		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Nov. - 2 Dec. 1998 Issue No.405
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

State piracy

Land plunder and bursts of rhetoric are clouding the slow and bumpy implementation of last month's Wye Plantation agreement between Palestinians and Israelis. On the Israeli side, Binyamin Netanyahu and his cronies have been firing off warnings and demands every step of the way, trying to exact concessions from the Palestinians in the name of security before honouring the timetable laid down in the memorandum. On the Palestinian side, there has been a stream of charges that Netanyahu is bent on destroying the peace process.

Israel has kept its settlement drive going strong, in flagrant violation of the Wye agreement. It invited tenders for the construction of more than 1,000 settlement housing blocks in Jebel Abu Ghneim, on the edge of East Jerusalem -- one of the major issues behind the 17-month deadlock in peace talks before the US-brokered Wye deal.

Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon, with characteristic bombast and bluster, jumped into the fray with an encouragement to Jewish settlers to take the law into their hands. "Everyone should take action, should run, should grab more hills," Sharon told a political rally on 15 November. "We'll expand the [Israeli-occupied] area. Whatever is seized will be ours. Whatever is not seized will end up in their [Palestinian] hands. That's what must be done now."

For his part, Netanyahu was doing everything in his power to appease the settlers. He sought their views on a map of West Bank areas to be handed over to the Palestinian Authority in the first phase of troop withdrawal under the Wye agreement. Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai said that the settlers had raised 117 objections to the map, which was redrawn to meet at least half these objections.

Worse, the first phase of withdrawal was coupled with an Israeli Radio announcement that Netanyahu's government planned to seize 10 per cent of West Bank territory for settlement purposes. The reasoning was that this land -- amounting to some 125,000 acres -- "does not belong to anyone", and is therefore "state" land. The joke -- or is it warped logic? -- is that "state" in this context was understood to be Israel, not Palestine.