World again gets set to debate ancient disaster

The Middle East peace talks are due to resume here next week, and once

again the world will try to grapple with an ancient disaster.

In 1948, when the British abandoned the mandate, the Jews in Palestine

proclaimed the state of Israel and the Egyptians, Syrians, and

Trans-Jordanians, aided symbolically by the Lebanese and ineffectually

by a Palestinian force, attacked it. There was earlier a nasty guerrilla

war between Jews and Arabs which the British tried to control with the

same success that the UN has met in Bosnia.

There has been a great and unnecessary dispute for 40 years over

whether the Arab refugees left of their own accord. The Israelis say

Arab generals and radio broadcasts told villagers to get out of the way,

the Arabs say the Israelis drove them out at gun-point.

Turn on the television news this evening and you will see the answer:

civilians caught in a war zone are desperate to escape. The Palestinians

fled from the Jews just as the Muslims in Srebrenica are trying to

escape from the Serbs.

It was the natural reaction. It happened again in 1967, during the

Six-Day War, when scores of thousands of Arabs fled from the mere rumour

of the Israeli army. I saw them, a few days later, trudging back to

their homes, having heard that the Israelis were not going to massacre

them, after all.

If the Arab governments and the Palestinians had accepted the UN

partition plan in 1948, which set up separate Jewish and Arab states

with a neutral Jerusalem, there would have been no war, no refugees, and

no Washington peace conference. But they didn't -- any more than the

Serbs have accepted the Vance-Owen plan, which provides for separate

Croat, Muslim, and Serb cantons in Bosnia, with Sarajevo, the capital, a

neutral zone.

The refugees are the product of the Israeli War of Independence. When

Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, it took over the camps

in those areas (there are many others in Jordan and Lebanon). They

behaved much better than the Serbs will when they occupy Tuzla and

Sarajevo and become responsible for a million or more Muslim refugees.

The great majority of Israelis have resolutely set their face against

expelling the Palestinians, ''ethnically cleansing'' Israel on the model

of Ezekiel who purged the country after the return from Babylon. So

there are now well over two million Palestinians living under Israeli

occupation. What is to become of them? The next step in the peace

process is that Syria and Israel will make peace, on the model of the

Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. Israel will give back the

Golan Heights, which will be permanently demilitarised and patrolled by

the UN. Syria and, probably, Lebanon, will make the same comprehensive

peace with Israel that Egypt did and both sides will hope that, as the

years go by, the present deep hostility between them will dissipate.

But, again, what about the Palestinians? Israel could give up the Gaza

Strip tomorrow, pulling out the couple of thousand Jews who live behind

barbed wire in a scattering of settlements.

Then what? The Palestinians there do not have the financial, social,

or educational resources to turn that miserable place into a Middle

Eastern Hong Kong.

All they have to sell is their labour, and the only market is Israel.

The same goes for the West Bank, with the insurmountable complication

that it is no longer possible to separate Jews from Palestinians in two

separate homogenous (or ethnically clean) areas.

The Israeli government might, at last, make good on the promise made

at Camp David to permit local autonomy. The Palestinians would then have

control of their own towns and lands. They want far more, but the

history of relations between the two communities for 60 years has been a

consistent refusal by the Arabs to accept less than their maximum

demands.

Perhaps, this time, they will take what they can get, and hope that

the future will offer them a better opportunity to expand ''local

autonomy'' into something more substantial.

The danger is that the young, hopeless, unemployed Palestinians will

reject all compromise, just as their coevals in South Africa demand war

on the government.

All this is to state the Palestinian problem, in the context of 60

years of conflict. It is a very depressing story and suggests that the

future of the Balkans, stretching as far into the future as a

pessimistic imagination can go, will be hatred, intransigence, and

bitter demands for vengeance.

Cold-blooded historians may note that ethnic cleansing sometimes

works. The exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923 was

a great historic injustice. Greek communities that had existed for at

least 3000 years were wiped out. The two countries still detest each

other, and have been on the verge of war over Cyprus, but they were

successfully separated.

East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and the Sudentanland were all

cleansed of Germans, who had lived there throughout history, perhaps 12

million in all, in 1945. Danzig, Posen, and Koningsberg were just as

German as Srebrenica or Tuzla are Muslim Serb, and much more German than

Sarajevo is Muslim.

Those Teutonic cities are now one with Nineveh and Tyre, and no-one

has suggested they be restored. The Serbs hope that the same thing will

happen in Bosnia, that it can clear out the Muslims now and, later, the

Croats from Mostar, Dubrovnik, and Split, as they were cleared out of

Vukovar.

To the victors belong the spoils. We will learn, in a generation or

so, whether the reordering of populations in the Balkans is definitive,

meaning that the displaced Muslims and Croats can be permanently

absorbed somewhere else, like the Greeks and Germans. The alternative is

the Palestinian precedent: war, terrorism, and misery.