27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
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Settling for no settlements
Israel's colonial construction policy is the principal obstacle to a peaceful solution, writes Khalil Al-Tafakji*
American diplomacy has adjusted to both Israel's refusal to end settlement activity and the Palestinian demand to freeze settlements. After the Oslo accords in 1993, the state of political paralysis that had beset the Washington talks came to an end. Israel managed to use the peaceful progress that had been made to increase settlement populations, build more settlements and establish new settlement loci, all of which transformed the demographic conditions of the occupied territories.
These new conditions made it possible to impose the solutions engineered by Ariel Sharon, who sees settlement activities as an ideological duty and a security gain. He is among the three or four Israelis who had the greatest role in the establishment and expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories from 1967 on. Without Jewish settlements in the Golan, "Judaea" and "Samaria" (the West Bank), Israel would have returned to the green line a long time ago.
Only the settlements prevented Rabin from agreeing to withdraw, and thus created difficulties in the negotiations. The peaceful route to a settlement allowed an exponential increase in the number of Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, raising the number of Israelis living in East Jerusalem by one third. The rate of settlement building has moreover increased by 52 per cent since 1993, when the number of housing units was 32,750. In the period from September 1993 to July 2000, 19,190 new housing units were established. The number of settlers increased at the same rate: in 1993 they numbered 115,700; by 2000 they had reached 199,000.
Thus the peace process, which started in 1991, cannot guarantee sovereignty or independence for the Palestinians; such at least was the Palestinian viewpoint. After the Taba negotiations, talks between the two sides stopped; the new Israeli prime minister had been elected, and he had an integrated project that he had first proposed in 1983, when he was defence minister. Sharon developed his project further in 1990, and began executing it when he arrived in office. The plan he proposed provided for a guarantee never to withdraw, under any circumstances, from unified Jerusalem, Israel's capital; the Jordan Depression, too, Sharon said, would remain under the control of Israeli settlements; no settlement would be dismantled and no refugees would be allowed to return.
Sharon has a clear political map for a permanent resolution with the Palestinians, which he keeps in one of his offices and shows all his visitors. On this map, the Palestinian state occupies no more than 42 per cent of the West Bank -- about two per cent more than the Palestinians have been given so far.
The diplomatic vacuum that resulted from the failure of the final settlement negotiations and the resumption of the Intifada created an opportunity for the Palestinians to reformulate their demands. The Jordanian-Egyptian initiative proposed the freezing of settlement activities in all those areas occupied after 1967. The Mitchell report, drawn up during the Sharm Al-Sheikh Conference to investigate the Intifada, called for a complete freeze on settlement expansion and suggested evacuating some settlements for security reasons. The report remarked that the Israeli government should freeze all settlement activities, including the "natural" growth of existing settlements, for security cooperation cannot go hand in hand with settlement activities for long. The statements issued by the Peace Now movement and the Palestinian Ministry of Interior show the extent of settlement development during that period of peace, during which Israel built 29,000 housing units. Between the Madrid conference and June 2001, the number of settlers rose from 105,000 to 208,015. During the Intifada, on the other hand, the number of settlers increased by 5,000, or 4.2 per cent of the annual increase.
Even though Israeli propaganda insists that settlers are moving out of settlements, the latest statistics demonstrate that the greatest increases took place within the settlements to be appended to Israel in the final stage of Sharon's plan. Population increases took place in settlements in Greater Jerusalem and in the areas of Ghosh Atsyoun, Latroun and southwest of Nablus. Various projects proposed by the Labour Party, the Likud or Peace Now all call for incorporating these areas into Israel. Movement out of settlements, in contrast, has been restricted to isolated or economically depressed areas like the Jordan Depression. Three settlements have been established since the Oslo accords, on the other hand; their population numbers 12,112. In addition, some 64 settlement locations were established between 1966 and 2001. These developments constitute the implementation of Sharon's "mountain occupation" policy during his term as foreign minister under Netanyahu; they show both a desire to colonise more and more land and the fear of international pressure.
Between 1994 and 1997 alone, Israel built ring roads amounting to 159km in total, taking over more than 56 square km in a process that relied on military orders to take over any land by any means provided that it is in the public interest. An Israeli road project issued in 1983 calls for the West Bank's division into a checkerboard that Israel can control easily from the security, economic and demographic perspectives.
In addition, Israel has been destroying Palestinian homes. Between 1994 and 2000, the Israeli army pulled down 740 Palestinian houses in the West Bank, and during the present Intifada the destruction has increased, especially in Gaza, with the object of isolating the Gaza Strip from the Egyptian border. Israel destroyed more than 100 houses there, turning their residents into refugees. The bulldozers also reached Jerusalem in 2001, destroying 45 supposedly unlicensed houses. This process made 130 people homeless in the period from 1 September 2000 to 15 September 2001.
Israel also seeks to cripple the Palestinian economy by closing off the West Bank and Gaza, citing "security concerns." They were closed for a total of 326 days from 1993 to 2000. Since the Intifada began, the roads have been closed far more frequently, and indeed remain closed at the time of writing. This has raised unemployment rates to 65 per cent and increased poverty drastically.
The Intifada is a bloody battle in which Israel's brutality only intensifies discontent. In defence of their rights and to evict the occupation forces, the Palestinians are using all the means at their disposal, as stipulated in UN Resolutions 242 and 338. In the absence of a political vision, however, the possibility of an interminable war of attrition looms large. If the Jordanian-Egyptian initiative and the Mitchell report were heeded, the blood- bath would stop, and a political mechanism could be put in place allowing for the resumption of negotiations. But Sharon's insistence that settlements should continue to grow "naturally," which the Palestinian people see as an attempt to destroy the bases of their state, places an insuperable obstacle in the way of a final settlement. Until the United States adopts a stricter position with Israel, the Palestinian Intifada will continue to demonstrate the essential contradiction between settlement activities and peace.
* The writer is head of the maps and land survey department at Orient House.
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