In hindsight, it is clear that the Jaffee Center study was deeply flawed. The principal error was its assumption that the security arrangements doctrine, which appeared to be working in the Egyptian case, could be readily applied to the case of a Palestinian state. This was the view of Dore Gold, later Israel’s ambassador to the UN, who was the one Jaffee analyst who participated in the longer six-option study but refused to sign its smaller policy paper recommending a Palestinian state with concomitant Israeli security arrangements.²⁹ It is one thing, Gold argued, to insist that security arrangements like troop limitations, demilitarized zones, or international peacekeepers be implemented in a relatively barren and peripheral part of Egypt such as the Sinai Peninsula; it is quite another to imagine Egypt agreeing to such arrangements in Cairo and the Nile Valley.³⁰ Yet this is precisely what security arrangements would mean in the case of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state, which would be expected somehow to maintain a semblance of sovereignty—despite strict limitations on its military power—over the entirety of its territory. Perhaps one could argue for such an arrangement in the West Bank if it were part of a larger Jordanian state, thereby creating a parallel to the Sinai model. But what sort of sovereignty would a demilitarized Palestinian “state” genuinely enjoy? Moreover, the Jaffee team was not willing to accept demilitarization alone as a sufficient security arrangement. It also insisted on maintaining an ongoing IDF troop presence on what was to become sovereign Palestinian soil. This was an unprecedented demand; Israel had not even succeeded in maintaining a security presence in Sinai following the evacuation from the peninsula.

Second, even from Israel’s own perspective, it seems evident that in the absence of early-warning stations or Israeli troops on Egyptian soil, the idea of a demilitarized Sinai is a far more plausible kind of security arrangement for Israel than would be a demilitarized West Bank. This, for two reasons: Sinai is a comparably vast area distant from Israeli population centers, whereas the West Bank is a populated region which overlooks both Tel Aviv and the narrow strip of land between the border and the sea. Furthermore, there is little reason to think that a Palestinian state would honor any demilitarization agreement. The Palestinian Authority, which has repeatedly flouted the limits on the size and weaponry of its police force to which it committed in the Oslo agreements in 1993, has shown little willingness to demilitarize, and there is no reason to think a sovereign Palestinian state would act differently. Thus without Israel’s control of the Jordan Valley to prevent the flow of illegal weaponry into the rest of the West Bank—a key demand of the Allon Plan—there is little chance that Palestinian demilitarization would ever happen.

Finally, it is far from clear that peace with Egypt succeeded as a result of, and not despite, the security arrangements promised in the Camp David accords. Although Israel gave up completely on the Allon Plan’s call for territorial adjustments in Egyptian territory, reverting to the 1949 lines everywhere except the Gaza Strip, it is also the case that in the actual peace treaty signed with Egypt in 1979 Israel was forced to give up on any presence in Sinai whatsoever—such as its early-warning station at Umm Khashiba—and thus some of the most important components demanded by the security arrangements school were in fact never implemented. Indeed, it is a significant distortion to describe the peace between Israel and Egypt as resting on the security arrangements of the treaty of 1979; it seems more likely that not security arrangements but rather something else—such as Egypt’s desire to be perceived as a treaty-abiding country, allowing it to continue to receive the billions of dollars in American aid each year—has helped maintain the peace between the two countries. Furthermore, while it is true that the Egyptian troop limitations in Sinai appear to have held up, these very limits have now become an excuse for Egyptian inaction in the face of weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip by Palestinian terrorists. And finally, it is crucial to note that security arrangements in Sinai after 1956, including the presence of UN peacekeeping forces, did nothing to prevent the outbreak of the Six Day War itself, which happened only after Egypt had evicted the UN forces and begun pouring divisions of its army into the Sinai. Thus it does not seem realistic to think that security arrangements are likely to succeed with a Palestinian state where they have not in the Egyptian case.

