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Philip C. Wilcox: …The Mitchell Report has highlighted the need for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as one requirement for ending the current violent conflict and resuming peace talks. The Report calls for a settlement freeze as a confidence-building measure that would follow a cessation of violence by both Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank of Gaza.

The issue of a freeze has reared its head, intermittently, over the decades, and all American Administrations have attempted to grapple with it. However, they have tended to kick the issue down the road as one that was too difficult to confront in a decisive way. The failure to resolve the settlements issue, in my judgement, is one of the main reasons why this conflict is still festering. Indeed, the doubling of the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza since 1993, the advent of the Oslo Peace Process, is one of the underlying reasons, I think, for the failure of the peace process.

That’s why the recommendation for a settlement freeze in the Mitchell Report looms so large as one of the keys to ending the current crisis and restoring confidence so that the parties can get back to the negotiating table.

This morning, I’m pleased to introduce my colleague Geoffrey Aronson. Geoff, as you know, is the foremost historian and analyst in this country of the Israeli settlement movement. He is also the Editor of the Foundation’s Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories. If any of you do not receive the Report, you can read on the Web, or request a subscription, either hard copy or by e-mail.

Geoff will talk about the issue of a settlement freeze and the concept of natural growth.

 
Geoffrey Aronson: Good morning, thank you for coming. Two bureaucratic points, one, you’ll note that among the information outside is a map of the West Bank and Gaza noting Israeli settlement areas and Palestinian villages which dates, I think, from 1992. There has been some change in that map over the years but 99 percent of it is still accurate and I apologize for not having a more up-to-date map for you.

The second point is, I’ll try to speak for about a half hour or so, something like that, and would be very interested, in fact, more interested, in responding to questions or concerns that you have after that.

The reason I’m here today, having written every two months about settlements for the last decade, is that settlements are in the headlines again. During the Oslo Process there was a prevailing assumption that a settlement freeze was in effect and no amount of information that I could gather and present could crack that conventional wisdom. However, today settlements have crawled their way back to the top fold of the papers and here I am to give you some insights into what this all means.
Settlements, in my view, are the most visible expression of Israel’s policy of what it calls creating facts on the ground. These ever-expanding settlements are found on lands the Palestinians claim as their own. Over the last months, these settlement areas and the military posts that have been established to defend them have become the flashpoints for the deadly battles that you report on and that we read about being fought throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If Israelis and Palestinians agree on anything at all, it’s that settlements and Palestinian opposition to them, exemplify the heart of the conflict, that is the continuing contest for control of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that’s been ongoing for more than a century.

From the Israeli perspective, settlements are the most emotive and also the most practical expression of the century-old Zionist revolution in Palestine, the most practical illustration of both the power and the success of the Jewish National Movement. In the occupied territories, that is the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, this ideological and historical imperative has been married to a military strategy intent upon insuring Israel’s control of the area west of the Jordan River. Civilian Israeli settlement, throughout the territories, was essential to the realization of this goal, as Moshe Dayan once explained. Dayan, was and remains the Israeli most responsible for instituting the basic framework of settlement and occupation that exists in some form, to this very day.
He said that, these "settlements are important not because they can insure security better than the army, but because without settlements, we cannot keep the army in those territories. Without these settlements, the IDF would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population," rather than an army defending the right, of its citizens to live in their homeland in peace and security.

An updated variation of this view was stated recently by Ariel Sharon, Israel’s current prime minister, when he said that if the settlements in the West Bank were not there, the Army would have long ago left. In part, because the Israeli polity would not long countenance the sending of their sons and daughters to areas beyond Israel’s sovereign territory. We saw that in Lebanon where, after an occupation lasting, 18 years, the Israeli army was forced to withdraw, in part because of the casualties it was sustaining. That, in turn, produced a political wave within Israel that would not countenance the permanent sending of their sons and daughters, again, across the border.

Little wonder, then, given the tremendous importance that settlements have represented over the years that the constant Palestinian demands, during the last decade in particular, to establish a framework of diplomacy which would require Israel to freeze its settlements as a prelude to evacuation of settlements, has never been seriously considered by Israel. Israel, of course, recognized that such calls for a freeze were motivated by an intention to force an Israeli evacuation, not only of the settlements themselves, but also of the Israeli army from the contested territories, and these again are territories that Israeli’s security establishment still considers to be essential to its regional security concept.

