Patrick Martin
Gush Etzion, West Bank — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Wednesday, Jul. 15, 2009 04:39AM EDT
Nothing poses a greater threat to the relationship between Israel and the United States than the issue of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.
In May, U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear that for the Arab-Israeli peace process to move forward, in his view Israel must halt settlement construction in the West Bank as a sign of good faith and a signal of a more even-handed American diplomacy in the Middle East. This week, Mr. Obama's envoy George Mitchell lands in Israel to press the case for a freeze, and Israel is bracing itself for the implications of its critical ally's new, hard-nosed stand.
Israel has yet to announce how it will comply with Mr. Obama's request, but the President made it clear recently to an audience of American Jewish leaders that he expects it to do so.
Many U.S. administrations have tried to halt the expansion of the settlements, considering them illegally built in occupied territory. Every one of them has failed, despite assurances from a succession of Israeli leaders that there would be no expansion.
In the 16 years since the Oslo peace accords were signed on the White House lawn, the number of Israelis living in West Bank settlements has increased to almost 300,000 from 110,000 – and that does not include the more than 200,000 Israelis living in occupied east Jerusalem.
The situation was ruefully summed up by Mr. Mitchell in a 2003 speech. “Opposition to the government of Israel's policies and practices regarding settlements … has been consistent through the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations,” he said. “Just as consistent has been the continued settlement activity by the Israeli government.”
Far from being a simple matter, figuring out just how serious Mr. Obama is and how much of a freeze on construction it will actually have to carry out is a problem that has occupied the Israeli government for much of the past two months.
For example, there's the question of where to draw the line. If a settlement home is already 90-per-cent built, can it be finished? What if it's only 10-per-cent built? What if the plan for a building has been approved, but work has not yet begun? What if the work began in the two months since Mr. Obama issued his call for a freeze?
Then there's the question of “vertical” expansion. Various Israeli leaders have said they understand the desire not to expand a settlement outward, taking up more Palestinian land. But what about building taller buildings within a settlement's current boundaries? Surely there's no harm in that, they say.
All indications are that the Obama administration is going to take a hard line in every case, and Israelis know it. As Amos Harel, a leading writer for Haaretz, wrote this past weekend, the mood in official Jerusalem is “one of shock” over how much ground the government is going to have to give on the settlement issue.
There is one exception Israel is counting on, however: the settlement-block exemption.
Ever since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Israelis have argued, and Palestinian negotiators have agreed, that certain settlement blocks immediately east of the 1949 Green Line boundary in which large numbers of Israelis are clustered should be considered part of Israel in any final-status agreement – provided that Palestinians receive an equivalent amount of comparable territory from Israel in return.
All other Israeli settlements would be relinquished by Israel.
Since both principal parties agree that the blocks won't be part of a future Palestinian state, Israelis say, surely the freeze need not apply to them.
But the settlement blocks Palestinians agreed to 16 years ago look a lot different today.
About two-thirds of the Jewish population increase in the West Bank has taken place in three settlement blocks: Gush Etzion, Modiin Ilit and Maale Adumim. The remaining one-third has been spread out among the other 117 settlements. Along with that population growth has come an expansion in settlement boundaries, with plans for much more.
While Palestinians take some comfort from the assurance they will be compensated with other territory, the scale of expansion threatens to bend their future state out of shape and severely isolate several Palestinian communities.
So what are these settlement blocks, and why should Israel be able to count on retaining them?
Here to stay
If Israel were allowed to keep only one of its 120 settlements in the West Bank, it would be the block known as Gush Etzion.
“From my window, I can see the path where Abraham walked on his way to bind his son Isaac,” said Yair Wolfe, deputy mayor of this community in the Judean Hills southwest of Bethlehem. “Our history didn't just begin in 1948.”
There's a lot of ancient history in these hills, but it is the community's more recent history that makes it special to Israelis.
