Settlements, Security & Peace
March 30, 2001Capitol Hill Conference, 3/30/01, co-sponsored by the FMEP and Americans for Peace Now, with Geoffrey Aronson and Amiram Goldblum (transcript)
Americans for Peace Now & Foundation for Middle East Peace
PARTICIPANTS:
Geoffrey Aronson
Director, Research & Publications, the Foundation For Middle
East Peace; Editor, “Report On Israeli Settlement In The Occupied Territories”
Dr. Amiram Goldblum
Founder & Head of the Israeli Peace Now Movement’s Settlements Watch Committee; Member of the Peace Now Central Committee
LOCATION:
Room 2255 Rayburn House Office Building
DATE:
Friday, March 30, 2001
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
PHIL WILCOX [President, The Foundation for Middle East Peace]: Good morning and thank you all for coming. Many years ago Merle Thorpe, the founder of The Foundation for Middle East Peace, recognized and began to try to arouse public interest in the problem of settlements, which he regarded as a principle obstacle to a secure and just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Recognizing that settlements threatened the emergence of a viable two-state solution, Merle and Geoffrey Aronson, who will brief us today together with Dr. Amiram Goldblum of Peace Now, established the Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories. Many of you are subscribers. If you’re not, you’re welcome to subscribe through our website, fmep.org.
The Foundation has always believed that settlements have created a deadly entanglement of Israelis and Palestinians that cannot be sustained. Settlements are not the only problem that divides Israelis and Palestinians. But, they are a principle barrier to a negotiated disentanglement of these two people and the creation of two states that can live at peace together. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acknowledged as much in 1995 when he said, “Were it not for Jewish settlements today in the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria, Israel would have long ago returned across the Green Line.” I think that is a clear a statement as you’ll find from any source about the importance that settlements play in this conflict.
It really wasn’t until the Camp David Summit last year that the two parties began to come to grips with the settlement issue in negotiations. They did not discuss settlements or borders in specific detail at the Summit, contrary to some press reports. But, it was a beginning. The Intifada erupted thereafter, as you know. But, in January at the Taba talks, the two sides engaged in some very detailed, specific negotiations on settlements with reference to maps. The Taba experience shows that there are grounds for compromise on this issue and that there can be a resolution of the settlements issue.
The geography on the ground is very difficult to understand and visualize. Amiram and Geoff have some maps here, which we’ll try to illuminate the situation. These two analysts are unmatched in their knowledge of this problem. They have followed it for many years and we’re pleased that we can be a cosponsor together with Americans for Peace Now in this forum. It’s important for Americans to focus more clearly on settlements to understand the d the dangers they pose to both peoples.
Before we begin, I’d like to introduce Debra DeLee, the President and CEO of Americans for Peace Now who will make some comments and introduce our speakers.
DEBRA DELEE [President, Americans for Peace Now]: Thank you, Phil. I’m not going to use these. Can you hear me?
It’s a pleasure for me to be here today. And on behalf of Americans for Peace Now, I want to join with Ambassador Wilcox in welcoming you to our conference this morning on Settlements Security, and Peace in the Middle East.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Americans for Peace Now, let me say that our organization was started about 20 years ago. It’s a support organization for the Israeli movement Peace Now/Shalom Achshav. Over the years, we’ve built on that mission to include broader representation of the pro-peace, pro-Israel perspective on Capitol Hill, with the administration, American-Jewish community, the Arab-American community, and with the public at large.
For those of you who are not familiar with the Israeli Peace Now movement, it’s grown from an ad-hoc group of 350 reserve and combat officers in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, who at that time were trying to convince Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace agreement with Egypt. And it’s grown into the largest grassroots movement in Israel working to enhance Israel’s security through peace.
In addition, Peace Now has developed a series of projects, on-going projects, which work to improve the prospects for peace between Israel and her neighbors. One of the most important of those projects is our Settlements Watch Project. It works to provide accurate, up-to-date and thorough information on what’s going on in the Israeli settlement movement. That includes information on the expansion of settlement building, on vacancy rates, on budget allocations, on bypass roads, and land expropriation, and other information related to what’s going on in the settlements.
Peace Now devotes a significant amount of time to this project, because time and time again settlements have proven to be an impediment to peace and a source of ongoing friction on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza. Settlements also have been a strain on Israel’s defenses and an impediment to Israel’s ability to keep its citizens safe. This is a very painful and disappointing time for all of us who care so deeply about peace in the Middle East. It’s also a very confusing time.
And I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that. Because of that, those of us at Peace Now have spent a considerable amount of time doing serious thinking about what’s going on and what’s our role, and what’s the role or possibilities of peace in the Middle East. And in spite of what’s going on, we still do believe that the outline of an agreement can still be achieved. In order for that to happen, there must be reciprocal confidence-building measures taken on the part of all of the stakeholders in the process. I’m going to mention just a few of those that are critical.
First of all, Arafat must stop the violence. He must prevent and punish acts of terror. And he must renew security cooperation. Israel must refrain from collective punishment, must enforce a settlement freeze, and must remove the most isolated, selected isolated settlements that are the source of so much friction. And in this country, President Bush must become and remain engaged in the peace process.
We hope that this morning’s conference will bring you up to speed on the most recent development going on in the settlements and to also explore the implications of these developments in the peace process and in the current security situations in the territories.
Before I introduce our speakers, I would like to mention two things. One, that Americans for Peace Now in early May will be hosting a session on further expanding the issue of security with Yossi Alpher, a member of the Mossad, and the former Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. I also would urge all of you who are not in the habit of regularly checking our website, check www.peacenow.org. We update it daily. Our Middle East Peace Report, which many of you receive every Monday is on there and a lot of very important and current information about what’s going on in the Middle East related to peace.
As Ambassador Wilcox said, we have two of the foremost experts on settlements with us today. We’re first going to hear from Geoffrey Aronson. Geoffrey is the Director for Research and Publications at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He’s the editor of the foundation’s report on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. After Geoffrey we’ll hear from Dr. Amiram Goldblum. Amiram is a professor of organic chemistry at Hebrew University. But most importantly for today, is the founder and the head of the Israeli Peace Now movement’s Settlements Watch Project and a member of the Peace Now, longtime member of the Peace Now Central Committee.
When both speakers are finished, members of the audience are welcome to ask questions.
