Via: Foundation for Middle East Peace

Settlement Report | Vol. 21 No. 6 | November-December 2011

By Geoffrey Aronson

The Madrid Peace Conference convened two decades ago in a spirit of great optimism. However it was Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, dragged to the meeting by President George H.W. Bush, who offered the most prescient commentary on Madrid’s troubled legacy.

 

 

 

“I would have carried out autonomy talks for ten years,” he remarked in June 1992, “and meanwhile we would have reached one half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”

 

 

 

After twenty years of negotiations the occupation is as firmly entrenched as ever. Settlements have always been a key barometer of Israel’s intentions. According to this standard, Israel’s commanding presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has only gone from strength to strength as the settler population exploded from 231,000 when Madrid convened to more than half a million today. Israel’s “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip in 2005 only highlighted the critical role of complete settlement evacuation as a key element signaling a change in Israeli policy.

 

 

 

American leadership, so critical to bringing hesitant and suspicious leaders to the negotiating table at Madrid, is more notable today for its shortcomings. The initial effort of the Obama administration to end occupation and create a Palestinian state has been abandoned in favor of a “full court press” against UN recognition of a Palestinian state, condemned by Washington as an unacceptable “short-cut to statehood.” (The PLO leadership turned to the United Nations only after Washington’s diplomatic effort to win a settlement freeze collapsed in mid-2009.)

 

 

 

Palestinians Are Not Finns

 

 

 

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral determination to break with all of Oslo’s conventions in 2005 led in Gaza to the first evacuation of settlements since Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 and the empowerment of the PLO’s nemesis, the Islamic Resistance Movement–Hamas. Dov Weisglas negotiated the text of an April 2005 letter from President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon offering U.S. support for the Gaza withdrawal. He later explained that “we effectively agreed . . . with the Americans . . . that part of the [West Bank and East Jerusalem] settlements [blocs] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is the freezing of the political process. . . . This whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. . . . And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?”

 

 

 

Commenting recently on the freezing of the diplomatic process that he did so much to encourage, Weisglas soberly observed that, “the Palestinian street is liable to deduce that violence pays off. Hamas’s approach currently appears to be far more beneficial than the PA’s policy of zero violence and zero terrorism. In addition to other failures by the Palestinian Authority, such as the complications their UN bid has run into, the deadlocked negotiations with the Netanyahu government and continued Israeli construction outside the settlement blocs–it is no wonder that its standing has been so badly degraded.”

 

 

 

Obama’s Retreat

 

 

 

There is no questioning the Obama administration’s retreat from active and determined diplomatic engagement to end occupation and create a Palestinian state. U.S. policy has been reduced to half-hearted suggestions from the State Department about “quiet” and “partial” settlement freezes. Bill Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state, was in Israel during November to promote negotiations and to prevent Fateh from forming a unity government with Hamas. Quar−tet envoys come and go without noticeable impact. The president’s inadvertently public remarks to President Nicolas Sarcozy betrayed his long-evident frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet administration officials, not to mention leading figures in Congress, openly convey a desire to “punish” PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority for what the State Department derided as an effort to “establish statehood through the backdoor” via the United Nations, rather than confront Netanyahu’s opposition to U.S. policy. U.S. funding to Palestinians through the Agency for International Development (AID) has been curtailed or stopped. The U.S.-trained Palestinian security forces have had U.S. funding of $197 million reluctantly restored after a cut off sparked by Abbas’ UN campaign, but continuing budget shortfalls have forced massive cuts in PA police and security budgets.

 

 

 

Washington’s disaffection with Netanyahu is shared by Europe’s top politicians. After the recent announcement of construction of 1,100 units in the East Jerusalem settlement neighborhood of Gilo, German chancellor Angela Merkal allowed that Netanyahu “is not serious and he does not intend to promote the basic and necessary conditions for renewal of the talks with the Palestinians.” Sarcozy, in inadvertently public remarks to Obama, simply described Netanyahu as a “liar.”

 

 

 

Weaken the PA, Settle the Hilltops

 

 

 

The PLO, excluded from the Madrid process, stepped onto center stage in September 1993 at Oslo as the recognized–representative of the Palestinian people. But Oslo also accommodated Israel’s refusal to freeze settlement or to support Palestinian statehood, grievous conditions that have haunted all subsequent diplomacy. Indeed, Oslo played a key role in enabling the expansion of settlement that continues to this day and in subjecting Palestinians to an endless progression of demands that have enfeebled the Palestinian Authority by failing to reduce Israel’s grip on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

 

 

 

International law proscribes all civilian settlement in occupied territory. One of the enduring myths of Israel’s settlement efforts is that private Palestinian land is off limits for settlement. Israel’s High Court of Justice in 1979 ruled that privately-owned Palestinian lands could be confiscated for security-related purposes but not simply to establish civilian settlements. Nevertheless, private lands continued to be stolen from Palestinian owners by settlers and the IDF after the ruling. Beginning in 1996, the first Netanyahu government embarked on a still-continuing effort to “claim the hilltops” by establishing more than 100 new settlement outposts, many of them on private Palestinian land. In some isolated cases, Israel’s High Court, relying on its earlier rulings, has ordered a few of these outposts dismantled.