Settlement attempts during the British mandate in the 1920s and 1930s fell victim to Arab uprisings. Jewish pioneers finally established a viable religious farming community here in the mid-1940s, only to lose it in the intense fighting that broke out after the 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. More than 150 of the community's defenders perished in the days just before Israel's declaration of independence.
For 19 years, during Jordan's occupation of the area, many of the survivors and orphans planned their return. Within weeks of Israeli forces conquering the area in the 1967 Six-Day War, a group set up camp on the old site. In a controversial decision, the Israeli government allowed them to remain, the first such permission it granted. Prime minister Levi Eshkol distinguished the act of these people as returning to their homes, rather than as settlement, which was disallowed under the Geneva Conventions concerning occupied territory. Gush Etzion grew from that.
Last month, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter visited the settlement and even he, a critic of many Israeli policies, said it was one good reason for adjusting the 1967 borders.
“This particular settlement area is not one I ever envision being abandoned or changed over into Palestinian territory,” he said.
These days, however, the block that started as a group of four small communities has grown well beyond the historic boundaries to which Mr. Carter was referring.
Gush Etzion organizers have carefully knitted together a chain of outlying settlements intended to maximize the block's reach. They have extended their jurisdiction 20 kilometres to the east where the settlement of Nokdim (home of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman) includes half a dozen concrete foxholes that face the desert. “It's important that we control the Judean desert,” Mr. Wolfe explained.
Gush Etzion also has claimed jurisdiction over the bursting new settlement of Beitar Ilit to the west. Not only does this ultra-Orthodox community house more than 37,000 people, it is located less than half a kilometre from the Green Line that delineates the border between the West Bank and Israel.
Gush Etzion's plans call for it to expand its residential areas in that direction.
“There are only 1,000 Arabs between us and the Green Line,” said a determined Mr. Wolfe, referring to the village of Nahalin that stands in the way. Nahalin, with a population of more than 6,000, is on the verge of being hemmed in by the expanding Etzion bloc on one side and Israel's security barrier on the other.
The secular settlement
There may be 28 synagogues in Maale Adumim, a sprawling settlement block east of Jerusalem, but religion has little to do with why most of the population of 37,000 people decided to move here.
They came because their shekels can buy a home near Jerusalem at reasonable prices, and they believe the municipality's literature that tells them “Maale Adumim is regarded as an integral part of the State of Israel.”
That's why the growth has been so strong, and why 1,000 more housing units are under construction.
“This isn't a settlement, it's a city,” says Hizki Zisman, spokesman for the Maale Adumim municipality. “You can't freeze that. We're a suburb of Jerusalem.
“People didn't come here for ideological reasons,” he adds. “They came for the quality of life.”
And while the community already has approval for its expansion to several outlying settlements, which will allow it to grow to 70,000 people by 2020, Mr. Zisman points out, “We're not displacing any Arabs.”
That's true, if you don't count the 1,000 or so Bedouin who live in tents and shacks in the valleys outside the community.
Part of the municipal plan is to link up with Kedar, a well-guarded settlement to the south that had been started by Gush Etzion in 1983, but now is being turned over to Maale Adumim. Another part of the plan is to link to four smaller settlements on the other side of the Jerusalem-Jericho highway.
Ayelet Meridor was one month old when her parents and a dozen other families started one of those settlements, Kfar Adumim, in 1979.
The 1,500 people in this attractive hilltop community are proudly independent, a mixture of religious and secular, with a primary school that places the children together. They don't care much for Maale Adumim.
“It's just a big city,” says Ms. Meridor, a mother of two and Kfar Adumim's community director. “Everyone here wanted to keep the community small,” she said. “Once you've lived in the desert, you can't ever leave it. It's like oxygen.”
Like it or not, the 380 families here know their future is tied to Maale Adumim. The only chance they have to remain a part of Israel is to be included with the expansion of the big metropolis.
“There's a lot of tension here right now,” Ms. Meridor says. “We know all the arguments. We just don't know what the future will hold.”
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