Only when Yasser Arafat, in 1993 during the secret Oslo track, agreed to drop settlements and the demand for a freeze from his agenda was the road to Oslo’s Declaration of Principles open. And for those of you who were around during that period, you may remember that one of the principle obstacles to progress in the period before Oslo, during the so-called Washington talks, was the demand of the Palestinian delegation at that time headed by Gaza personality Haider Abdu-Shafi that the talks begin with an assumption or commitment by Israel to freeze settlements. That Palestinian demand was one of the reasons why nothing moved during those talks.

This year, we have the failure of the final status talks, the last session of which took place at Taba after the first of the year, the defeat of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the hands of Ariel Sharon, and the rebellion against Israel mounted by Palestinians since last October in the occupied territories. These three factors have created a diplomatic vacuum that the call for a settlement freeze is meant, in part, to fill. Both the peace plan promoted by the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments and the report by the presidentially appointed commission headed by former Senator George Mitchell have placed a halt to settlement expansion at the heart of their recommendations for stabilizing the ever-deteriorating situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

The effort to win Israel’s endorsement for a freeze in the growth of its outpost in the occupied territories has an impeccable diplomatic pedigree. Every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has tried, with varying degrees of commitment, to cajole, convince, or threaten Israeli leaders to undertake a settlements freeze, but these efforts have uniformly failed.

Jimmy Carter thought he had won a commitment from then-prime minister Menachem Begin to freeze settlements for the duration of discussions about Palestinian autonomy that was conceived at Camp David in September 1978. But Begin was only prepared to freeze settlements for three months, so he declared after returning from Camp David, and he also forgot to tell Carter that during that period Israeli could still thicken existing settlements. At that time the population of all the settlement areas beyond the Green Line numbered 50,000.

In 1992, George Bush and the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, at Kennebunkport, agreed to another freeze except for what was called "the natural growth of settlements." Back at home, Rabin defended himself against right-wing attacks for this concession, noting with some exasperation, quote, "The construction of 11,000 settlement units continues. Is this a freeze? I don’t know whether George Bush accepts this or not, but he knows that this will happen." At that time, there were a quarter of a million Israelis beyond the Green Line border.
Now today, 34 years after 1967, over 400,000 Israelis live in the occupied territories in more than 200 purposely built towns, suburbs and villages in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem, on lands, let us not forget, that 3 million Palestinians regard as their patrimony.
Palestinians who have suffered the doubling of Israel’s population in their midst during almost a decade in which most observers have described as "peace" might be forgiven for questioning, not only Israel’s intentions, but those of their own leadership as well.

Palestinians demanding such a freeze need to be mindful of the adage, "watch out what you wish for because it might be come true." They, the Palestinian leadership and its experts, have been surprised by the renewed resonance of the freeze idea in the international diplomatic community. And they are much better prepared to attack Israel’s refusal to concede this point than to consider how exactly such a freeze might work, what it should include, how it would be monitored, and what penalties would be exacted for transgressions.

The Israeli foreign minister, on the other hand, is searching his extensive diplomatic lexicon to conjure a formulation that will satisfy the freeze’s partisans while leaving unfettered, Prime Minister Sharon’s desire to create more settlements facts. In the event of an unlikely Israeli agreement to entertain such a notion, the interminable negotiations to determine its practical import could well result in yet another settlement freeze which, like all of its antecedents, leaves Israel’s settlement prerogatives largely intact.

Why, then, has the freeze suddenly become an important topic on the negotiation agenda? Number one, as I noted before, is the creation of a diplomatic vacuum. Each side is for its own purposes trying to do what I call determining the shape of the table. Each side wants to establish its own control over the framework for discussions that are going to take place.

The Israelis have historically refused to accept any external constraints on their settlement expansion. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have tried unsuccessfully but rather persistently to impose this demand on the diplomatic negotiations. Now with the failure or the seeming end of the Oslo Process, with a change in government both in Israel and in the United States, the Palestinians see once again an opportunity in the form of the Mitchell Report.

The Mitchell Commission is only reporting what any observer has come to know who has spent any time in these territories over the years, which is that Palestinians on the ground, understandably, look outside their windows see an ever-expanding presence, of not only Israeli civilians, but of Israeli civilians who need to be protected by the IDF, who need roads to come and go from Israel, and who need a variety of infrastructural improvements, water, electricity, and so forth. All too often, these developments take place in a zero-sum framework, so to the extent that Israel increases lands available for settlements and roads and so forth, these are lands that are subsequently denied to Palestinians. This is a reality that, for most Palestinians, is far more important and far more decisive than any discussions or negotiations that have been conducted or will be conducted.

