Temporary Permanence

Are Israel and the Palestinians inching towards some sort of renewed negotiations? I have no idea. George Mitchel is going back and forth, so on that level you could say they're deep into negotiations and have been for a while. On the other hand, no officials from either side have met officials from the other side, so far as we know, since Abbas forgot to reply to Ehud Olmer's offer of September 16 2008. So who knows.

In any case, in the present flurry of whatever they are it seems Netanyahu has floated some sort of idea, whereby the Palestinians get a state without its final border being defined. Abbas rejected that idea out of hand yesterday, and Avi Issacharof takes a closer look. In the Hebrew edition of Haaretz his article is titled "Ein al ma ledaber", Nothing to talk about, but the English version toned that down to a non-committal Chilly reply. The English version also left out a crucial explanation for the Palestinian rejection: the fear the temporary borders might eventually become permanent (this sentence, along with another few, were dropped in translation).

There's a deep irony in this Palestinian fear, of course. Back in 1949 it was the Arab states (Egypt, Jordan and Syria) who refused to recognize Israel's borders, in the hope or expectation or intention of changing them in the future to Israel's detriment. (The Palestinians were not part of those discussions at all, since the Egyptians and Jordanians had no interest in a Palestinian state). Moreover, as Michael Oren has documented in his excellent Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, in the 1950s the Americans and the British both floated plans to reduce Israel's size for this or that purpose. The line of 1949-1967 became an official border sanctioned by international consensus only after the Israelis overran it in 1967.

Near the end of his item, Issacharoff mentions that there is one camp in the Palestinian polity which still sees the world in the terms of 1949, i.e Palestinian borders with Israel should be temporary:

Among the Palestinians, only Hamas does not reject the idea of something temporary. In the past, but also recently, the Islamist group suggested the creation of an interim Palestinian state. But Hamas' interim borders are very clear: June 4, 1967.