GEOFFREY ARONSON [Director for Research and Publications, Foundation for Middle East Peace]: First of all, I’d like to thank the organizers of Peace Now who have done the work necessary to get you all here today. And I also commend you for coming, as well. When I first thought about this event in late November, the Intifada was new and still on the front pages in the United States, and it was still a topic of conversation. Now it’s March and there has become an unfortunately very deadening routine to this, both figuratively and literally. And, so the fact that there are still people like yourselves who are interested in this, is heartening.
It’s been my view for quite some time that the history of this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can best be understood by looking at maps, because at the end of the day when all is said and done, what this dispute is about is controlling the land, who is going to control the land, and how much each side can martial in its own arsenal. And that’s been the mission in a large part of the Report on Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Territories, which has been published every couple of months for almost a decade.
I was speaking with somebody from the Mitchell Commission a couple of days ago and I took the opportunity to go through the reports page by page, which I haven’t done in years. And at that point, I came up with that quote that Phil quoted about Sharon, which, as he rightly pointed out, is really an emblematic and symbolic statement of the continuing relevance of this historical view that whoever controls the land controls the destiny of that part of the Middle East.
But back to November. And it struck me that the Oslo process was understood by many people as fundamentally getting Israel out of the hair of Palestinians. And here we have the Intifada that began in late September. And you had Israeli troops fighting on a daily basis with Palestinian civilians. And I said to myself, "what’s that all about? Oslo was supposed to get these people out of the way and they’re supposed to separate them." But, as was clear from the very beginning, but perhaps made not as clear to more casual observers of the process, Israeli redeployment did not mean disengagement. And those are two fundamentally different concepts here, which again the last few months have shown us is, in fact, the case, that redeployment of Israeli troops did not get Israeli troops out of the way, out of harm’s way, and out of the way of confrontation with civilian Palestinians. Again, not only in isolated places throughout the West Bank, but everywhere throughout the West Bank. Look at where the confrontations have taken place in the last few months, and I’ll do that briefly here.
We start off here on the main road between Jenin and Nablus. Let me explain this map. (See www.fmep.org for Taba, January 2001 Map and therein March-April 200O edition of Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories.) For our purposes right now, the important points are -- these dark gray areas are areas controlled by the Palestinians by and large. These light gray areas controlled by Israel under the whole Oslo process, as are these current, these blue areas, which we can talk about a bit later. But, they should be considered to be light gray.
There have been problems overlooking Nablus. You may remember one of the first incidents where a settler was killed was right around here. We have two very, even within an Israeli context, radical right-wing settlements, Yitzhar and Itamar, and there have been problems between them and along this road for months on end. Further south at a junction right here called the Tapuah Junction, which again is an important strategic crossroads between east and west and north and south on the West Bank. Many of you have heard of something called the Ayosh Junction, which is right here north of Ramallah and Al Bireh, which was notable and still is for confrontations between civilians and Palestinian police, as well Israeli soldiers. This area here sits just south of an important new military base which protects larger settlements here at Beit El and again has a very important strategic function controlling the north-south access on the West Bank. Further east there’s a settlement here called Ofra and then Shilo. Here there have been drive-by shootings in recent months. Further west is the Talmon bloc. Here are settlements. These roads around here for settlers have been closed for months on end because of rock throwing and so forth.
This road here [Route 443] is a main road. There are two ways that one can get from Israel proper to West and East Jerusalem. One is relatively an older road that goes through Israel proper by and large, except for a certain area here where it crosses no-man’s land. But then in the last few years, Israel built a road that goes from here past the settlement of Givat Ze'ev and into the city from the north. This road is not closed, but traffic on the road -- I think if you look in your packet, on the last page of the December issue, I think, it talks about -- the last page of the current issue in March, Israeli traffic along this road has decreased by something like 40 or 60% over the last months. They’ve even told people that they’re taken the police off the roads so you can go as fast as you want. Because it’s a speed trap. I’ve gotten stopped there on my way to the airport in the morning. But still Israelis understandably make a calculation, do I speed or do I get shot at? It’s not worth it.
So, again, there are problems along this road for months on end. And here, look, we haven’t even gotten further south and we haven’t even gotten to Gaza. So, there have been -- and I won’t go through this because we don’t have time. But there are extraordinary number of points of confrontation. And if one looks and examines these, one sees that, in large part, these points are a function of the creation, the existence of settlement areas and the need for the IDF to be in close proximity to them to protect them. And also secondarily the whole issue of roads that are needed to protect and to assure what settlers call a normal life to enable them to go back and forth to their places of work, to friends and so forth.
Now, it’s important to note the proximity of IDF bases to settlements. The close proximity in which they exist today was not always the case, and it is in some respects a function of Oslo. Before Oslo, Israel had the entire West Bank to put soldiers in. When it started withdrawing from certain lands, the areas which it had access to in order to locate bases became much smaller. Also, as it became a smaller area, the Palestinian focus or the problems associated with settlements became much clearer, as you’ll note if you read the Oslo II Agreement. Much of the agreement is concerned with assuring the protected status of settlers and settlements.
So the IDF, because it began to lose territorial options, had to locate closer to settlements. And because the need to protect settlements became more salient, that also contributed to this development. So that today, many civilian settlements are located next to new IDF bases, and, therefore, when fire is directed at IDF bases, that necessarily involves settlement areas as well.
And in a sense, if we have time, I’ll explore this a bit later, but this process has worked. If you’re an IDF person or even a settler, I think you can look upon the past few months and make a point that the deployment of the IDF as a function of the implementation of the Oslo agreements has managed to protect settlers, settlements, and with some caveats, most access roads.
At this point it might be helpful to examine the relationship historically between settlements and Israeli security, Israeli security both broadly understood and more narrowly understood as well. And in this context, I always recollect a statement that was made by Moshe Dayan quite some time ago. He said, “Without settlements, the IDF would be merely an occupying army in these occupied areas.” And what he meant was that settlements created a politically sustainable rationale to permit the IDF to pursue its regional security aims beyond Israel’s borders. And we have seen, in a sense, the converse of this in southern Lebanon where the IDF retreated last May.
