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Imposing Middle East Peace

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Imposing Middle East Peace No. 3 January 2010 Noref Report Imposing Middle East Peace Henry Siegman Summary Locked in The continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” West Bank seems to have finally locked in the perma- in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in vi- nence of Israel’s colonial project. Israel has crossed olation of even the limited settlement freeze to which the threshold from the Middle East’s only democracy Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed him- to the only “apartheid regime” in the Western world. self, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the But outside intervention may offer the last hope for a irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that reversal of the settlement enterprise and the achieve- “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments ment of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a conflict. Since the US is no longer the likely agent of two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from that intervention, it is up to the Europeans and to the “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only Palestinians themselves to fashion the path to self- apartheid regime in the Western world. determination in the occupied territories. Essential to the success of these efforts is setting aright the The inevitability of such a transformation has been held chronic imbalance of power between Israel and the out not by “Israel bashers” but by the country’s own lead- Palestinians. If left to their own devices – including, ers. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as some have proposed, to reconcile their conflicting as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that historical “narratives” – the further usurpation of Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if Palestinian lands, and the disappearance of the two- it did not relinquish “almost all the territories, if not all,” state option, is all but ensured. including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem. Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America. January 2010 1 Henry Siegman: Imposing Middle East Peace Olmert ridiculed Israeli defence strategists who, he The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its said, had learned nothing from past experiences and mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed charac- were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of indepen- ter. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged dence. “With them, it is all about tanks and land and citizens – while all others are kept behind checkpoints, controlling territories and controlled territories and this barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded hilltop and that hilltop,” he said. “All these things are by the Israeli army – is not democracy but its opposite. worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on anoth- er hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel’s basic From the river to the sea security?” 1 The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastruc- ture, which span the West Bank from east to west and It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles – al- north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a though denied by Israel’s government – that the settle- garden. They have been carefully planned, financed ments have become so widespread and so deeply im- and protected by successive Israeli governments and Is- planted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility rael’s military. Their purpose has been to deny the Pal- of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely estinian people independence and statehood – or to put populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine unless compelled to do so by international intervention, “from the river to the sea,” an objective that precludes an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely. the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel’s pre-1967 border. It is not only the settlements’ proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally A vivid recollection from the time I headed the Ameri- decisive have been the influence of Israel’s settler-se- can Jewish Congress is a helicopter trip over the West curity-industrial complex, which conceived and imple- Bank on which I was taken by Ariel Sharon. With large, mented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable worn maps in hand, he pointed out to me strategic loca- pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration tions of present and future settlements on east-west and by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national north-south axes that, Sharon assured me, would rule camp into key leadership positions in Israel’s security out a future Palestinian state. and military establishments. Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, then An apartheid state defence minister, described Israel’s plan for the future Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel of the territories as “the current reality.” “The plan is would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab popu- being implemented in actual fact,” he said. “What ex- lation in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish popula- ists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in tion. But the relative size of the populations is not the the West Bank.” Ten years later, at a conference in Tel decisive factor in such a transition. Rather, the turning Aviv whose theme was finding a solution to the Israel- point comes when a state denies national self-determi- Palestine conflict, Dayan said: “The question is not, nation to a part of its population – even one that is in What is the solution? but, How do we live without a the minority – to which it has also denied the rights of solution?”2 As described by Geoffrey Aronson, who citizenship. has monitored the settlement enterprise from its early beginnings: When a state’s denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes perma- “Living without a solution, then as now, was un- nent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for derstood by Israel as the key to maximising the that double disenfranchisement is that population’s eth- benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens nic and religious identity, the state is practising a form and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. programme of expansion that generations of Israeli 2 Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, a bi- 1 Ethan Bronner, “Olmert Says Israel Should Pull Out of West monthly publication of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Bank,” New York Times, 30 September 2008, http://www. vol 17, no. 3, May-June 2007, p 4, http://www.fmep.org/ nytimes.com/2008/09/30/world/middleeast/30olmert.html, reports/archive/vol.-17/no.-3/PDF, accessed 19 January 2010. accessed 19 January 2010. 2 January 2010 Henry Siegman: Imposing Middle East Peace leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settle- path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Pales- ment, the dynamic transformation of the territories tinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, modera- and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to tion’s leading Palestinian advocate, who announced his the Jordan River.” intention not to run in the coming presidential elections. Netanyahu’s “limited” freeze was described by the A colonial enterprise Obama administration as “unprecedented,” even Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conditions for Palestinian though the exceptions to it – 3,000 housing units whose statehood would leave under Israel’s control Palestine’s foundations had supposedly already been laid, public international borders and airspace, as well as the en- buildings, and unlimited construction in East Jerusa- tire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in lem – brought total construction to where it would have place; and would fragment the contiguity of the terri- been without a freeze. Indeed, Netanyahu assured the tory remaining for such a state. His conditions would settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusa- resume after the ten-month freeze – according to minis- lem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immedi- ter Benny Begin, at a rate “faster and more than before” ately following the 1967 war – land that had never been – even if Abbas agrees to return to talks.4 The Israeli part of Jerusalem before the war. In other words, Netan- press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new yahu’s conditions for Palestinian statehood would meet construction in the settlements is “booming.”5 None Dayan’s goal of leaving Israel’s de facto occupation in of this has elicited the Obama administration’s public place. rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements. From Dayan’s prescription for the permanence of the status quo to Netanyahu’s prescription for a two-state solution, Israel has lived “without a solution” not be- Unilateral actions cause of uncertainty or neglect but as a matter of delib- The widespread despair among Palestinians, Arab erate policy, clandestinely driving settlement expansion countries and in much of Europe, caused by the collapse to the point of irreversibility while pretending to search of the new US administration’s promising approach to for “a Palestinian partner for peace.”3 peacemaking, brought in its wake a re-examination of previously rejected options.
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