So the popular view in Palestine today has contributed to the crystallization of a demand to see concrete action regarding settlements. They want to see that the settlement momentum, the settlement drive, is actually being halted. And again halting, of course, is not enough for these people.
This is the situation as it exists today. This is a map of the West Bank and Gaza with areas A, B, and C, as outlined by the Oslo Talks, this area A and B are those that are nominally controlled by the Palestinians that comprise about 42 percent of the West Bank. Area C, where all these purple settlement areas are, are areas that are controlled exclusively by Israel.

The Palestinian demand for a freeze is intimately tied to their expectation that a freeze will be indicative of an Israeli willingness to evacuate settlements. And that is the unspoken subtext of the demand for a settlement freeze, and it’s a subtext that the Mitchell Report referred to when it noted that Israel should consider, whether its security interests are being served by certain outposts that have been points of conflict and violent confrontation.

And that formulation, done very expertly, was actually a compromise to satisfy members of the commission who were actually advocating a more explicit call for evacuation of specific settlements. The Mitchell consensus was that it should not micro-manage the situation to that degree, but nonetheless, there was an articulate belief on the part of some members of the commission that they should make the suggestion.

Now, a question that really hasn’t been asked by very many people is what is a settlement freeze? How do you stop, how do you freeze a community of almost half a million people, if we include East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements together? Currently they number 400,000. This has never been done, anywhere, under any circumstances, that you impose a halt on the development of over 200 communities. What does it mean? Does it mean that you just simply stop pouring concrete, or simply stop clearing land for new settlement areas? Does it mean that people who own apartments there are not permitted to add a room? Does it mean that they can or cannot sell apartments? Does it mean that Israel’s package of subsidies, for example, which creates a market advantage for settlement housing over that available in Israel, needs to be withdrawn and that there be no positive discrimination, in a sense, in Israeli’s tax code to favor purchasing homes in settlement areas? Does it mean that road improvements will not be made? Does it mean that the Post Office will not add new Post Office boxes in a settlement area? How expansive are the parameters of the freeze you are demanding, who is going to monitor this system, which, depending on how you frame it, could be very intrusive? you would need monitors on almost every street corner, depending on how extensive a freeze you wanted to impose. So how would you monitor it, and what penalties would be exacted for transgressing its regulations?

We’ve seen, during the period of the loan guarantee issue in the early part of the s, when the U.S. committed to reduce the amount of loan guarantees to Israel by an amount equal to its non-security expenditures in settlements, that this is a highly politicized process. And if you look at the figures [which I think you have in the papers which were available outside] as time went on, the amount of penalty incurred by Israel, for what was, in fact, an expanding settlement program, became less and less. Not because, again, the facts on the ground suggested that but because it became an overwhelming political exercise whose impact, at some point, the parties sought to minimize.
So it’s a very complicated, intrusive, and difficult to create a monitoring program, all of which, I would remind you, would need to be negotiated with Israel. One could easily see a discussion of these issues dragging on for months on end and becoming, in and of itself, the focus of diplomacy between the two parties.

There’s one other issue, related to this, that has been raised in recent weeks, and that’s the question of vacancy rates in settlements. Some parties have suggested that there are enough units currently completed, to account for three or four years of purchases. Part of this point is true, but part of it is a partisan political point that is meant to promote an agenda rather than to recognize what in fact is actually happening.

In any community in the world you always have a reserve of vacant units. Communities are dynamic animals and in order to expand, if they are healthy, they need apartments. In fact, in the West Bank, over the last decade there has consistently been a reserve of about 20 percent of the total number of apartments available and vacant at any one time.

It’s not unusual for empty apartments to exist in what are otherwise growing communities. In some cases, the percentage of empty apartments is quite high. In the Gaza Strip, for example, about 33 percent of the total housing stock is vacant. Now that probably is a suggestion that these places are not too popular. But nonetheless, the settler population in the Gaza Strip, of all places, has increased, over the last decade, from 5,500, to about 7,500 people.

