Palestine - semantic skullduggery scuttles sensible solutions

Both sides have been engaging for the last 19 years in a dialogue under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap that has not been based on terms that have first been defined and agreed upon between them

The deliberate ambiguities and vague generalisations in the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap have led to innumerable differences and disagreements.

Any lawyer worth his salt will insist on terms being fully defined in agreements so that the parties will be in no doubt as to what the use of that term in the agreement means.

The simplest and most basic of these misunderstandings relates to the meaning of the term "Palestine ".

Does Palestine only include Israel, the West Bank and Gaza? Or does it also include Jordan - 78% of the territory called Palestine covered by the Mandate for Palestine conferred on Great Britain by the League of Nations in 1922 following the San Remo Conference and the signing of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920?

According to Article 2 of the the Palestine Liberation Organization Charter - Jordan is included:

"Palestine,with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."

So why is the PLO only demanding territorial concessions including land swaps by Israel - and not Jordan - in its push for statehood and independence?

Why should Jordan - the Arab country that invaded and occupied the West Bank for 19 years between 1948-1967 when an independent Palestinian Arab State could have been created in a Jew-free West Bank - be quarantined from being part of the solution - now that 350000 Jews live there?

When the Hashemite rulers in Jordan proclaim that "Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine" - what do they mean? When these same rulers pronounce that "Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan" - what are they trying to convey?

Any territorial grant of land by Jordan to a putative Palestinian Arab state equal to the amount of territory retained by Israel in the West Bank would have no effect on Jordan's security or territorial integrity. Yet it could have a real impact in bringing about a resolution to the long running conflict.

Jordan helped create the current problems in the West Bank. Why shouldn't Jordan be part of the solution to ending those problems arising from its former occupation of the West Bank and the fact that it sits on 78% of "Palestine"?

All of these questions must now take on a new meaning following the declaration by PLO chairman - and Palestinian president - Mahmoud Abbas - that the negotiations between Israel and the PLO under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap are "clinically dead"

Here again is another new term introduced into the political lexicon - which now needs to be defined so that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are in agreement as to its meaning as it inevitably becomes part of the international dialogue.

Anyone care to speculate that Israel and the Palestinian Authority will ever agree on what the terms "Palestine" and "clinically dead" mean?