A Fictional Plan For Peace (2 Of Them)

As Israel and the Palestinians gear up for another bloody conflict (rockets were launched towards Jerusalem today, no word that I've seen on whether or not they hit and last I saw, Israel was calling up 75k IDF reserves) I've seen a couple of interesting things floating around out there. One was this Foreign Policy article assuring everyone that the Peace Process wasn't in fact dead. Another was an interesting question posed on Facebook: why not a one state solution?

To me a large part of this question is purely speculative. Both sides are going to have to make painful, painful sacrifices they don't want to make in order secure a deal and neither side has leaders with the stature enough nor the political will to do so. Unfortunately that means an endless cycle of conflicts such as these which will only serve to deepen the hatreds, the mistrust and makes a just and lasting peace more impossible with every passing day.

They say there's no such thing a dumb idea, so given that, I'm going to jump over a one state solution, even a two state solution and propose two completely fictional solutions instead... because with the peace process flatlined, you have to start somewhere, right?

The first comes to us from Tom Clancy and his tome The Sum of All Fears (much better than the movie though the 50-75 page chapter describing in molecular, nano-second type of detail exactly how a nuke explodes is a little overkill.) Basically, you get this:

In Clancy`s scenario, which bears an uncanny resemblance to recent news from the Moscow summit, Ryan has engineered a peace plan for the Middle East. Assuming the world community`s impatience with Israel as the putative stumbling block toward ending the region`s discord, Ryan`s plan calls for Israel to give up the West Bank to the Palestinians in return for a U.S. military peacekeeping force on Israel soil. They also must accept a Vatican-run religious government of Jerusalem that includes Muslim, Jewish and Orthodox participation. Accept it they do, we are told, and the arrangement actually works.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm... while I can't imagine Americans being crazy about another peace keeping mission in the Middle East, realistically, that's probably what it's going to take to make a peace last- but after Iraq and with us still bogged down in Afghanistan, I think that'll be a tough sell to the American people. Tough but not impossible.

The interesting element of Clancy's plan is Jerusalem. Sacred to three religions it seems also genius to put the Christians back in charge of it- especially since they haven't had any geo-political skin in the region since the Crusades. Whether Israel would realistically accept that is an open question. Probably not, I'm guessing.

The second one comes to us from The West Wing- also contigent upon American peacekeeprs on the ground (a storyline that provides a beautiful boost out of TWW sclerotic 5th Season and into their excellent 6th and 7th seasons). Palestinians accept a limited right of return- to the new Palestinian State only while Israel gives up 95% of the West Bank while allowing for a mechanism for them to intervene in 'emergencies.'

But it's TWW's Jerusalem solution that I think should get serious policy considerations. TWW essentially creates a diplomatic enclave in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Palestinians can claim it as their capitol and gain custodial rites over the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount, Israel can claim an undivided Jerusalem as their capitol. Everybody wins...

Obviously, these fictional plans work because, well, they're fictional. And Clancy is more interested in blowing up the Super Bowl as it turns out. But they're well thought out, they're serious and in the absence of anything resembling new ideas at all, what do we have to lose?