So you can’t simply suggest that you use all your vacant apartments until Day X when none of them are vacant and then you can start building again. However, what it does suggest is an effort to win the political argument, which is to impose a settlement freeze. However in doing so, in making that argument, you, in a sense, admit that the standard you’re going to use to judge whether housing construction is required is the demand of the market. And that, I would argue, for Palestinians and also for those Israelis and people in the United States, is a very slippery slope. Once you concede that the framework is essentially a bureaucratic one, and not one based on principle, that is that there should be no transfer of Israel’s civilian population beyond its own sovereign borders, you’ve entered an argument which ultimately only those partisans of settlement can win, I believe.

Now, what you may see is a freeze of sorts as a result of market circumstances. There’s a housing recession in Israel today as a whole, so housing is not an industry, in Israel, that’s very vibrant, and housing in the settlements is certainly a function of this. Secondly, the Intifada, because of its focus, on settlements and roads, has dramatically changed the environment for settlers and for Israelis who are considering moving across the Green Line. No longer can they pretend that these are simply unremarkable parts of the state of Israel. And if they do they’re quickly made aware, when their children have to go to school every day in armed convoys, when shots are taken at their friends who are going to and from work, and so forth, when their refrigerator breaks down and the repair man won’t come out because he’s afraid to come out on these roads. When you have a wedding celebration and you have to have it somewhere else, because if you have it in your settlement, you know that none of your friends from Israel proper are going to come.

So this new factor, which hasn’t been a consideration since 1967, is having an impact and I think you’ll see during the summer months, when Israelis generally move in and out of places, before the beginning of the school year, that many Israelis who currently live in settlement areas will decide that their children are going to start the school year within Israel proper, so they’re going to move out of settlement areas into an environment which they consider to be safer.

This has already happened during this year. In Gaza, for example, there are two or three settlements where there are less than ten families currently residing, according to Israeli press reports. One is Kfar Darom, which sits aside the main north/south Gaza access and has been a focal point of violent confrontation.

The second settlement, Nitzanit where there are new homes under construction but at the same time again there are less than ten families. So in these areas, for example, a freeze as a prelude to evacuation makes practical sense, immediate practical sense.

Now the Mitchell Commission was not alone in thinking about the specific parameters of what a settlement freeze means. The Palestinians have only recently begun to try to parse the specifics of what exactly it is they are demanding. And the more intensively they get into this issue, the more they realize that it would be a very hard, long, complex struggle to win anything from Israel that would impose meaningful, external constraints on their settlement expansion.

However, what it would represent, as I noted earlier, is the Palestinian’s success and their ability to determine the shape of the table, to determine the rules under which diplomacy will operate in this post-Oslo, post-Ehud Barak period.

I’ll end with a short discussion of U.S. policy on this. It seems quite clear that U.S. efforts, such as they have been, to constrain settlement expansion have been ineffectual at best. In fact, during the Clinton years, for the first time, we have an official expression of U.S. support for the natural growth of settlements. This is the first time, and the only time, since 1967 when the U.S. government has explicitly repudiated its historical commitment to view the West Bank and Gaza Strip and other territories as occupied territories in which Israel has no settlement rights.

The idea of natural growth, again, was a diplomatic construct, fashioned in the wake of the agreement that George Bush the elder and Yitzhak Rabin reached in August 1992, to enable Israel to complete the construction of over 10,000 settlement units that Yitzhak Rabin had inherited from his predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir. The terms of the deal permitted the completion of these units, which enabled the expansion of settlements by about 40,000 people, and where the notion of the freeze came in was that 7,000 dwelling units that existed on paper only, were frozen.

Yitzhak Rabin, when he returned to Israel said "look, this is not a freeze here, I’m building 10,000 units" The expansion that took place during the Oslo era is unprecedented in terms of the numbers of settlers who actually came to live across the Green Line. As Phil Wilcox mentioned earlier, the settlement population has doubled during the Oslo era.

Subsequently, even those thousands of units that were frozen on paper were subsequently unfrozen. And again, this is not inconsistent with natural growth, because natural growth has no meaning at all. Again, it was just a construct, a dodge, as one U.S. diplomat explained to me recently. Today the idea of the settlement freeze has intruded once again. But, there’s really no indication that the U.S. government is prepared to push Israel hard enough to seriously consider imposing practical and meaningful external constraints on its settlement expansion.

