Settlement Freeze - 'Natural Growth' in New Clothes
May 21, 2001Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories by Geoffrey Aronson
Demands for a freeze in the expansion of Israeli civilian settlements located in territories the Jewish state occupied in June 1967 are now at the center stage of Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Both the peace initiative promoted by the Egyptian and Jordanian governments and the recent report of a presidentially-appointed commission headed by former senator George Mitchell have placed a settlement freeze at the heart of their recommendations for stabilizing the ever-deteriorating relations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The effort to win Israel's endorsement for a freeze in the growth of Israel's outposts in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem has an impeccable diplomatic pedigree. Every president since Jimmy Carter has endeavored, with varying degrees of commitment, to cajole, convince, or threaten Israeli leaders to undertake a fundamental change in one of the central components of Israel's security and domestic policy.
These efforts have uniformly failed. Jimmy Carter thought than he had won an Israeli commitment to a five year freeze at the first Camp David summit in September 1979. But Menachem Begin was only prepared to stop for three months. And he forgot to tell Carter that the "thickening" of existing settlements, whose population then numbered 50,000, would continue unabated.
George Bush and Yitzhak Rabin agreed in 1992 to another freeze, except for the "natural growth" of settlements. Rabin defended himself against right-wing attacks for his concession, noting with some exasperation, "the construction of 11,000 units continues. Is this a freeze? I don't know whether [Bush] accepts this or not, but he knows that this will happen." At that time there were 250,000 Israelis living over the 1967 Green Line border.
Today, after 34 years of Israeli rule, over 400,000 Israelis have been settled in the occupied territories in more than 200 purposely built towns, suburbs, and villages in East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, upon lands that at least two million Palestinians consider to be their patrimony. Palestinians who have witnessed the doubling of Israel's population in their midst during almost a decade most observers have described as peace might be forgiven for questioning not only Israeli intentions, but those of their own leadership as well.
Israel's effort to literally transform the landscape has been undertaken in the service of both ideology and military strategy, a winning combination that has demonstrated its vitality and staying power in times of war and peace. Settlements are the most emotive expression of the century-old Zionist revolution in Palestine, the most practical illustration of both the power and the success of Jewish nationalism. In the occupied territories, this ideological imperative has been married to a military strategy intent upon assuring Israel's permanent military control west of the Jordan River. Civilian Israel settlement throughout the territories was essential to the realization of this goal, explained Moshe Dayan, who remains the most important architect of Israeli policy in these areas, "not because they can ensure security better than the army, but because without them we cannot keep the army in those territories. Without them 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.
Little wonder then that Palestinian efforts during the last decade to condition diplomacy on an Israeli agreement to freeze settlements have never been seriously entertained. Israel recognized that such calls for a freeze were motivated by an intention to force an Israeli evacuation not only of settlements but also of the Israeli army from the contested territories themselves. Only when Yasser Arafat agreed to drop settlements from his agenda in 1993 was the road to the historic Oslo process opened.
The failure of final status talks earlier this year, the defeat of Ehud Barak at the hands of Ariel Sharon, and the rebellion against Israel mounted since last October by Palestinians in the occupied territories created a diplomatic vacuum that the call for a settlement freeze is meant, in part, to fill. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres is searching the extensive diplomatic lexicon to conjure a formulation that will satisfy the freeze's partisans while leaving unfettered Prime minister Sharon's extensive settlement vision.
Palestinians demanding a settlement freeze need to be reminded of the old adage: "Be careful what you wish for because it might come true." They have been surprised by the renewed resonance of the freeze idea in the international diplomatic community, and 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 is to be monitored, and what penalties would be exacted for transgressions. In the event of an unlikely Israeli agreement to entertain such a notion, the interminable negotiations to determine its practical significance could well result in a settlement "freeze" that, like all of its antecedents, leaves intact Israel's settlement prerogatives.