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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Living Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Waiting for Barak
By Graham UsherOn 22 May, five days after Israel's Prime Minister-elect Ehud Barak had heralded a "new dawn" in Israeli politics, a handful of Palestinians gathered at Ras Al-Amud, an 11,000 strong Palestinian village that sits on a ridge between Jerusalem's old city and the "eastern" villages of Silwan, Abu Dis and Al-Izzariya.
The Palestinians had come to protest the construction of a new 132 unit Jewish settlement on 16 dunums of land "purchased" in wholly murky circumstances some years ago by the Jewish property magnate (and friend of Israel's outgoing prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu) Irving Muskowitz. The bulldozers broke earth at Ras Al-Amud on 18 May, one day after Netanyahu's election defeat and two days after another squad of bulldozers had begun building the first of 150 units for the Har Homa settlement at Jebel Abu Ghneim. For PLO executive member responsible for Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, the timing of the starts was hardly coincidental.
"For over a year the settlers at Ras Al-Amud didn't do a thing," he said, standing before the reinforced steel fence Israel's "Jerusalem" municipality has thrown around the new settlement. "Now they act. We believe it is a deliberate provocation and challenge to the new Israeli government. And what we want from Ehud Barak is a clear statement as to whether he will allow or stop these actions."
It has been a demand echoed by virtually every Palestinian leader since Barak's election win, reflecting the Palestinian consensus that a halt on settlement expansion in the Occupied Territories is now an absolute precondition for any resumption of the Oslo process. "Our message is that there can be no peace process without the cessation of settlement, and especially those settlements whose intent is to prejudge and predetermine the final status of Jerusalem," said Palestinian Legislative Council member for Jerusalem, Hanan Ashrawi, at Ras Al-Amud.
There is more hope than conviction in such statements. The idea that an Israeli government led by Barak, or anybody else for that matter, will suddenly freeze the 6,000 or so settlement units currently under construction in the Occupied Territories is improbable, if only because there is nothing in the Oslo Accords which explicitly prohibits such building and because the Palestinian leadership has long (if quietly) agreed with Israel that settlements can be expanded in line with their "natural growth".
Palestinian demonstrators being prevented by Israeli soldiers from approaching a Jewish settlement near Nablus in the West Bank on Saturday (photo: AFP)
Palestinian concern is directed rather at those "political settlements" like Ras Al-Amud, Jebel Abu Ghneim and the 20 or so "hilltop settlements" settler groups have set up across the West Bank since the Wye Agreement was signed in October 1998.
For these settlements are intended to prevent any territorially contiguous Palestinian entity from emerging. Thus, should the Ras Al-Amud or Har Homa settlements be built, they will effectively sever Arab East Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterland. Should the hilltop settlements stay in place and be "developed" with by-pass roads and "security zones", they will act to contain the "autonomous Palestinian areas" to more or less their existing and separated enclaves.
But would a government led by Barak freeze such actions? The signs so far are wholly ambivalent. On the one hand, there are potential members of a Barak coalition, such as the leftist Meretz bloc, who are making a freeze on all new settlement construction a condition for its participation in government. There are others, like the Russian immigrant Yisrael Baliyya Party, who reject all talk of a freeze.
There is also the lingering possibility that Barak may invite the defeated Likud Party into a National Unity government and offer its probable "caretaker" leader, Ariel Sharon, a major ministerial post. And Sharon is not so much a supporter of the current settlement drive as its mastermind. It was he, after the Wye Agreement, who called on the settlers to "grab the hilltops [in the West Bank], because if you don't, they [the Palestinians] will". He also supported the Ras Al-Amud settlement when it was set up in September 1997 as "supremely important" to Israel since it would serve to "segregate" the old city from the "eastern" Palestinian villages.
Beyond this, there is the question as to what the Palestinians would do should Barak follow Sharon's path rather than Meretz's. And the auguries for this are presently no clearer than those for Barak's coalition. Thus despite being called by all the Palestinian factions, including Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and the Islamist Hamas movement, the Ras Al-Amud protest drew barely 50 people. Describing the demonstration as "at least a start", one of its organisers admitted that there is a crisis in the Palestinian national movement in Jerusalem.
"Everybody knows Arafat doesn't want mass protests in Jerusalem," he said. "The question is what are we going to do about it. And the problem is that the factions are so internally divided within and between themselves that we have lost the trust of the people. This fragmentation is particularly bad in Fatah, but it applies to all the groups."
Unless such fragmentation is overcome, the Palestinian leadership is likely to continue to rely in its struggle for Jerusalem on appeals to the US, the UN and, above all, Ehud Barak, a man whose electoral platform vows "the preservation of a united Jerusalem forever". Yet, without the threat of Palestinian resistance on the ground, why on earth would Barak get into a fight with the settlers when the Palestinian national movement appears ever less ready to do so?