The expansion of settlements is a national Israeli enterprise, first and foremost. The particular party in power doesn’t necessarily have a determining effect on this. Settlement expansion relates, not only to political policy, but to market economics, to the political situation generally, the security situation and so forth. So there’s no real correlation between a Labor government, for example, and fewer settlements, although that’s the political construct that’s been put forward over the last decade. And in contrast, the notion that Likud leaders build more. There’s no real correlation in the numbers to point that out. What there is a correlation in is that Labor-led governments build quietly and Likud-led governments build very noisily.

It’s long been said that the Labor party will announce one settlement and build ten. And the Likud will announce ten settlements and build one. And I think if you look at the actions of the Sharon government over the past few months, where we have, it just happened this week, where the minister of housing and construction, Sharansky, announced that he had accepted tenders issued on about 800 new settlement units in settlements called Ma’ale Adumim and Alfe Menashe and it sparked an outcry.

But again, these were the same settlement tenders that were announced in April; only he couldn’t keep quiet about it because he has a constituency to answer to in Israel

Question: Isn’t a settlements freeze essential to stop the violence and return to negotiations?

Geoffrey Aronson: From the Palestinian perspective, there’s a very visible popular Palestinian expectation that their rebellion against Israel needs to see some concrete a payoff. And the assumption is that an announcement that security cooperation between the parties has begun, the announcement that there will be renewed final status talks and something like that, are in and of themselves, insufficient to convince people whose daily lives have been affected negatively by this creation of facts on the ground.

So from that standpoint, the issue of a settlement freeze has percolated to the top of a popularly expressed agenda, which Palestinian leaders have little choice but to demand. How committed they are to this is unknown. The historical record suggests, however, that they have been unable to impose this demand on the diplomatic process.

For Israelis, there are recent polls suggesting that Israelis are perfectly happy to see a freeze. What they want is an end to shooting. They want to be able to go to the mall without worrying about whether it’s going to be blown up. And they’re prepared to entertain a freeze.

Again, that popular view, however, has long been opposed by political elites in Israel of both parties. Because they understand that this isn’t simply a tactical move, but rather an expression of intent and also an expression of the diplomatic balance of power as well. And they are unwilling to make that sort of concession even if popular opinion would in some measure favor it.

Question: Isn’t the current crisis so severe as to require a break with the tradition that settlement development will continue, whatever happens?

Geoffrey Aronson: Well, who’s to say it’s going to break? I don’t see it breaking unless they, well, the way it would break that would be most consistent with the past would be to find some sort of, to finesse the issue, to declare a freeze but in fact it wouldn’t be a freeze, which I think would be harmful overall, not only to the Palestinian view over the long term, but also to the prospects of building a consensus on both sides in favor of progress.

The other possibility is that the Palestinian authorities would concede something like a cosmetic declaration of Sharon’s that he’s prepared to freeze settlements for a month. Such an action would be not inconsistent with Israeli policy in the past. Menachem Begin did it and didn’t suffer any consequences, and Ariel Sharon was in his cabinet at the time. So there are ways to finesse the argument without having any sort of practical import and given the history of this issue, that’s the best option I think that’s probably out there.

I would be tremendously surprised if Israel, at this stage under this prime minister, conceded long-term, meaningful constraints on settlement expansion that were imposed externally. Again, the market itself in Israel might force a contraction in expansion. And if somebody wants to use that as a rationale for a diplomatic formula that will get the parties to stop shooting and sit down, all the more power to them.

Question: Shouldn’t Palestinian refugees be resettled in vacated settlements? The Palestinians would like to take over some of the settlements, not just see them destroyed. And what about the natural growth of the population in Palestinian cities and towns, which has been a really big issue inside Israel as well as on the West Bank of Gaza? Also, with four presidents having tried to freeze the settlements or tried to do something about settlements, in order to bring about peace, is it going to be necessary to freeze U.S. aid before we see any advance on the peace process?

Geoffrey Aronson: During discussions at Camp David last year and subsequently at Taba, when they were discussing the final status map for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the question naturally arises, what happens to Israelis who find themselves on the wrong side of the new border? [Now the map here, below, this map here, is a reconstruction of the map that Ehud Barak presented to the Palestinians at Taba. Now you can see here that with the exception of these blue areas, whose importance cannot be minimized, but again, for the sake of argument, all of these triangles in these sort of grayish areas would have been on the wrong side of the border, okay?] 87 settlements comprise 35 percent of the West Bank settler population. That’s about 65,000 settlers who live in about 12,000 units.

