Pakistan, Bangladesh and a Territorially Viable Palestinian State

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'The electrified barrier is highly effective. It has made it virtually impossible to escape Gaza, and the result is a sense of imprisonment and suffocation. There are 3,766 people to every square kilometer in the territory. The towns, camps, and houses are hideously overpopulated. To escape the watching eyes of one's family and the pressure of the community at large requires almost superhuman ingenuity. People in Gaza live without windows on the outside. The only crumbs of comfort come from encounter with foreigners passing through - or from dreams peddled by Israeli TV or the satellite channels. The people speak of Gaza as a "rabbit hutch" or a "life-size jail." Most Gazans under twenty have never known anything other than the place where they were born. A test carried out on children and young people from the ages of ten to twenty-four has shown that three out of four people think that the map of Gaza is the map of Palestine. The inability to picture the national space is an example of how a generation, and indeed a whole society, trapped in a given territory can have its imagination literally amputated by the experience.' (L Bucaille, Growing up Palestinian (Princeton University Press, USA 2004) 87)


In this context, will a Palestinian State suffer the same fate as Pakistan/Bangladesh? Yossi Alpher, a former senior adviser to Ehud Barak, seems to think so. He argues that "In view of today's demographic situation, we clearly do require the emergence of a territorially viable and stable Palestinian state, if only to enable Israel to survive as a Jewish and a democratic state." The alternative would be a fragmented Palestinian State that is a threat to regional stability - a threat to Israel itself. I do not know of any international law basis that would require a territorially viable Palestinian State, but there is ample historical precedent to show that pragmatism requires the pressures of the Gaza strip to be relieved through free movement between Gaza and the West Bank. Yet it is arguable that the fate of Palestine has already been sealed by virtue of the division of power between Fatah and Hamas in the two territories, as well as decades of separate experience - the emergence of separate identities.

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