And again, in some part one can attribute the withdrawal from Lebanon to the fact that there was no domestic Israeli constituency rooted in the land that could justify the deployment of the IDF beyond its borders. Because Israelis are not unlike most people, and if a situation is permitted to develop when there’s some controversy over the deployment of their own boys and girls in a foreign land, the automatic tendency would be to say, "well let’s get them out of there." However, if you have your own civilians on those areas and you’re in the process of making the lands your own, it becomes a much more problematic enterprise. And the people like Dayan who were responsible -- and Sharon -- who were responsible in the early years for creating the foundations of what we see today understood that the IDF would not long last in the West Bank or Gaza without a civilian Israeli presence. So, in that view, settlements themselves were not important for security. And it became clear quite some time ago to almost every Israeli leader, again with the exception of people such as Sharon, that the settlements themselves have no security value. But what they do is they make politically sustainable the security demands of the IDF itself.
Now again when we talk about Lebanon and the experience of the Israeli withdrawal last May, the lesson that the Palestinians drew, if one could say that they drew any at all, was that an Israeli withdrawal in the south was made possible through a war of attrition, which was carried out by a very small number of well-trained, dedicated, smart Palestinian -- excuse me -- Lebanese fighters. And it seems that that was an encouraging conclusion that some Palestinians reached. It was incorrect, and, again, fundamentally so, in terms of its relation to the occupied territories because of the point I made earlier, [which] was that, in Lebanon, there were no Israelis resident there. And if only for that the analogy does not pertain.
Now, getting back to the West Bank and Gaza. We have seen that Oslo brought the IDF in much closer proximity to settlers and settlements and that the mission of protecting them and their roads became much more explicit. Now, this objective necessarily intruded on all aspects of Palestinian life. And this was the case before the Intifada, as well, certainly. Okay? And this point was made, perhaps, as well as it could have been by Henry Seigman, who’s at the Council on Foreign Relations and who in an article that I think was published in Ha'aretz made the point that Palestinian Intifada owes far less to an appreciation of what went on at Camp David and the high politics of diplomacy than it does to the feelings of despair and humiliation and loss of hope that Palestinians themselves felt as a consequence of their own personal experiences trying to get through every day one day at a time. And that people who concentrate on diplomacy and so forth misunderstand the whole rationale and the entire sense of energy and commitment that sparked and that sustains the Intifada, certainly in its early months.
And this experience, again, proved to Palestinians, who certainly know far better than anybody in this room, that the continuing existence and growth of settlements poses insurmountable obstacles for the realization of their own political aspirations. This is something that they don’t have to read about or look at in the diplomacy or read the Oslo II accords. This is something they feel and see on an everyday basis.
Now, it’s extraordinary that in view of the contest that’s been undertaken these last many years where Israel has moved approximately 400,000 civilians into areas that it captured in June 1967, that the process of Palestinian opposition hasn’t been more violent. Because, again, these people view every day -- they see settlements taking away their land and their prospects for the future. Only now in these last months do we see Palestinians, more or less for the first time, specifically targeting settlers and roads.
Now the death toll here has been basically as follows. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, just came out with a report. Twenty-three Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian civilians, among whom B’tselem apparently counts freelancing Palestinians with guns. Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian security forces: 6. I think in terms of settlers, yes. Israeli security forces killed by Palestinian security forces: 8. Israeli security forces killed by Palestinian civilians: 12. Here I didn’t address the preponderant number of people who have died who are those Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli security forces. It’s around 300.
So we’ve seen that the number of Israeli casualties of this Palestinian strategy, if you can call it a strategy and for the sake of argument here we will, has been greater than it ever has been. But it’s not, in the absolute scale, a tremendous amount of people.
Now, as a consequence of this effort which has disrupted the day-to-day life of settlers undoubtedly -- schools have been closed, young kids have to take armored cars, if possible, when they go to schools. In some settlements in Gaza at certain points during the Intifada the only means of entry and egress was through helicopters, and so forth. But the IDF has adopted draconian measures of punishment and interdiction of Palestinians, closing all roads, doing something, which when it was first announced in November I considered extraordinary, to prevent, for example, men, Palestinian men, from driving alone in cars anywhere in the West Bank. It’s extraordinary. But it is happening in some places. All the checkpoints and so forth. All of these measures that have become defining characteristics of Israeli policy in recent months.
Now, in large part many of these -- the closures that we read about, the moats and all this -- has been implemented, in large part, to appease settlers and to enable them to pretend that normal life can be maintained in circumstances where they’re engaged in a violent struggle to control land that other people consider to be their own. Now to some degree settlers cannot be blamed, because, as I noted before, this is really the first time in 30 years that Palestinians have managed to mobilize in some ways, effective, ineffective, whatever you want to call it, to say no to this, and in a way in which the Oslo process didn’t begin to address. The Oslo process, if anything, consolidated the efforts of settlers and there again is no better proof of that than the fact that the settler population doubled over the last decade.
Now, again to get back to the issue of redeployment and disengagement. We have seen again that the Oslo map enables the IDF to choke off any measure of daily Palestinian normal life when it so chooses. At some cost, but not at an overwhelming cost that can’t be maintained on the Israeli side, at least, for days and weeks and perhaps months on end. Every town is surrounded, people can’t move. These kinds of restrictions on movement and the economy and so forth have never been as draconian and as extensive and as successful as they have been now.
And again, if you’re in the IDF, you say, “Okay. It worked. We were still able to cut this place into as many pieces as we wanted to even with the redeployment, even with the fact that the PA controls in some measure or other about 40% of the West Bank.” So, again, this uprising may not be seen by some Israelis as a need for reevaluating the status quo. In fact they may well reach the opposite conclusion.
Okay, let’s get to a quick look at how this began to change at Taba. This is the Taba map, which portrays the best offer made by Ehud Barak and his people, not the best offer made by Yossi Beilin and Shlomo Ben Ami and his people, the best offer made by the prime minister. Now what this map illustrates is the beginning of a change in certain basic concepts that have been consistently followed by Israel in the Occupied Territories since June, 1967. One conceptual change is to disaggregate settlements from security. And that’s most apparent in the Jordan Valley, where Israel at Taba conceded any civilian presence in the Jordan Valley; it conceded the relationship between its security forces in the Jordan Valley that were going to remain for a short period of time and settlements; it conceded the need to control permanently and exclusively access to these areas, east-to-west, on roads. This is an important achievement. And it should not be minimized.