 

 

 

YESHA Council chairman Danny Dayan has lead a campaign to legalize the land theft, most notably in the new settlement outposts. In a letter to government ministers and MKs, Dayan noted that more than 150 dwellings in which 1,000 Israelis, including serving IDF officers, reside, are scheduled for demolition in coming months.

 

 

 

“All of Givat Assaf could be erased by the end of 2011,” he warned. “Migron–by March 2012. The Ulpana neighborhood in Beit El, by April 2012. Amona’s fate could be sealed in about a month. And the list goes on.”

 

 

 

The government is now attempting to remove the prohibition on the theft of private land for settlement in order to “launder” the many settlement outposts, not to mention veteran settlements like Ofra, that are sited on private Palestinian property.

 

 

 

Minister of Culture and Sport Limor Livnat has been charged by the prime minister with implementing this policy. She has noted that, “Beit El and Ofra are built on absentee-owner [Palestinian] land. Are we going to demolish them because that is absentee-owner land? There is no such intention. I remember our current president, Shimon Peres, dancing with a Torah scroll at Kedumim. [Peres as defense minister in the mid-1970s offered critical support to unauthorized settlement near Nablus] I was there.”

 

 

 

Israel Settles–A Zionist Response

 

 

 

After the failure of the settlement freeze effort, Netanyahu is no longer concerned about effective pressure from Washington to constrain settlement expansion. He remains opposed to the discussion of borders and security outlined by the Quartet. Pressed by market forces and public demands to increase housing construction throughout Israel, and ever-present settler demands, he is presiding over a new wave of relentless settlement expansion, particularly along the southern ring of East Jerusalem–Gilo, Har Homa and most notably at Givat Hamatos (Airplane Hill), the first new large-scale settlement in East Jerusalem since the development of Har Homa by the first Netanyahu government in 1996. Political pressure continues to advance large-scale settlement plans at the site of the now defunct Jerusalem airport at Atarot and in the E-1 area.

 

 

 

Settlers feel stronger today than at any time since Madrid. The United Nations has noted that the weekly average of attacks by settlers against Palestinians increased by 40 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, and by 165 percent compared to 2009. Settlers, some of whom during the late 1990s were prepared to consider the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, now call openly to establish a Palestinian state . . . in Jordan.

 

 

 

“The two-state solution,” wrote Adi Minz, former head of the YESHA Council, “was based on the existence of a moderate [Arab] axis, which is well and truly dead. They just haven’t signed the death certificate yet. The time is now right for a change of direction: sovereignty and security control over Judea and Samaria must remain in Israeli hands, since there is no room for another state between the Mediterranean and Jordan. The answer lies in Palestinian autonomy. A genuine Palestinian state will be established one day in Jordan and the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria will be its citizens.”

 

 

 

Settlers easily survived the ten month settlement moratorium during 2010 and enjoy strong support in the cabinet and Knesset. Longtime settler leader Benny Katz dismissed Netanyahu’s settlement campaign as insufficient.

 

 

 

“This is a miserable and insulting response. In the face of Arab impudence, the government should have declared the abrogation of the Oslo Accords and announced the establishment of new settlements.”

 

 

 

Whither the PA

 

 

 

The November 1 decision to construct 2,000 settlement dwellings in and around Jerusalem was described as a “Zionist response” to “punish” the Palestinians for their admission as a member state to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization.

 

 

 

Netanyahu, along with many Israeli leaders, believes that instability in the Arab world has taken peace talks off the table for a “generation.” In an October 31 speech, he declared, “people make peace with the strong, not with the weak.”

 

 

 

His remarks on this subject might well have been directed at Abu Mazen, who was famously dismissed by Sharon as a “chick without feathers.” Netanyahu’s associates are reported to have described Abbas as “a peace rejectionist who is unwilling to return to the negotiating table even in a secret track.”

 

 

 

The PA is under broad assault from powers greater than itself, led by the United States and Israel. Washington, despite its efforts to punish the PA, remains invested in the success of the institutions led by Abu Mazen and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Israel’s interests are more opaque. Abbas was reported to have said that Netanyahu wants to “slaughter” him. Ha’aretz reported that “in closed meetings Abbas expressed the view that Israel is working . . . to strengthen Hamas and weaken him.” This concern is shared by Jordan’s King Abdullah.

 

 

 

The IDF is today Israel’s key institutional supporter of the PA, arguing against the segregation of tax funds and in favor of modest measures aimed at “strengthening” the PA and at reigning in the excesses of settler attacks against Palestinians and the IDF itself. There is concern that Israel, principally the IDF, will pay the price of a reduction in the PA’s capacity, particularly in areas where Palestinian security forces have assumed most day-to-day security duties and provide helpful intelligence to the IDF.

 

 

 

Netanyahu’s advisors are far more sanguine. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon recently voiced publicly what has only been reported off the record. “If the PLO wants to quit, Israel will look for international or local forces to take charge of the PA, and if they can’t find them and the PA collapses, that will not be the end of the world for Israel. The Palestinians have to know that they can’t scare us by threatening to disband the PA.”