| Settlements fuel war’s fire in Middle
East
By MARGOT PATTERSON
Jerusalem
One of the central elements in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
has been the continuing encroachment of Israeli settlement on the territories
Israel won in the 1967 war. Originally described to the Israeli public as a
bargaining chip for peace, the territories have become a new battleground in
which Israeli settlers, supported and sponsored by the Israeli government, vie
with Palestinians for control over a contested patrimony.
Many of the settlers who move to the occupied territories do so
because of the generous economic inducements offered by the Israeli government.
Philip Wilcox, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said the
costs of settlements are buried so deeply in different line items in the
Israeli budget that probably even Israel’s budget-makers would find it
impossible to tease out the total cost to Israel of building and defending
settlements. In its March-April report on Israeli settlements, the foundation
said the 2002 Israeli budget includes $64 million for incentives for home
ownership, which includes grants up to $20,000 and soft loans up to $8,000 to
homebuyers in the territories. Citing figures quoted by Mossi Raz of the Meretz
Party, the foundation reported that personal income tax breaks for settlers
come to $106 million in the budget.
Economic perks for settlers come in a wide array of other forms as
well. They include educational subsidies, access roads for settler use only,
constructed on confiscated Palestinian land, and grants to local government
councils that in 2000 were eight times the amount given to poorer Jewish
communities in Israel. The foundation quotes the daily Israeli newspaper
Ha’aretz, which reported in an article printed Dec. 27,
2001, that the average investment per capita in regional (government)
authorities in the occupied territories is $1,773 annually, nearly three times
the sum spent per capita inside the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967
border.
Settlers who move to the occupied territories do so at the risk of
becoming targets of Palestinians militants, who see the settlers as the front
lines of the Israeli military, a way in which the Israeli government tries to
block or at least minimize any future Palestinian state. Nonetheless, the
number of settlers living in the occupied territories has doubled since the
Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, jumping from 200,000 to 400,000. This
includes new settlements in East Jerusalem, where Jewish neighborhoods have
been constructed to ring the Palestinian portion of the city.
If economic benefits lure the majority of settlers to the occupied
territories, religion and ideology drive others. For these settlers, any peace
plan that would give up territory won in the 1967 war would violate important
religious and nationalist aspirations.
“This is the heart of the land of Israel. This land is land
Jews lived on until we were thrown out of the land of Israel,” said David
Wilder, an American who immigrated to Israel 25 years ago and now lives in a
settlement in Hebron on the West Bank.
Like many settlers, Wilder is unbending in his opposition to the
Oslo accords.
“A journalist once asked me to define in one word how I react
when I hear the word ‘Oslo,’ and I said ‘suicide.’ The
whole concept behind Oslo is the destruction of the state of Israel,” said
Wilder, who questions why settlers living in Hebron are thought of differently
from Israeli residents living in, say, Tel Aviv.
Daniel Yossef, a teacher who lives in the Tekoa settlement on the
West Bank, is also critical of the Oslo peace accords. Founder of a group
called Peace for Generations, which he described as a grassroots pressure
group, Yossef advocates an approach to Israeli-Palestinian coexistence that
eliminates what he believes is the gamble with Israel’s future the Oslo
peace agreement involves, yet recognizes the legitimacy of both Palestinian and
Israeli claims to a common land. Polls show rising numbers of Israelis, now
almost 50 percent, support deportation of Palestinians as a solution to
Israel’s perceived security needs. Yossef said he unequivocally rejects
this, though he added he could understand how recent violence propels
extremism.
“The vision of the Israeli left is flawed,” Yossef said.
“So is the vision of the Israeli right because there is no long-term
vision. The Palestinians are here and you can’t ignore that fact. The
right’s creative thinking stops with imposing its will on the
Palestinians.
“We are against every hint of transferring people,” said
Yossef. “This is the homeland of the Jewish people and also of those who
identify themselves as Palestinian people. There should be one land and two
systems. Why does Israel and the world always think in terms of Solomon’s
division? The true mother is the one who says let’s save the
child.”
Yossef talks about instituting a win-win solution in which both
Israelis and Palestinians would have their own state on the same land. Two
parliaments, two educational systems, two names even for the same country.
Yossef said one side of a coin could be called Palestine and the other Israel.
He is organizing a conference in the fall that would bring together a wide
array of world thinkers and leaders to discuss this and other possible
solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.
Yossef’s endorsement of what could be described as an
apartheid system is open to criticism along those lines, but Connie Hackbarth,
a media officer at the Alternative Information Center who positions herself on
the liberal end of the political spectrum, credits him with a willingness to
engage more creatively with the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian
relationship than is common on the Israeli right.
Since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took office in February
2001, 34 new settlements have been constructed in the occupied territories,
according to a report in March by the Israeli group Peace Now, which charged
that the new settlements violate the coalition agreement between the Israeli
political parties in the current government.
William Quandt, a professor of government at the University of
Virginia who served on the National Security Council during the Nixon and
Carter administrations, said most American presidents have opposed settlement
construction in the occupied territories. Few have been successful at arresting
it, however.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has made a freeze on settlement
construction a condition for any cease-fire. The Mitchell Plan proposed by
former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell also called for Israel to cease settlement
construction as a trust-building measure. In an April 4 address on the Mideast,
President George W. Bush demanded an end to settlement construction.
But the addition of two right-wing parties to the Israeli
government in early April makes it more unlikely that the current Israeli
government will put a halt to settlement construction of its own volition, even
should Sharon wish to. As the prime architect of the settlement movement,
Sharon is considered hostile to any plan to slow or curtail settlement
development.
“At the present moment there’s no distinction between
the settlers and the government,” said Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, a California
rabbi who has studied the settler movement and who lived in Israel after the
1967 war, when the settler movement began. “Sharon is the architect of the
settler movement, and he’s the practical engineer of the idea that there
is no room for the Arabs to live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea in their own political entity. They can live there as laborers and choppers
of wood and drawers of water but only if they eschew any political
aspirations.”
As recently as mid-January, Sharon stated to a delegation of
settler women, “I don’t see myself evacuating any settlement, not in
the short term, in the context of interim agreements, and not in the long term,
in the context of a permanent agreement.”
“Sharon’s ambition is to cement Israeli control over all
the land of what he calls Greater Israel,” said Wilcox of the Foundation
for Middle East Peace. “The reason for settlements is to maintain Israeli
control, and the early architects of the settlements realized that neither the
Israeli public nor the rest of the world would understand or tolerate a
permanent armed occupation of the occupied territories.”
Dismantling settlements may be unpopular with the Israeli
population, but Wilcox contends, “American interests are on the line here.
Peace requires an end to the settlements.”
Margo Patterson is NCR senior writer. Her e-mail address is
mpatterson@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, April 19,
2002
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