By Conn Hallinan – September 20, 2009
When President Barak Obama said in his Cairo speech that
“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli
settlements,” he cut to the heart of the four decade old conflict in the
Occupied Territories, slicing through the thicket of “confidence building,”
“security walls,” and “road maps”
that have derailed one peace attempt after another.
But has the process already gone too far? Has Tel Aviv’s
policy of “creating facts on the ground” and moving over 500,000 settlers into
the West Bank made disentangling the two people impossible? Do the Israelis
have any interest in removing some 120 settlements, and 100 so-called
“outposts”? And if Obama is serious about putting the squeeze on the right-wing
government of Benjamin Netanyahu, does he have the political backing to make it
stick?
On the last point, the answer would seem to be “yes.”
According to a recent Zogby International poll, 50 percent of Americans think
that the U.S. should “get tough” with Israel. Some 32 percent were “not sure,”
and only 19 percent said, “do nothing.” But once the partisan gap is factored
in, Obama supporters overwhelmingly favor “getting tough” by 71 to 18.
The poll shows strong support for Israel—71 percent to
21 percent—and a negative view of Palestinians—25 to 66—but
again, there were strong differences between Obama and McCain supporters. Asked
if Israeli and U.S. interests were identical, Obama voters said “no” 59 to 28,
while McCain voters said they were identical 78 to 15. Obama backers had a
largely negative view of Netanyahu—49 to 29—while McCain supporters
favored the Israeli prime minister 82 to 9.
While the Netanyahu administration has tried to rally
Americans Jews to support the settlement project, according to Guttman, “On
this issue, the community could find it difficult to back Netanyahu.”
Indeed, the prime minister’s reluctant endorsement of a
two-state solution—and one filled with so many caveats that it would be
almost impossible for the Palestinians to accept—might have been, in
part, a response to the concerns of American Jews. According to Guttman in The
Forward, “For the mainstream Jewish community…has fully embraced the idea of a
two state solution and has been working to promote it within the community and
among policymakers.”
In short, Americans who voted for Obama have his back if he
wants to lean on Netanyahu.
The current Israeli government doesn’t even have a great
deal of support at home. According to a recent Tel Aviv University poll almost
two-thirds of Israelis view the settlements as a liability, not an asset, and a
majority are willing to dismantle all but the largest. According to Tel Aviv
University political scientist, Tamar Hermann, the Israeli public believes that
“settlements do not stop terror and they use up Israeli resources.”
Which doesn’t mean they support dismantling them, or even
freezing their expansion. A recent Maagar Mohot poll found that by a margin of
56 to 37, Jewish Israelis think the government should resist the Obama
Administration’s call for a freeze, and 36 percent think all the settlements
should be kept, while 30 percent think only smaller settlements should be
abandoned.
But the poll also found out something that Washington should
pay attention to: some 50 percent of those polled think that the Obama
Administration is not serious about a freeze. Only 32 percent of them thought
it might be a “make or break” demand, suggesting that those poll numbers might
shift dramatically if Israelis thought the $2.3 billion in yearly U.S. aid,
plus billions in military support might be affected.
Whatever their sentiments, Israel is currently gripped by
political apathy except among some militant settlers and the core of the
Israeli peace and human rights movement.
“Israelis are generally worn out, and in the same way that
today they won’t take to the streets calling for peace, they are not going to
get up and fight for the settlements,” Michael Barak, CEO of Keevoon Research,
Strategy & Communications told The Forward.
In the meantime, however, settlement expansion continues. In
spite of a serious economic down turn, and deep cuts in social services and
education, Shas Party Interior Minister Eli Yishai is allotting $250 million to
the settlements. Half will go toward settlement expansion.
And according to Peace Now, “The official figures are
nothing but the tip of the iceberg” with other settlement spending spread
throughout Israel’s two-year $159 billion budget. “Israelis will pay not only a
political price for the settlements, but also an economic one,” warns Peace
Now’s Yariv Oppenheimer.
