Middle East Peace?

• Author: Sullivan, Anthony T.
• Position: Arab-Israeli conflicts

Perhaps the most courageous and imaginative article to appear on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in any American public policy journal in recent years is the eloquent articulation of an ethical realist approach by John C. Hulsman, "Grasping The Nettle", published in the November/December 2006 issue of The National Interest. Hulsman's advocacy of Israeli and Palestinian accession to the European Union may indeed be a bridge too far (as Richard Rupp suggests in the same issue) but he rightly points out that any new attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem must address the most difficult issues up front, at the beginning of any new negotiating process.

It may even be necessary to contemplate a repartition of all of historic Palestine if the impasse between Israelis and Arabs is to be broken. The 1967 Green Line is not sacrosanct. Land swaps need to be more than "limited" and apply to more than Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank.

For example, areas of major Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories might indeed be included within Israeli borders in any new partition, as President Bush has suggested, if significant areas within what is today Israel (possibly portions of Galilee and the Triangle) with Lower Nazareth as a hinge were to be included in a new, peaceful and economically viable Palestinian state...