And then because it disaggregated settlements from security, it meant that settlements would be evaluated on the basis of their success in creating demographic facts that could not be ignored. If the settlement was big enough, then it seemed to pass the test. So, therefore, you have an Israeli request for all of these areas here in blue, which amount to about 5% of the West Bank. The big exclusion here are settlements, some of which have more than 1,000 people. These settlements become part of Palestine. Now, there are important elements of this understanding -- it can’t even be termed an understanding -- that were not addressed. And they may -- they weren’t addressed, they may never had an opportunity to be addressed. For example, what would the status be of settlers and settlements that find themselves on the wrong side of the new border?
One thing that the Intifada has managed to do is to convince more and more Israelis that in the event of a deal that requires some territorial adjustment of the border, settlers, Israeli settlers, have no future in Palestine. Before the Intifada, there was a great deal of discussion, an assumption by many Israelis that there would be five, ten years, fifteen years, but settlers would be able to remain in Palestine subject to some measure of Palestinian rule. There aren’t too many people now who are thinking in those terms. And again, that’s primarily a function of the Intifada.
This map was understood to be serious by the Palestinians in a way in which previous maps weren’t. And in your packet, you’ve got some publications of ours, which seek to show how the maps have changed from Camp David to Washington, and last December until now, with an appropriate analysis by us to point out the way in which Israeli policy evolved.
Now Barak's offer was understood to be serious by the Palestinians at Taba. And it engendered the first Palestinian response, after which I’ll stop, by Abu Ala, a presentation of a map very poorly drawn, but which nonetheless showed a Palestinian willingness at that point to see 3% of the West Bank annexed by Israel. Again, that 3% number would be consistent with the Clinton parameters for a 3% territorial swap with land in Israel. And that territorial swap, what was talked about was this area here in Israel, south of the border with Hebron and also what’s called the Halutza Sands.
So the point is that Barak made a serious proposal. The Palestinians made a serious counter-offer. Neither side responded to the other, and that’s where things stopped.
DR.AMIRAM GOLDBLUM [Founder and Head of the Israeli Peace Now Movement’s Settlements Watch Committee]: I would like to thank Ambassador Wilcox and APN President Deborah DeLee for their introduction and especially Geoff now for his long expose to the subject, which saves a lot of my time. And although we will have some overlapping views about some of the issues, my stress would be somewhat different, and although Deborah DeLee presented Peace Now, I would like to reiterate some of the things that she said and tell those of you who were not here when Deborah spoke, and also to the others, that we are the largest and oldest peace group in Israel.
It has been constructed in 1978 by 350, about 350, officers in the reserve forces of the IDF calling upon Begin in an open letter in the press, which became known as the Officers’ Letter, to do all that is in his hands to promote the peace with Egypt according to the Sadat-Begin initiative that started it. And, now we can also remind everybody that the settlement issue is not a new one. It was there in 1978 when Peace Now wrote this letter at its beginning calling upon Prime Minister Begin to refrain from constructing any more settlements because they present a hazard to the peace process with Egypt and to any peace process in the future.
And Peace Now being a movement that believes in the Zionist ideal of a democratic state for the Jews in the Middle East has been always involved and always focused on the wide aspects of security of Israel. And the wide aspects include the morality of its soldiers, treatment of an enemy, and sensitivity to the other side. And we are still worried about those same aspects today, as we were 23 years ago, unfortunately.
We are different than other peace groups in the world in the sense that Peace Now has always encouraged its members to enlist to the army, to participate in military activities, to enroll to elite units in the Israeli IDF, but on the other hand also to be sensitive to the difficulties and to the plights of the other side.
For those of you who are not that well acquainted with the details, I’d still like to go through some of the general information that includes the population, the size of both Israel and the Occupied Territories. Israel is a small country and a very dense one. It has about 6 million inhabitants over and area that is originally about 20,000 kilometers, square kilometers, which is just a little less than 8,000 square miles. This is without the West Bank, without the Golan Heights, and without the Gaza Strip. In the war of 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank and crossed that Green Line, which has been obliterated from official maps since then, but you can see it quite vividly here on this map. And it also exists very vividly in the minds of people who have to cross this line, although it is not signed and there is no sign of the Green Line anywhere on the ground.
The existence of the Green Line is still in the minds of people because it is quite real that over that Green Line there is a huge population of Palestinians. Three million Palestinians live in the Occupied Territories. About 2 million Palestinians…a little more than 2 million Palestinians in the West Bank, which has been called the West Bank because the East Bank is the Jordan, and that was the Kingdom of Jordan; and the Gaza Strip, which was part of Egypt before 1967, which is only 400 square kilometers large with a population of more than a million people. It’s one of the densest places in the world, if not the most dense area in the whole world. More than 7,700 persons per square mile in this area, compared to about a 1,000 in the West Bank and 700 inside Israel.
Israel has partially solved its problem with part of the Arab world. We have a peace treaty with Egypt; we have a peace agreement with Jordanians. Israelis can travel to Egypt, used to travel more in the past, less today, to Egypt, to Jordan. We still did not solve our problems in the north with Lebanon and Syria. But, the core of the problem is well understood by most Israelis to be the conflict with the Palestinians. This is the main issue that was mentioned already in the agreements with the Egyptians, and it is today the greatest impediment to the opening of Israel to the whole of the Middle East and to the ability to construct more peace treaties and to heaten up the cold peace accords that we have with the Egyptians and with the Jordanians.
So, Oslo. In 1993, we were all very hopeful that the agreement in Oslo would change this and it was signed right here. I had the great opportunity to be present here on the 13th of September together with some of the faces that I see in the audience. And everybody was very hopeful, not only here but also on the Palestinian side and among the Israelis. And, some of you may remember that in the first days of the IDF…was still an occupying force in Gaza and the West Bank, but Palestinian kids came out with olive branches and gave it to the soldiers who were on the jeeps immediately after the signing of the Oslo Agreement.
So, the hopes were tremendous and were rising at that time. And, there were lots of new contacts that were created between Israelis and Palestinians on many levels, both on the leadership level between PLO leadership for the first time and the Israeli leadership. People-to-people programs have become very common and lots of young Israelis met with young Palestinians. And there was cooperation at the security level between the IDF and the Palestinians.
