Israel has come a long way in recent years in adopting a positive attitude toward international involvement on the ground in its troublesome relations with its neighbors.
Gone are the days when every United Nations peacekeeping initiative and every European and sometimes even American offer of help was looked upon with great suspicion, if not out-and-out hostility. At the broad strategic level, this can apparently be explained with reference to two trends.
On the one hand, Israel has developed greater self-confidence based on a strong military and has emerged from isolation thanks to an advanced and increasingly globalized economy and stable peace treaties with two of its neighbors.
On the other, there is a growing suspicion that traditional solutions, both military (conquest and occupation) and diplomatic (bilateral peace processes), won't work in the cases of Lebanon and Palestine. Hence Israel's greater readiness to consider international offers of help.
The beginnings of this development can perhaps be found in a dramatic appeal by PM Yitzhak Rabin back in the heady days of the mid-1990s when the Oslo process seemed on track.
Speaking in the Knesset, Rabin called upon a divided Israeli public to recognize that the world was no longer against us and would work with us for peace - in this case, a peace with the Palestinians (that never materialized).
Another milestone was PM Ehud Barak's readiness to work closely with the UN in delineating the Israel-Lebanon border when Israel withdrew unilaterally in May 2000.
While many components of Israel's subsequent Lebanon strategy have since been discredited by the recent war, it is generally accepted that it was precisely the UN legitimization granted to the "blue line" Israel-Lebanon border fence that enabled Israel to keep most of the international community on its side in this war and bring about Security Council Resolution 1701, which appears so far to be working in Israel's favor.
More recently, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip a year ago it actively sought to involve Egypt and the European Union in Palestinian-Egyptian border arrangements that would enable it to abandon the philadelphi strip.
The entire concept constituted a revolution in Israeli thinking that owed much to Israel's growing disenchantment with any scheme that involves occupation of heavily populated Arab territories.
Since then, Israel has agreed to the establishment of an international mechanism to pay salaries of some Palestinian civil servants.
The latter arrangement, coupled with Egyptian and American "coaching" of parts of the Palestinian security establishment, could conceivably be considered first steps toward the evolution of some sort of international trusteeship for Palestine.
This is not a new idea; a number of close observers of the Israeli-Palestinian scene have advanced the trusteeship solution in recent years. It is predicated on two determinations.
First, under prevailing circumstances, Palestinians will not succeed on their own in building a state, hence they need hands-on support, assistance, and even direction from the international community.
And second, in plain language, Israel has every interest in ceding to the international community its post-withdrawal residual responsibility to ensure that Gaza doesn't completely collapse economically.
The trusteeship idea is ostensibly reinforced by 1701, which places European and other troop contingents in Lebanon both for independent conflict management tasks and as back-up for a weak government and weak army seeking to prevent weapons smuggling and establish the necessary monopoly-of-arms to bring about stability.
And it draws encouragement from European willingness - against the current backdrop of American paralysis in the region - to commit forces in Lebanon and contemplate something similar in Palestine.
Indeed, "something similar" in Palestine, because no other concept of international involvement seems remotely workable.
The sort of international peacekeeping forces envisioned in various Israeli-Palestinian peace schemes can't conceivably work in the absence of a bilateral peace agreement.
Nor is there room for buffer forces patrolling demilitarized zones that straddle borders: these, too, require the presence of stable and willing local partners, and in any case the geography really doesn't leave sufficient room to insert an additional armed force.
Certainly there is no likelihood of the international community taking over all of the PA or even Gaza by force against the will of the Palestinian government, weak as it is.
Yet even an international trusteeship requires a willing and able Palestinian partner.
Here again, the Lebanese example is instructive. The Siniora government in Beirut is weak but willing. Certainly it has more control over most of Lebanon than either the Haniya government or President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in Palestine.
Yet, unless the Lebanese government evinces the courage to deploy UNIFIL II against Hezbollah, a member of that very government, and unless a minimal level of security is maintained in southern Lebanon, the current experiment in international involvement in Lebanon will fail.
Can we envisage Abu Mazen siding effectively with the international community despite Hamas' discomfort or against its opposition? So far this has happened in specific instances, such as the deployment of EU forces at the Rafah crossing and Egyptian and American training of security forces allied with the president.
Perhaps this trend can continue to be built upon incrementally, as we have witnessed over the past year or so in Gaza. But more importantly, can we envisage the minimal degree of security needed in Gaza in order to welcome and maintain a larger international presence there?
Currently the EU force spends most of its days on the beach at Ashkelon precisely because it is too dangerous for it to deploy at Rafah.
Conceivably, if the currently rumored ceasefire/prisoner exchange/unity government deal is achieved and is stable, things will change and there will be room for some form of trusteeship in Gaza. But right now even this form of large-scale international involvement does not look practical.
Yossi Alpher is Co-Editor of the bitterlemons family of Internet publications. Acknowledgement to bitterlemons.org
Commentary: Toward trusteeship?
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