots in 1986.

Obviously, there is a major difference in the genesis of the Cyprus and Palestine conflicts. The international agreement over Cyprus that culminated in the establishment of the Republic in 1960 was based upon the concept of a unified, independent Cyprus. The 1947 international solution to the Palestine problem was based upon partition and upon the establishment of two separate sovereignties, some federated functions and an internationalized Jerusalem.

Northern Ireland

Another parallel case may be drawn from Northern Ireland. There the seeds of the dispute between Roman Catholics and Protestants lay in the 1920 partition of Ireland and the establishment of an autonomous province of the United Kingdom. The interlocked issues of sovereignty and boundaries remain at the roots of the conflict. While the outlawed Irish Republican Army wages its war for union of Northern Ireland with Ireland, more moderate Catholics both in Ulster and the Irish Free State pursue compromise. They would probably accept another partition that would attach the Catholic rural outer counties to Dublin, or as an alternative, some kind of bi-communal northern Irish state that might be federated with the Irish Republic or the United Kingdom - or both.

The half-million Catholic minority of Ulster might be likened to the Arabs of the West Bank or Gaza - they are the predominant population in the rural areas of the six northern Irish counties, and are also very strongly represented in the city of Londonderry and in Belfast (which, de facto, is a city divided, as Nicosia is, and as Jerusalem was from 1949 to 1967). If Jordan were to be regarded as analogous to Eire, and Israel to the United Kingdom, then comparisons could be made between Ulster, and Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In such a comparison, Palestinian Arabs would seek control of the West Bank to merge it with Jordan, as the IRA seeks to unify Ireland. On the other hand, while some West Bank Arabs do wish unity or at least federation with Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its supporters among the West Bank Arabs have, as their current priority, sovereignty over the West Bank before considering a confederation with Jordan. Moreover, Belfast, while divided, is not a frontier city as was Jerusalem prior to 1967.

Of course, one might employ a different analogy from the above by treating Israel, the West Bank and Jordan as one unit. In fact, the PLO’s Palestine National Coveoant does consider these three parts of pre-Mandatory Palestine as Palestinian territory. Under such circumstances, the goal of uniting all the land of Ancient Israel east and west of the Jordan into a single Palestinian Arab polity under PLO domination - and with a Jewish minority diminished by the expulsion of its “Zionists” - would be similar to the IRA’s goal of a united Ireland in which the national, religious, and ethnic identity of Ulster’s one million Protestants of English and Scottish descent would be submerged.

Belize-Guatemala

A third analogy, although the conflict is now latent, is the Belize-Guatemala case. The issue between the two is one of both sovereignty, and territory. Guatemala has a long-standing claim to Belize, the former British crown colony known as British Honduras. Mexico has a dormant claim to the northern half of the country which it has said it would not reactivate unless Belize’s territorial integrity were to be compromised by another state. Guatemala bitterly opposed the independence of Belize on the grounds that Guatemala had inherited Spanish sovereignty over the area, thus rejecting British claims to the colony based upon the 1859 United Kingdom-Guatemala treaty. Although Belize attained independence in 1981, and it is protected by British troops, its long-term future is clouded.

One option is close association or federation with Guatemala. This was posed by a US-appointed mediator in 1969 as a means of resolving the conflict. The suggestion was rejected by the British. Another option is territorial partition whereby a small portion of Belize would be ceded to Guatemala. In 1975, Guatemala offered to settle its claim by accepting the southern quarter of Belize, south of the Monkey River. The Guatemalans were interested in the seabed in which oil prospecting is taking place, as well as the land. This offer was rejected by the British, prodded by the continuing and bitter opposition of Belize political parties to the dismemberment of any significant portion of their territory. In addition to their sense of national self-pride and their interest in petroleum rights, the Guatemalans have security concerns - they seek full sovereignty over the Bay of Amatique which provides access to their Caribbean port of Puerto Barrias.⁵

While Belize is an ethnically-mixed country, its Creole majority, the descendants of Black slaves and English seamen, is located on the coast, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Glossary of Frequently Used Hebrew and Arabic Geographic Terms
• Summary
• Chapter I International Conflict and Borders
• Chapter II Borders in the Arab-Israeli Dispute
• Chapter III The Historic Evolution of Israel’s Borders
• Chapter IV The Politics of Territorial Compromise
• Chapter V The Map of Territorial Compromise
• Chapter VI Core-Periphery Relations
• Chapter VII The Debate over Territorial Compromise
• Chapter VIII Conclusion
• Notes
• General References