The main problem was that the issue of the settlements was deferred in the Oslo Agreement to a later stage. That was the source of most of the problems that we encounter later. And this is also the source of what I believe the inherent violence in the situation. And the daily situation today goes back to the deference of the issue of the settlement and to the inability to deal with the issue of settlements until this very moment.
Oslo created a mechanism for transferring territories to Palestinian Authority from Israeli occupation to Palestinian-controlled areas that are under full Palestinian control. That means both civil control and security or some Israelis would call it military control of the Palestinians. They comprise -- in the beginning they were about 4% of the territory, but during the times of Prime Minister Rabin and later Netanyahu, some increase in that A-type area was achieved and more of that was transferred to the Palestinians. So those are the brown areas.
The yellow areas are a B-territory. The B-areas are those areas where Palestinians have only civil control and Israel still controls militarily, controls the security over the rest of the area. So, if one asks oneself what is -- and, of course, the white area is the rest of it, which is 60%, about 60% of the territory is completely under Israeli control. This is called C-areas.
But if one asks oneself what part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip does Israel still control and has its forces going around freely without having to clash directly with Palestinian military forces controlling the Palestinian areas, this is about 80% of the territory -- more, nearly even 85% of the territory. Am I right? About 85. And so the A-areas comprise about 15% of the area, plus-minus. The yellow areas, mostly rural areas, about 25%, and those areas, the A and B areas, are where most Palestinians live.
According to the Oslo Agreement, there were 190 -- 1-9-0 -- islands of Palestinian existence divided into those A and B areas. So all the rest -- all this was in Israeli hands, so all those Palestinian islands sort of floated in a sea of Israeli C-territory. So it was completed controlled from all sides. Each of those areas is completely controlled or could be completely controlled, depending on the conditions, completely controlled by Israeli, by the Israeli forces.
Let’s go into the details in one of those areas because I think this would be a good example for you to understand. Why was it designed in that way on the one hand, and what are the consequences on the other hand? Let’s look this canyon between those two A-areas in the north. This larger A-area, the largest of the A-areas in the north of Samaria, that is, the area of Samaria is that northern part, has about 150,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including the town of Jenin, which is the largest town in that part of the territories.
This other A-area has more than 50,000 Palestinian inhabitants. The only reason that they have not been made contiguous is the existence of two Israeli settlements in this canyon, in this wide canyon between those two A-areas. One is called Sa Nur, 47 inhabitants. Forty-seven Israelis live in Sa Nur. Homesh is the other one. One hundred and sixty-eight live in Homesh. If you want to include also Shave Shomron here in the south, you get another 500. So less than 1,000 Israelis live in this whole long canyon of about 25 miles and surrounded by 150,000 -- 50,000, and I did not include the Palestinians who in live in B-areas, which are accessible to the Israeli military. Those are about 20,000 more Palestinians live in those areas.
So this is typical. This is just the very strong, a very strong example of that kind of canyon-like structure that was constructed by the Oslo Agreement, and you can follow this canyon structure anywhere in the territories. Take this one over here between this left-side A-area and the B-area to the south of it. So there’s another canyon here. You can follow this canyon all the way through. And whenever you follow those canyons, what you find is small settlements, small tiny settlements, completely surrounded by Palestinian villages and towns.
What effects does this have on the need for security, on the ability to achieve security? First of all, the length of the border. The older Green Line is about 310 kilometers, about 200 miles. The new borders -- some of them are not official borders. But if you take all the length of the borders between us and the Palestinians today, between the areas C, between those white areas and the combined circumference of all the A and B areas you get to about 2,000 miles. So it’s ten times longer. The border is ten times longer. This must be longer than the Israeli -- well, it’s not as long as the United States-Canada border, but it’s probably less peaceful. It’s much longer than any of the other Israeli borders. So there’s no surprise then to find out that today Israel has more divisions, more divisions, in the West Bank itself, more divisions than on the border of Israel with Lebanon and Syria combined. Eight divisions in the north, nine divisions only in the West Bank. Three divisions in the Gaza Strip, or two plus divisions in the Gaza Strip. And when I’m saying a division, I mean something like 2,500 soldiers in each division.
So this is one of the main sources of difficulty for Israeli security. The only reason, the only reason -- this has already mentioned by Geoff in some of his arguments. The only reason that those soldiers have to be there is to protect the settlements. So the settlements are the only source for Israel’s need to deploy so many soldiers in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. And Israel still controls -- although most Israelis, if you ask Israelis in a public opinion poll, is Israel still controlling Gaza?, 90% would say we got out of Gaza. Israel still controls 20% of the Gaza Strip, controls 42% of the beach of Gaza, which is the only accessible beach for the Palestinians, and, of course, controls also the roads, the main roads of Gaza, because there are isolated settlements such as the famous Netzarim and Kfar Darom that are at the midst of the most densely populated parts of the Gaza Strip and require a lot of Israeli soldiers to protect them. And part of that protection is to block the roads to the poor Palestinians to pass from the northern part to the southern part of the Gaza Strip in order for the people of Netzarim to come in and out of their settlement.
The only real security assets that Israel has in the West Bank are well known to anybody who has been involved with Israeli security for many years. There’s an important base near Nablus, there’s another one not far from the settlement of Ofra, but has nothing to do with the settlement itself. Those are two important bases overlooking what we call the eastward front, the possibility of Iraqi forces or other forces coming to attack Israel from the east. And this is still an important security asset. But this is something that we could get along with the Palestinians, had we achieved a peace agreement with them.
Just to show you, to give you one -- it may look funny to some of you. This is from a paper just about a week ago, 23rd of March, just to show you the change in the structure of the IDF in the West Bank and the need for increase, increased forces. Yitzhak Eitan, head of Central Command, issued an order that prevents soldiers from riding settlers’ busses and called upon them to reduce their use of public Israeli transportation in the territories. This order follows complaints by settlers that soldiers take their seats in those busses, which just gives you an idea of how many soldiers are there because there are 200,000 or nearly 200,000 settlers in the West Bank, and the amount of soldiers has increased tremendously.
I have also smaller view of my own. I used to spend most of my reserve service in the Gaza Strip, mainly in the city of Gaza, until about 1992. And in the '70s and the '80s -- and I was a company commander. And in the '70s and the '80s, we used to have two battalions, about 500 people controlling the whole of the Gaza Strip. Now, we have more than two divisions, about 6,000 soldiers doing the same thing, while Israel controls only 20% of the Gaza Strip.
