A "Virtual" Mideast Peace

International Economy, The, Jan, 2001 by David Apgar

Israeli and Palestinian authorities should replace violent clashes with healthy competition.

Start with the heroic view that it is possible even in the midst of Israel's and the Palestinians' low-level civil war to think about structural solutions for Jerusalem. This view puts us half way out on a limb, so we may as well crawl the rest of the way to the rich foliage and make an even more affirmative assumption. Contrary to fashionable stands on the intractability of cultural conflicts, let's argue that the case for a version of shared sovereignty was never anywhere stronger than today in the Holy City.

To see how, dust off a proposal to resolve Northern Ireland's three and a half centuries of troubles penned by William F. Buckley decades ago under the title, "A Modest Proposal" in the National Review. The proposal is no more preposterous for Jerusalem than for Ulster: Give everyone in the disputed territory a choice of passport.

Thus in the Middle Eastern version, if you live in the disputed parts of the Old City or East Jerusalem and choose an Israeli passport, then you will pay Israeli taxes and receive Israeli services such as retirement support, public education, state medical benefits, and access to Israeli courts. If you choose a Palestinian passport, you will pay Palestinian taxes and receive the corresponding Palestinian services. The few services that cannot be divided between two coextensive governments are mostly local or have local counterparts, essentially law enforcement and infrastructure. Only these would fall under a unified local government entity reporting jointly to the two national governments.

In the years since Buckley proposed simply giving everyone in Ulster whichever they chose between a British and an Irish passport, technology has developed more streamlined solutions for the trickiest administrative issues. States, for example, can now follow taxpayers electronically around the country. And retirement asset management and accounting, under pressure from mutual funds and defined contribution plans, are equal to the task of tracking which individuals residing in disputed territories might at different times in their lives switch citizenship back and forth between two competing governments.

This last thought holds the real key to the proposal, and the first of three bigger reasons to think about it. It is not interesting just as a desperate effort to finesse tough historical and cultural facts on the ground like blood hatred. It is interesting because we may have reached a point where we can make governments compete. Dot-com and service companies compete in Tel Aviv and Ramallah and those cities' economies thrive. Why not let Israeli and Palestinian national governments compete for the wallets, if not the hearts and minds, of Palestinian Quarter and downtown East Jerusalem residents?

Competition between governments, even if only within the narrow confines of a few sections of a medium-sized city on the rim of the Judaean desert, provides more than discipline over what those governments offer citizens and how efficiently they offer it. It changes government from an entity organizing various forms of national service into a service organization. It transforms governments' means of survival from periodically stirring the embers of bitterness into constantly meeting people's needs.

There may be no better place to launch the concept of direct government competition than the city that has witnessed the most struggles for control in history. Borders, which from time immemorial have protected governments from competition, show in Jerusalem none of their potential to solve problems elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere, borders help people who mainly want to disengage from one another. In the West Bank they serve mainly as chalk marks where stone-throwers and tanks can line up. The difference may be that, far from disengagement, what Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem seek is access to a shared history--one of whose features is, after all, constant mutual engagement.

Its unique potential to reach a solution without drawing another boundary in Jerusalem is the second reason for seriously considering the concept of simultaneous sovereignty (we should probably call it "virtual sovereignty" with the times).

Governments need not in any event administer those few borders demanded by religious practice. Here lies a secret and overlooked ingredient to peace in Palestine: Almost no one lives in the Haram ash-Sharif (Temple Mount), and nobody lives by the Wailing Wall anymore. Tie sovereignty to people rather than territory, and you moot it where there are no people.

More practically, under simultaneous sovereignty there would be little change from current arrangements where religious authorities already maintain the Haram ash-Sharif and the precincts of the Wailing Wall. Tradition helps keep order more than an unnatural international border snaking down the downtown alleyways of a First Century city ever will. It is easy to forget after Sharon's escapade, for example, that religious law forbids orthodox Jews from entering the Mount for fear they might walk directly over the remains of the Second Temple. Similarly, Palestinians have no interest in the smooth stone face that sets even secular Jews dancing Friday evenings.