Now, the discussions did not reach the level of detail to determine how long these people could stay, what would be the nature of their compensation and so forth, but two points should be noted in this regard. Number one, the Intifada has, at least for the time being put to rest the expectation that settlers, Israelis, can live peaceably within Palestine after an agreement.

Secondly, the value of these properties was at that point, during the Taba talks, considered by Israel to be part of the negotiations on the compensation for Palestinian refugees as an offset for the value of their properties that they lost in Israel proper in 1948. So the value of the settlements would be deducted from the overall compensation that would be awarded to Palestinians based on their property value lost in Israel proper.

However, this was merely in the realm of the theoretical. They really didn’t address these issues with any specificity.

Secondly, the question of U.S. aid. This again is something that has been raised over the years and most recently, in the period during the Shamir government, about a decade ago. It had absolutely no future on Capitol Hill. One thing however, that the U.S. could note is that the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security needs does not include its commitment to Israel’s own view of what its security needs are. And that would lead, I would think, to an assessment specifically about the extent to which the U.S. should be supporting an Israeli regional defense strategy that, in the minds of Israeli defense strategists requires them to remain in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If Israel changes its defense doctrine, for example as we have seen during the Gulf War, when Israel’s effective eastern border became the frontier between Iraq and Jordan rather than the Jordan Valley itself, if there was a practical expression given to that change, you would see a reduction in the requirements that Israel currently demands for a military presence in the West Bank.

Now we’ve seen such a change, in the IDF’s view of its frontier with Egypt in Sinai and prospectively in the Golan Heights where Israeli military strategists were able to comprise alternatives to territorial control to assure and to in fact increase Israel’s regional security. Israel withdrew from Sinai, an agreement for a withdrawal from the Golan Heights with small territorial exceptions was on paper. So it’s not impossible that Israel’s strategic security doctrine can be changed to reflect less of an appetite for territory beyond its own borders.

Question: Your presentation, understandably, has focused on the political dimensions of the settlements so far. Could you take the issue of security and expand it? I have several questions. One, has security been discussed as a factor in the negotiations on the settlements? Two, if so, are there any settlements that have a clear security role, are they located in a place geographically that represents a clear advantage like the Golan Heights? And three has there been any talk of compensation in terms of the security measures in the settlement communities?

Geoffrey Aronson: I’ll recall for you the point that Moshe Dayan made himself a long time ago. Settlements in themselves, in his view, had no intrinsic security value. You’ll get an argument on that point from people like Ariel Sharon and there is a historical split within the Israeli defense community about the security value of specific settlements. But my assumption is that you can assure Israel’s security without settlements.

But what settlements do is they enable the idea to enjoy a domestic political consensus. Supporting a military deployment beyond Israel’s borders rather than defending foreign territory, the IDF has been transformed into a body defending Israeli civilians. That’s a much more potent and politically acceptable rationale than foreign occupation. Israeli leaders from the earliest days after understood this. And that’s why the IDF is in the West Bank and Gaza today as Ariel Sharon himself admitted and it is not in Lebanon or the Sinai today.

So the security value of settlements in that respect is indirect and instrumental. Settlers themselves cannot block a road if Jordanian or Iraqi tanks somehow magically appear in the Jordan Valley. Now of course these tanks won’t get further than the Iraqi frontier, and we know that. But sometimes there’s a lag of decades in refashioning a doctrine.

Now are there clear security roles? Again, it depends on how you define security. If you include in Israel’s definition of security an ability to obstruct the creation of a territorially contiguous Palestinian entity, then settlements serve a security function. Now there are many Israelis who adhere to this idea of the value of settlements, a place like Ma’ale Adumim for example. [This is an exploded map of sort of greater Jerusalem, this is East Jerusalem here, this is West Jerusalem here, this is the area that was annexed, an area of Jordanian territory annexed after 1967, these blue areas are settlement areas, here’s Jericho. This is the built-up area of Ma’ale Adumim in dark blue and this is the projected built-up area in light blue. The borders, the planning borders of Ma’ale Adumim go in the west from the borders of the Old City, practically, almost, all the way to the outskirts of Jericho.]
Now I remember an interview with the current mayor of Ma’ale Adumim who said look, look at a map, Ma’ale Adumim divides the West Bank in two and complicates the ability of Palestinians from the North to communicate and create a contiguous political entity with those in the South. So if you accept that, that’s what you have. And you can make that argument, in some respects, for every one of these settlements. Because again, if it’s a zero-sum game, what I have, you lose. And in a sense, this deployment has in a way proved itself over the last eight months. The IDF, the Israeli defense forces, despite the redeployment undertaken during the Oslo process, have been able to cut the West Bank and Gaza into more manageable pieces, in part because of the existence of settlements which, again, have been fortified explicitly as a consequence of the Intifada, and now you have military base areas that are right next door or sometimes within settlements themselves. So settlements have created a rationale for the deployment of the IDF throughout the West Bank and they’ve managed to again enable the IDF to cut up the West Bank.