Take Hebron, another example. In Hebron, we used to -- before Oslo, there were about two battalions -- there were about two companies, two to three companies taking care of the whole of Hebron. Now there are two battalions stationed in about 20% of Hebron, that is, in this H-1 area, which is under Israeli control. I have here an aerial photograph of a small part of the Hebron, the Hebron settlement. I have a photograph of a place called Tel Rumeida. There are six families -- six families that live in those mobile homes here surrounded completely from all sides by Arab houses, by Arab families. And the Israeli forces, about 100 soldiers, are stationed in this formerly Arab building in order to take care of the security of those six families.
This happens everywhere in the territories. There’s a couple near the settlement of Tapuah. In the Tapuah junction over here, there’s a couple from the Tapuah settlement who decided to have their honeymoon, two years ago they decided to have their honeymoon opposite the road of the other side. So they built a mobile home there and there are 10 soldiers taking care of them for the last 2 years.
And those are some of the typical things that happen everywhere. There are today 43 permanent roadblocks in the territories, which require 3 battalions. Three battalions take care of -- a whole division takes care of only roadblocks in the West Bank. There are another 40 -- someone counted 40 roadblocks in Gaza Strip alone, which is much smaller than the West Bank. So there’s no need to explain why there’s more friction, daily friction between Palestinians and Israelis. The roadblocks, the length of the borders, the need to pass from A to B and cross Israeli roadblocks, or from A to C, or from A into Israel, or from B into Israel, wherever Palestinians move they encounter roadblocks of the Israeli IDF. And that increases friction, that is the source, one of the main sources of violence. It is not the only source, but it is a very important one.
The visibility of ammunition in the Occupied Territories. There are tanks in the territories today. There are armored trucks everywhere. It’s a different country. And there’s an overall deepening of the occupation. And I think, this the main -- this is the main -- this is the main reason for the deterioration of the atmosphere of peace that existed right after Oslo and that is required and is extremely important in order to resolve the conflict. And I’ll stop here and later respond to questions.
Thank you.
MR. WILCOX: Thank you very much, Geoff and Amiram, for helping to untangle this puzzle. Both of our speakers would be glad to take your questions. Please identify yourself and be brief.
MARK ROSENBLUM: Marc Rosenblum, founder of Americans for Peace Now.
I have first two very quick quotes that emphasize the context that both of our speakers tried to present. One is a comment quoting Amiram. The other's quoting Uri Savir. Amiram referred to the September 13, 1993 South Lawn Signing Ceremony where he was one of the invited guests. And, in fact, both of use were sharing a little box of Kleenex. I don't know if you remember. And Amiram put his arm around me when this reluctant handshake took place, and he said "Mark, you better enjoy our tears of joy now, because the tears of blood are going to follow.”
The sense of not being Utopian, of understanding the huge problems that lay ahead, I think, is an important context for this discussion. And Uri Svir suggested when he was asked, when he first began to head a negotiating team for Israel, in the United States he was asked what’s the greatest challenge Israel faces in negotiations in Oslo. He thought for a minute and he said, “Not taking everything and not winning everything. There's a power to win at the negotiating table."
And I think the comments here that both Geoffrey and Amiram are making is to suggest structural flaws, one of them, the structural flaws at Oslo from the '70s there were left in. And the questions are, one, we can't immediately get into the permanent status negotiations, one could argue, because of the crisis and the murder and mayhem in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel today. But I would like to at least ask both of you for a moment to pretend we could get beyond the current murderous environment and project what settlements would have to be removed in a permanent agreement to allow for a continuously viable Palestinian state, keeping in mind what we know was talked about in Taba.
And, secondly, in reference, Geoffrey, to your comment about the here and now, you said one of the perhaps unintended good consequences of the latest Intifada is that settlements that are in the bad side of the settlement line that is this map of 2001, Barak’s map, understand there's no future for them.
My question is, and it goes back to statistics, one of the bad-news components of the present moment is that however Israelis view some of the casualties you didn’t talk about within Israel -- the suicide terrorist attacks and the like -- have convinced many Israelis that the Palestinian goal is not a state in the West Bank and Gaza, and it has hardened Israeli public opinion. So I’d like a brief reference to how do you see the settlements being withdrawn, what is the map look like with fewer settlements? And secondly, how do you address the current political environment, both on the Israeli and Palestinian side -- Amiram referred only to the Israeli side -- in terms of the violence that has perhaps changed public opinion. Amiram, in particular, has Israeli-Jewish public opinion hardened in terms of its support for settlements because of the attacks that have taken place against Israel within the Green Line? What public opinion polls are there, if any, about how Jewish-Israelis feel about the evacuation of settlements?
MR. ARONSON: You’re talking about a probable map. Rather than you or I dreaming about a map, we have the beginning of a map here, or what the Palestinians appear to think is a good beginning, and what some Israelis, although very few today, and very few when this map was first proposed, believe is a good beginning. The main -- what this does is this leaves 41 settlements with 65% of the settlers who live in the West Bank and Gaza today on the Israeli side of the prospective border. That would require the evacuation of 87 settlements comprising 35% of the settler population in the West Bank.
Gaza surprisingly has never been specifically or explicitly on the table since the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in 1994. And from time to time, every 6 months or so, I ask my Palestinian and Israeli friends, "if Gaza is so easy -- you know, Netzarim, some of these places with two and three people in them, why don’t you do that? Why don’t you make progress on that score?" And I said this to my Israeli friends and my Palestinian friends, because from the Palestinian point of view in a sense they’d be pushing on a door that’s a bit further open than places in the West Bank. And for some reason I’ve yet to get a satisfactory answer, and now it’s only a question of history, as to why neither side in the last seven years has attempted to make progress on territory in Gaza. There’s been no further redeployment in Gaza at all since 1994. I don’t understand it.
So here we have the Israeli view. Okay? It does help territorial continuity for Palestinians. There is a remaining problem here, which Palestinians point to, between this area and the West Bank further south. There is a real problem with Ma’ale Adumim and, of course, that is why Ma’ale Adumim is where it is, which is to create a problem between connecting Ramallah with Bethlehem and further south. So the Palestinian idea, the Palestinian counterproposal, such as it was, took Ma’ale Adumim out, altogether out, which, of course, the Barak people did not find terribly appealing since 25,000 people live here today, not to mention Givat Ze'ev and elsewhere.
