Sharon, settlements and making Dante blush Geoffrey Aronson

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Sharon, settlements and making Dante blush

Geoffrey Aronson

The Daily Star, 9/3/03

A single-mindedness of purpose is required for those who hope to make history, a belligerent, bull-headed determination to keep one’s focus on the prize and to subordinate every tactical consideration to this strategic goal. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has such qualities. His dogged pursuit of the expansion and consolidation of Jewish sovereignty throughout what he refers to as the “Land of Israel,” and the associated destruction of the prospect of genuine Palestinian sovereignty, are his lodestar. Every action he takes and every policy he pursues are undertaken in its service. The ineffectual American-led “road map” has proven to be little more than a nuisance for him. He has frustrated both implementation of the evacuation of settlements established after March 2001, and an immediate, comprehensive halt to settlement expansion. Both were central features of the first stage of the road map, and both have been effectively ignored by both the US and Israel. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, overwhelmed by the demands of his stronger antagonists, has made only perfunctory attempts to force the issues onto the agenda. It is doubtful a more forceful Palestinian effort could have had more success. US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Israeli daily Maariv on July 31: “When Abbas was in Washington last week and they talked about settlements and … prisoners … (US) President (George W. Bush) kept … interrupting the conversation to say: ‘I understand, but it begins with security.’” Powell then said that Abbas replied, “Well, we need more on settlements.” Bush repeated, “I understand, but it begins with security.” The West Bank town of Hebron is a metaphor for the unequal, zero-sum contest between Palestinians and Jewish nationalism of the kind championed by Sharon. It is a place where the presence of a few dozen adult settlers has created a kind of hell that would make Dante blush. The beginning of the contemporary, permanent Jewish presence in the city in 1980 followed a script similar to the one that has attended the recent Israeli response to the creation of new settlement outposts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which now number more than 100. Then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a settlement cheerleader but at times a stickler for the law, referred to settlers who had broken into a building in Hebron as “invaders.” Backed by his Cabinet, he righteously vowed to expel them from the town. The settlers, of course, remained, and their militancy and malignant hatred of Arabs metastasized into yet another deplorable feature of life under Israeli rule. It hardly needs to be said that for the Palestinians of Hebron, the hesitant, almost surreptitious elements of the road map that Palestinians hoped would signal their salvation have proven no more than empty talk. The Hebron settlers have made no secret of their intention to remake Hebron into a Jewish city, and to “kick the Arabs out.” In the town’s Old City their campaign is paying dividends. The Israeli organization B’tselem reports that 43 percent of the inhabitants of Hebron’s Old City, located near the enclave where 500 Jewish settlers reside, have left their homes since the start of the second intifada in September 2000. “According to our investigation, 73 of the 169 families living in these streets have left, while some 2,000 shops and businesses in the Casbah (Old City) have closed,” the coordinator of the report, Shlomo Suissa, told AFP last Aug. 19. The Israeli Supreme Court recently removed a restraining order delaying the construction of a four-story building for seven settler families in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida settlement. The families began building permanent homes last September, but the court stopped construction five months later at the request of archaeologists who charged that the construction was causing damage to Jewish antiquities at the site. The court has now dismissed these objections. The 23 Israeli settlements of the Jordan Valley have distinguished themselves among West Bank settlements by a consistent record of economic and demographic stagnation, trends reinforced by Israel’s economic slowdown and the intifada. Despite its unprecedented budget woes, the government has adopted a new plan of economic incentives for many West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements. A similar government-subsidized settlement campaign is under way on the Golan Heights. The failed effort to make peace with Syria has restored the confidence of newcomers that investments there will not be threatened by something so unlikely as peace. The number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza continues to grow at a rate almost three times Israel’s national rate. The scores of settlements in the West Bank currently boast a population of over 220,000 people, slightly higher than the number of Israelis residing in annexed East Jerusalem. Even in Gaza, of all places, the population of 20-odd settlements increased 10 percent during the intifada, from 6,900 to 7,600, with a significant rise in Nissanit and Neveh Dekalim, where 70 families joined each settlement. The Bush administration, which has chosen not to exercise its power to effect real changes in Sharon’s settlement strategy, has instead fallen back on a symbolic gesture. Sharon welcomed, indeed invited Washington to deduct from $9 billion in US loan guarantees Israeli expenditures on settlements, a policy pursued without any discernable impact when loan guarantees were first made available a decade ago. Nor is the Israeli prime minister losing sleep over the prospect that the US may, though ever-reluctantly, penalize Israel for its construction of the $1 billion separation wall that will make West Bank Palestinians trespassers on much of their remaining patrimony. Sharon is confident that whether or not the US cuts back on its guarantees, he will not be deflected from making Palestinians strangers in their own land.

Geoffrey Aronson is director of research and publications at the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).