What if...?

 

It is usually futile to ask the question: "What if we did something different all those years ago?". It is futile, except if by answering the question one can learn something and change behavior or policy in the present.

There are two questions I want answered:

1. In September 1967, after the Six Day war the Arab conference in Khartoum resolved that there will be "No Peace, No negotiations, No recognition of Israel". Israel was still hopeful and offered to return to, mostly, the 1949 armistice lines in return for peace.
What if instead Israel took the Arabs at their word and annexed the West Bank (Judea and Samaria)?

2. On September 17, 1979, the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace agreement at Camp David.
What if Begin didn't agree to the terms Sadat proposed, withstood the heavy pressure from President Carter and refused to sign the agreement?

Let's deal first with question #1:

Annexing Judea and Samaria would likely have a similar immediate effect to annexing the Golan Heights: a short bout of complaints from the Arabs and some others and then the matter would be promptly forgotten and ignored. It might come up in different negotiations but Israel wouldn't be demonized or accused of breaking international law for keeping the territory.

The long term effects would be profound and it's impossible to enumerate all of them in a short essay, especially since some are not obvious and would lead to unpredictable consequences 40 years later.

Some effects are fairly simple to predict:

After more than 40 years of being part of Israel Judea and Samaria would have a much larger Jewish population and the prices of housing in Israel would be much lower.

One of the original reasons for not annexing these territories was the supposed "demographic bomb". The Arab population was supposedly growing much faster than the Jewish and the outcome was predictable: the Jews would, sooner or later, become a minority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. This prediction was based on a linear assumption: the Jews and the Arabs would keep their than current birth rates. As we know now this was a wrong approach. Besides the more than 1 million Jews that came to Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union the birth rates also changed: the Jewish went up and the Arab went down. Including Palestinian emigration the current numbers and the rate of change make the Jewish majority secure and growing.

In the absence of a Palestinian Authority with its corruption and oppression the Palestinian emigration would go down, which would be compensated by a higher standard of living accompanied by an even lower birth rate.

The Oslo accords couldn't happen with Judea and Samaria being a part of Israel. The only reason that the Israeli left succeeded, with no authorization from the government and against the law, to start negotiations with the PLO and the murderous Yassir Arafat was that the territory in question was still open to be negotiated about in 1989/1990. With Judea and Samaria firmly a part of Israel there would be nothing to negotiate about. The absence of the Accords would be profound. The terrorist PLO would not be invited, naively, by the Rabin government to take control of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Without a firm base the PLO would have remained what it was before: a terrorist organization living on money donated by patrons who wanted specific jobs done for them. There is no doubt that they would try to continue their attacks on Israel and its interests, but lacking the massive influx of funds, training and arms that Oslo gave them the PLO would keep failing until it faded into irrelevance. In 1989 terror originating in Judea, Samaria and Gaza was insignificant and was in decline. Israel had a firm hold on security and improving living conditions made the Palestinians wary of disturbing the peace.

The same logic can be applied to the Gaza strip: in the absence of the Oslo accords Gaza would remain under Israeli control and would develop into a green area feeding both Israel and itself.

A matter of no lesser importance is the international platform the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the "Peace Process" gave to Israel's enemies. This the main tool used to delegitimatize Israel and to deny it the right to self defense and ultimately the right to exist. It is likely that Israel's international position would be not much different now from where it was in the early 1990s if Arafat and his gang of murderers stayed in Tunisia.

As far as Israel is concerned this would be a much better outcome than the situation we have now. The Palestinians would also profit from the absence of a terrorist proto-state in Judea Samaria and Gaza. Their economical situation would be much improved and they would have proper human rights as opposed to the dictatorial gangster like rule of the PLO and Hamas.

We will deal with the Israel-Egypt peace in a future post.