So, we’re getting -- they’re getting a bit closer to where the rubber meets the road here. That is an undeniable fact, which both parties would attest to. However, it’s important to note that neither side, even then, even in December-January, was able to command a majority even within its own ranks for the maps that they proposed. On the Israeli side, there’s a majority today in the Labor Party in support of Sharon, as opposed to this map. And on the Palestinian side, Abu Ala and the Palestinians have run away as fast and as quickly from what they have put on the table in Taba, at least publicly, as anybody else. Although, in their heart of hearts, and when they’ve been discussing this with the United States, these two maps were still put on the table.
So this map shows us where the problems will be, if we’re making any progress at all. Certainly the Sharon map does not look at all like this and looks far more like the current A, B and C map – the Olso II map. Gaza Strip, again, is something else. The breezy assumption that Israel is not interested in remaining in the Gaza Strip is a mistake, in my view. I think there are in the Israeli view solid security reasons for maintaining a military presence in the Gaza Strip. I think in some respects the Intifada of the last six months is understood as justifying this concern that the IDF has not only to remain in strategic control of the Gaza Strip, vis a vis Egypt, for example, but also to be able to split the Gaza Strip into manageable Palestinian pieces to prevent the creation of a Palestinian drive toward Israel proper, for example. This is a historical problem, which the Israelis have considered for 50 years, and it’s one that’s not going to go away easily. And I think that the fact that there’s been no redeployment in Gaza during the Oslo process is in some measure a reflection of the lingering concerns that the IDF and others have to maintain a presence even in places like Netzarim, in Morag, all these tiny places that are like Fort Apache, the Bronx.
MR. GOLDBLUM: I don’t think my point of view’s very different than the one presented by Geoff. But I’d like to say something about some of those areas that have been termed the settlement blocks by Israel, especially be Prime Minister Barak in his discussions in Camp David. We can also go back to some of the terms used by Rabin at the time. And Rabin divided the settlements between the political settlements and the security settlements. And the security settlements were those that were along the Jordan River. And this goes traditionally back to the idea of security combined with villages or with kibbutzim, mostly in the north and the south of the country before the creation of the state. The same idea still prevails in the minds of many people connected to the border between Israel and Jordan or between Israeli-controlled area and Jordan, as well as the border between Israeli-controlled area and Egypt.
So the idea of the settlement blocks could have been useful for those settlement blocks that are close to the Green Line and are not disruptive in terms of the Palestinian contiguity. This area has two great defects. Although this has been very closely constructed according to the Beilin-Abu Mazen Agreement. This area, on one hand, all the Green Line was passing here. This is about 10 miles long. The line that is created because of the need to annex Israeli settlements and to prevent the annexation as much as possible of Palestinians is about 100 miles long.
So if you’re going for full and loving peace forever, then you don’t really have to care about the borders, and this is the basis of the idea between -- behind the Beilin-Abu Mazen Agreement. However, once we are in need to take care of our security, those are not defensible borders. And this is a very difficult border to take care of. And, Ariel -- although some people, even in Israel, believe that it’s a large city, it has 50,000 people surrounded -- you take any circle around Ariel, you’ll find more Palestinians around Ariel than the population of Ariel itself.
And this is true for most of the settlements in this most-inhabited Israeli area in the West Bank, which is West Samaria. West Samaria is inhabited by more Palestinians still than by Israelis. They are not that visible because the settlements are constructed on the top of mountains and the villages, the Palestinian villages, are more in the valleys. So you won’t see them if you cross or if you travel there you’ll see more of the settlements. But there are more Palestinians there. And most of those settlements are still and have to still to be termed isolated settlements.
And isolated settlements is the rule rather than the exception in most of the occupied territories. We have very few settlements that are not isolated settlements. Gush Etzion may be one of them. But not Ariel and not most of those areas. So I warn against the idea of annexing this area, which will require also the annexation of a large Palestinian community, At least 50,000 Palestinians will have to be annexed to Israel in this area. And the length of the borders is another difficulty.
Geoffrey Aronson
Director, Research & Publications, the Foundation For Middle
East Peace; Editor, “Report On Israeli Settlement In The Occupied Territories”
Dr. Amiram Goldblum
Founder & Head of the Israeli Peace Now Movement’s Settlements Watch Committee; Member of the Peace Now Central Committee
LOCATION:
Room 2255 Rayburn House Office Building
DATE:
Friday, March 30, 2001
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
PHIL WILCOX [President, The Foundation for Middle East Peace]: Good morning and thank you all for coming. Many years ago Merle Thorpe, the founder of The Foundation for Middle East Peace, recognized and began to try to arouse public interest in the problem of settlements, which he regarded as a principle obstacle to a secure and just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Recognizing that settlements threatened the emergence of a viable two-state solution, Merle and Geoffrey Aronson, who will brief us today together with Dr. Amiram Goldblum of Peace Now, established the Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories. Many of you are subscribers. If you’re not, you’re welcome to subscribe through our website, fmep.org.
The Foundation has always believed that settlements have created a deadly entanglement of Israelis and Palestinians that cannot be sustained. Settlements are not the only problem that divides Israelis and Palestinians. But, they are a principle barrier to a negotiated disentanglement of these two people and the creation of two states that can live at peace together. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acknowledged as much in 1995 when he said, “Were it not for Jewish settlements today in the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria, Israel would have long ago returned across the Green Line.” I think that is a clear a statement as you’ll find from any source about the importance that settlements play in this conflict.
It really wasn’t until the Camp David Summit last year that the two parties began to come to grips with the settlement issue in negotiations. They did not discuss settlements or borders in specific detail at the Summit, contrary to some press reports. But, it was a beginning. The Intifada erupted thereafter, as you know. But, in January at the Taba talks, the two sides engaged in some very detailed, specific negotiations on settlements with reference to maps. The Taba experience shows that there are grounds for compromise on this issue and that there can be a resolution of the settlements issue.