“Natural growth” is the central rationale the Netanyahu
government makes for why the settlements need to expand—although the
Prime Minister does not use the term itself— but official figures don’t
support the argument that this is about building to accommodate a baby boom.
According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the
annual population growth for the settlements is 5.9 percent, three and a half
times higher than for Israel, which suggests immigration is a major cause of
population expansion. For instance, in 2007 some 36 percent of all new settlers
immigrated from Israel or abroad.
“Somewhere between a third and two fifths of the growth of
settlement population during the last decade hasn’t been ‘natural’ at all,”
writes The Forward columnist Leonard Fein. “It has been the result of heavily
subsidized migration, not family expansion.”
What Netanyahu can count on are the most radical of the
settlers, who have made it clear they will block any attempt to dismantle
settlements. Settlers have launched “Operation Price Tag”, which organizes
riots to smash Palestinian cars, assault Palestinians farmers, and burn fields
and olive groves if the Tel Aviv government tries to remove any settlements.
Indeed, part of the Israeli public’s souring on the settlers is because West
Bank militants have increasingly clashed with the Israeli Army.
While a “freeze” seems like a relatively modest demand,
according to Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, halting
settlement construction would mean that Israel “would have to undo the system
by which the military establishment, the legislative and executive arms of the
state, settlers, and public, private, and supranational communal organizations
collaborate in the encouragement and expansion of settlements.”
Some analysts argue that the Prime Minister will never agree
to a real freeze. “Why won’t Netanyahu agree to a freeze?” asks Israeli
historian and author Gershom Gorenberg, “[because] he regards the West Bank as
Israel’s patrimony, and has never recognized that denying political rights to
the Palestinian population undermines Israeli democracy. His proposals for the
future are the discredited colonial ideas of the past: Palestinians will
concede dreams of independence in return for marginal economic progress.”
Certainly the Israelis are still building. Defense Minister
Ehud Barak authorized construction of 300 housing units in the Talmon
settlement. The government also just announced it would build 455 new homes in
the West Bank. Under international law, all settlements in the Occupied
Territories are illegal.
But might Netanyahu agree to a freeze? He is a hard
rightist, but also a crafty politician. A “freeze” on settlement expansion
might buy his government time, and time is the enemy of a Middle East peace.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak has floated a proposal to freeze
“new building in the settlements, excluding Jerusalem, for three to six months.
In return, the Palestinians would have to stop their protests and Arab
countries would move toward recognition.
The Israeli Prime Minister has already said, “We will not
build new settlements and we will not expropriate additional land for
settlements.” But the settlements have municipalized enough adjacent land to
greatly expand without technically building “new” ones, or expropriating land.
For instance, Mitzpe Shalem is a settlement of 200 people
near the Dead Sea, but its municipal district embraces 13.6 sq miles. No “new
land” would need to be “expropriated” to vastly expand the settlement.
It is unlikely that the Palestinians or Arab countries would
accept a freeze that does not lead to an absolute ban on all building,
meaningful negotiations on removing Israeli roadblocks in the West Bank,
opening Gaza, sharing Jerusalem and establishing final borders.
“It would indeed be a victory for Netanyahu if in return for
freezing a few extra flats, Obama let himself be maneuvered into accepting that
the existing settlements are ‘facts on the ground’ that can never be changed,”
editorialized the British Guardian.
The Netanyahu government is under increasing international
pressure. Meeting in Trieste, Italy, the Middle East Quartet—the U.S.,
Russia, the European Union and the United Nations—called for a freeze on
all settlement activity, and a “sustained reopening” of crossing points into
Gaza. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that France “would no longer accept
Israeli subterfuges meant to disguise colony construction.”
The question is whether the Quartet is willing to make the
settlements a “make or break” issue? If they do, they might find it is possible
to bring this long running tragedy to a close. 