So if you’re an IDF planner, you say, "it works here, we’re able to cut off Khan Younis and Gaza from Gaza City, we’re able to stop traffic from north to south, and in some cases from east to west," so that rather than undermine the concept, the Intifada may, in the minds of some people, actually have demonstrated its utility.

Question: One idea is that natural growth could be vertical growth…you could build more settlements that don’t take more land. Is that an idea that actually makes sense practically?

Geoffrey Aronson: None. None. Number one, who’s going to watch? Who’s going to watch this? Number two, if you read the Israeli reporting on this, again it’s pablum offered for ignorant foreigners who want to believe that some sort of verbal formulation can actually work on the ground to constrain settlement expansion. They aren’t going to be building World Trade Towers in these settlements. Such an ideas is not being framed by those who are seriously interested by those who are interested in constraining settlements, it’s being framed by those people who are anxious to lessen the focus on settlements as an issue that needs to be addressed in a period before final status.
I haven’t seen anything beyond these sorts of phrases to suggest that there’s any degree of serious intent, but not only that, that there’s any really workable way of imposing something like that.
Now, for example, if you were to say, we will not clear any more land for settlement construction, if you were to say you will not pour any concrete at all, or more than one ton, or that you will not pour in any one settlement area more than fifteen tons of concrete, I don’t know, then you’re beginning to think seriously about constraining settlement expansion.

Now just articulating those points suggests how intrusive a monitoring scheme there would have to be. And I don’t see that happening, I don’t see the political will on the part of the United States to promote such an enterprise, I don’t see the current Israeli government or any Israeli government succumbing to that kind of intrusive inspection on an issue that they’ve refused in principle to compromise on for 35 years.

Question: One aspect of your very able presentation is a sense of inexorability. In good times and bad, under Labor and Likud, the process goes forward. From all you know about how it has worked on the ground and from all the study you’ve given the diplomatic process, do you see any prospect that it will not continue inexorably to grind on and therefore doom any chance of a viable Palestinian political entity in the West Bank?

Geoffrey Aronson: In some respects we’re only at the beginning. It took the Palestinian community in these areas from 1967 until October 2000 to respond in a violent fashion, to settlement expansion. I find it extraordinary that it’s actually taken so long. So we don’t know what sort of an effect this is going to have on the popular Israeli readiness to conceivably risk life and limb of their own and their children in pursuit of either ideological preferences or a cheaper house.

One of the indications may be during the summer months, again, when we get a sense of to what extent Israelis are moving with their feet. You can already see some settlement communities with houses to sell are offering over and above the incentives and the tax rebates and so forth, I saw an ad recently that was offering a car if you would buy an apartment in a settlement.

Now in Israel, a car is an expensive purchase, twenty- thirty thousand dollars for a small vehicle. So these are the kinds of things that are percolating now through the system and one can’t say where they’re going to go.

However, in terms of the diplomacy, imposing effective constraints, all I can say is that it hasn’t happened in 35 years and I don’t see where the rules of the game have changed completely that there’s really any political will to impose this sort of requirement upon Israel. Yes?

Question: Sharon recently said he would not expropriate any more territory, can you comment, under the Israeli legal system, how much of the territory is under, is legally part of the Israeli state’s title?

Geoffrey Aronson: Again, this is one of the formulations that I would characterize as something that’s meant quite cynically to relieve pressure upon Israel from seriously considering effective constraints on expansion. Ariel Sharon knows better than most Israelis that Israeli need not confiscate, expropriate, any more land in the West Bank to enable the expansion of settlements for decades on end. In many cases in the last decade, expropriation of Palestinian land has taken place, but in the Israeli parlance, this has not been new expropriation, because they’ve been based on military orders that were issued ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Some Palestinian landowners could conceivably wake up one day, today, and hear that Israel is taking his land based upon an order that was issued in 1985. There’s a stack of those orders just waiting to be implemented. According to Ariel Sharon’s characterization, conceivably these would not fit under his restriction because they would be essentially old expropriations.