For this reason, it is important to recall that both the Jaffee Center’s plan and the Allon defensible borders plan depended on the possibility of Israel’s stationing a major armored presence in the Jordan Valley. The security arrangements school argued that an Israeli brigade could be placed on the soil of a Palestinian state, while the defensible borders school insisted that Israel seek sovereignty in the Jordan Valley as part of any territorial compromise. They disagreed, rather, over the question of whether sovereignty was required in the areas where Israeli forces would be kept. The key problem with the security arrangements school’s proposals for extraterritorial military presence was that unlike Israel’s sovereign control over security zones, these military positions would likely be eroded by the Palestinians over a few years, if they were ever implemented to begin with. As a result, Israel would be stripped of both territorial buffers and security arrangements. Nonetheless, a new generation of Israeli leaders seized upon the Jaffee study’s willingness to abandon sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, rather than its insistence on a permanent Israeli military presence there—a fact that found potent expression in the Oslo accords in September 1993.

 

Israel never formally conceded its policy of defensible borders when it signed the Oslo accords, which after all left final-status issues like boundaries for a future negotiation. But the defensible borders doctrine did suffer a major diplomatic blow, stemming principally from complete confusion over whether Israel had given up on its demand for sovereignty in parts of the territories of Judea and Samaria. This confusion was due mainly to the vastly differing visions of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—an acolyte of Allon who never gave up on the defensible borders doctrine—and Shimon Peres, a believer in an extreme form of security arrangements who intentionally underplayed Israel’s defensive requirements in favor of unprecedented political flexibility toward Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Although he did not explicitly endorse the Jaffee study’s security arrangements proposals, Peres—in advocating the notion that trans-nationalism and “soft borders” made sovereignty unnecessary—nonetheless opened the door for the abandonment of the defensible borders thinking and the advent of the security arrangements school. In fact, Peres and his deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin often seemed to be less interested in defending Israel’s vital territorial interests than they were in supporting PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s rehabilitation as a legitimate leader, and the Palestinians as a legitimate peace partner. For Peres, the goal of the peace process would be ultimately to integrate Israel and an eventual Palestinian entity into a “New Middle East” based on an integrated regional economic and political system modeled on the EU.³¹ According to this view, territorial protections for Israel would be less important in an era of peace, since borders themselves would no longer be significant under a regional security arrangement. “‘Strategic depth’ may no longer have the same meaning when peaceful relations and reciprocal control systems are in effect,” he wrote. “Strategic areas do not have the same value in peacetime as they do in war. The significance of military campaigns and tactical considerations changes when armed conflict is replaced by equable, amiable relationships.”³²

Peres’ imagination was captivated by the European Union’s economic and political arrangements, and he wanted to transplant the system to the Middle East in general and to relations between Israel and the Palestinians in particular. This, Peres reasoned, was a necessary result of the changing nature of human needs, the gradual obviation of nations, and the advent of higher, border-piercing technologies:

In sharp contrast to Peres’ enthusiasm for a new, “borderless” Middle East, Rabin never abandoned his commitment to defensible borders as envisioned by Yigal Allon—although he endorsed and actively promoted the Oslo agreement as an interim step.³⁴ In October 1995, in his last Knesset address, seeking approval for the Oslo II interim agreement, Rabin set out his vision of defensible borders: “The borders of the State of Israel during the permanent solution,” Rabin affirmed, “will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the June 4, 1967 lines.”³⁵ Rabin emphasized that Israel would retain sovereignty in the same territories advocated in the Allon Plan. “The security border of the State of Israel,” he asserted, “will be located in the Jordan Valley in the broadest meaning of that term.” But like his former Palmah commander, Rabin insisted on much more than the Jordan River itself as a defensive barrier to possible attacks from the east. He intended for Israel to be protected by the total 4,200-foot incline from the Jordan riverbed up the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge.³⁶ Rabin added that Israel would also maintain a united Jerusalem, and keep settlement blocs east of the 1967 lines.³⁷