But in terms of Israel’s legal claim to lands in the West Bank, the built-up areas of every settlement in the West Bank today comprise less than two percent of the entire West Bank. By built-up areas, I mean areas where there are already apartments, houses, swimming pools, town halls and so forth.
In contrast, the zoning area of settlements in the West Bank is at least eight percent of the West Bank. Now eight percent of the West Bank does not sound like a lot, if you’re a math student, however when you compare that to the area of the 400 plus Palestinian villages in the West Bank and if you look at their master zoning plans, they’re also about eight percent. So in a sense, this issue of percentages is a bit counter-intuitive. One cannot simply depend on a small percentage figure to suggest a comparatively small ability to control an area.

And for example here in the U.S., the major metropolitan areas of the United States comprise four percent of the United States. Again, that isn’t very much but the United States would not be the United States without Chicago and New York and Cleveland and so forth.

You could remove two percent of the United States and prevent transport from one side of the Mississippi to the other side. The prospective commitment not to take new lands is, to my mind, nothing more than a cynical ploy.

Question: I was wondering if you could comment on the debate within the Israeli government, between Labor and Likud on this issue of a freeze, given that, as you said, Shimon Peres was in favor of some sort of a construct, and arguing as well for some increase versus Sharon who would not entertain that idea. Are they arguing really about semantics or are there differences in how they would implement a so-called truce?

Geoffrey Aronson: From the best of my understanding, there’s no sincere desire on the part of leading members of the Labor government to submit to external constraints on settlement expansion. Neither on the part of the current defense minister, Ben Eliezer, nor on the part of the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. To find political support in Israel for these kinds of constraints you would have to go further left to the people in Peace Now, for example, to Yossi Sarid in the Meretz Party and further left.

Now even these people haven’t thought through the specifics of what it is they’re talking about when they say freeze. And in their own minds, they’re also prepared to evacuate some settlements, so my own sense is that they’re looking for a formula to get parties back to the table based on territories for peace. And so the freeze is only of instrumental value here. Anything else? Yes, Phil.

Phil Wilcox: Jeff, you discussed the security rationale that settlements in the West Bank and Gaza give that a politically supportable basis for keeping Israeli forces there. A few weeks ago, we heard Amiram Goldblum who is head of the Israeli Settlements Watch element of Peace Now comment on the security implications of settlements. Jeff has written and lectured about the fact that the settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza have become the flashpoints for violence. Amiram Goldblum confirmed this and pointed out that given the current configuration of settlements, and the need to protect them, the effective borders that the IDF is required to protect now, given this archipelago of settlements is 2,000 miles long. Whereas the borders of the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, established in 1967, and between Israel and Gaza are only 200 miles long. This fact underscores dramatically the massive additional security burden that settlements impose on Israel.

Israel now has eleven divisions of forces deployed on the West Bank of Gaza, many many more than it has had, traditionally, from 1967 until the recent crisis. If this situation persists, it creates a permanent confrontation, unless the Palestinians are ultimately subdued and acquiesce, between Israeli forces and hostile, subject Palestinians who are confined in enclaves through the West Bank and Gaza. So while the presence of the Israeli forces in these areas may provide some theoretical defense against a highly speculative threat from Arab armies, from the East or West, and I emphasize highly speculative and not based upon any current sound threat analysis, it exposes Israel to a much greater internal security threat.

Question: Is there any effort by academics or other people to define how exactly a settlements freeze would work and who would be responsible for monitoring it?

Geoffrey Aronson: Well I know that members of the Palestinian delegation are now thinking seriously and quite extensively about what kind of settlement freeze they would demand. These efforts have been underway for only a matter of weeks, and they’re making progress along those lines and I would expect that at some point, if the diplomatic opportunity presents itself, that they will put forward a rather explicit framework for what sort of freeze they would like to see, how they intend to monitor it, and what sort of penalties might be exacted for infractions. But aside from that, there’s no Israeli party that I know of that is undertaking a similar effort and in the U.S. Administration, I’m not aware of any.

Thank you all very much for coming.