The geography on the ground is very difficult to understand and visualize. Amiram and Geoff have some maps here, which we’ll try to illuminate the situation. These two analysts are unmatched in their knowledge of this problem. They have followed it for many years and we’re pleased that we can be a cosponsor together with Americans for Peace Now in this forum. It’s important for Americans to focus more clearly on settlements to understand the d the dangers they pose to both peoples.
Before we begin, I’d like to introduce Debra DeLee, the President and CEO of Americans for Peace Now who will make some comments and introduce our speakers.
DEBRA DELEE [President, Americans for Peace Now]: Thank you, Phil. I’m not going to use these. Can you hear me?
It’s a pleasure for me to be here today. And on behalf of Americans for Peace Now, I want to join with Ambassador Wilcox in welcoming you to our conference this morning on Settlements Security, and Peace in the Middle East.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Americans for Peace Now, let me say that our organization was started about 20 years ago. It’s a support organization for the Israeli movement Peace Now/Shalom Achshav. Over the years, we’ve built on that mission to include broader representation of the pro-peace, pro-Israel perspective on Capitol Hill, with the administration, American-Jewish community, the Arab-American community, and with the public at large.
For those of you who are not familiar with the Israeli Peace Now movement, it’s grown from an ad-hoc group of 350 reserve and combat officers in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, who at that time were trying to convince Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace agreement with Egypt. And it’s grown into the largest grassroots movement in Israel working to enhance Israel’s security through peace.
In addition, Peace Now has developed a series of projects, on-going projects, which work to improve the prospects for peace between Israel and her neighbors. One of the most important of those projects is our Settlements Watch Project. It works to provide accurate, up-to-date and thorough information on what’s going on in the Israeli settlement movement. That includes information on the expansion of settlement building, on vacancy rates, on budget allocations, on bypass roads, and land expropriation, and other information related to what’s going on in the settlements.
Peace Now devotes a significant amount of time to this project, because time and time again settlements have proven to be an impediment to peace and a source of ongoing friction on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza. Settlements also have been a strain on Israel’s defenses and an impediment to Israel’s ability to keep its citizens safe. This is a very painful and disappointing time for all of us who care so deeply about peace in the Middle East. It’s also a very confusing time.
And I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that. Because of that, those of us at Peace Now have spent a considerable amount of time doing serious thinking about what’s going on and what’s our role, and what’s the role or possibilities of peace in the Middle East. And in spite of what’s going on, we still do believe that the outline of an agreement can still be achieved. In order for that to happen, there must be reciprocal confidence-building measures taken on the part of all of the stakeholders in the process. I’m going to mention just a few of those that are critical.
First of all, Arafat must stop the violence. He must prevent and punish acts of terror. And he must renew security cooperation. Israel must refrain from collective punishment, must enforce a settlement freeze, and must remove the most isolated, selected isolated settlements that are the source of so much friction. And in this country, President Bush must become and remain engaged in the peace process.
We hope that this morning’s conference will bring you up to speed on the most recent development going on in the settlements and to also explore the implications of these developments in the peace process and in the current security situations in the territories.
Before I introduce our speakers, I would like to mention two things. One, that Americans for Peace Now in early May will be hosting a session on further expanding the issue of security with Yossi Alpher, a member of the Mossad, and the former Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. I also would urge all of you who are not in the habit of regularly checking our website, check www.peacenow.org. We update it daily. Our Middle East Peace Report, which many of you receive every Monday is on there and a lot of very important and current information about what’s going on in the Middle East related to peace.
As Ambassador Wilcox said, we have two of the foremost experts on settlements with us today. We’re first going to hear from Geoffrey Aronson. Geoffrey is the Director for Research and Publications at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He’s the editor of the foundation’s report on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. After Geoffrey we’ll hear from Dr. Amiram Goldblum. Amiram is a professor of organic chemistry at Hebrew University. But most importantly for today, is the founder and the head of the Israeli Peace Now movement’s Settlements Watch Project and a member of the Peace Now, longtime member of the Peace Now Central Committee.
When both speakers are finished, members of the audience are welcome to ask questions.
GEOFFREY ARONSON [Director for Research and Publications, Foundation for Middle East Peace]: First of all, I’d like to thank the organizers of Peace Now who have done the work necessary to get you all here today. And I also commend you for coming, as well. When I first thought about this event in late November, the Intifada was new and still on the front pages in the United States, and it was still a topic of conversation. Now it’s March and there has become an unfortunately very deadening routine to this, both figuratively and literally. And, so the fact that there are still people like yourselves who are interested in this, is heartening.
It’s been my view for quite some time that the history of this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can best be understood by looking at maps, because at the end of the day when all is said and done, what this dispute is about is controlling the land, who is going to control the land, and how much each side can martial in its own arsenal. And that’s been the mission in a large part of the Report on Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Territories, which has been published every couple of months for almost a decade.
I was speaking with somebody from the Mitchell Commission a couple of days ago and I took the opportunity to go through the reports page by page, which I haven’t done in years. And at that point, I came up with that quote that Phil quoted about Sharon, which, as he rightly pointed out, is really an emblematic and symbolic statement of the continuing relevance of this historical view that whoever controls the land controls the destiny of that part of the Middle East.
But back to November. And it struck me that the Oslo process was understood by many people as fundamentally getting Israel out of the hair of Palestinians. And here we have the Intifada that began in late September. And you had Israeli troops fighting on a daily basis with Palestinian civilians. And I said to myself, "what’s that all about? Oslo was supposed to get these people out of the way and they’re supposed to separate them." But, as was clear from the very beginning, but perhaps made not as clear to more casual observers of the process, Israeli redeployment did not mean disengagement. And those are two fundamentally different concepts here, which again the last few months have shown us is, in fact, the case, that redeployment of Israeli troops did not get Israeli troops out of the way, out of harm’s way, and out of the way of confrontation with civilian Palestinians. Again, not only in isolated places throughout the West Bank, but everywhere throughout the West Bank. Look at where the confrontations have taken place in the last few months, and I’ll do that briefly here.
We start off here on the main road between Jenin and Nablus. Let me explain this map. (See www.fmep.org for Taba, January 2001 Map and therein March-April 200O edition of Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories.) For our purposes right now, the important points are -- these dark gray areas are areas controlled by the Palestinians by and large. These light gray areas controlled by Israel under the whole Oslo process, as are these current, these blue areas, which we can talk about a bit later. But, they should be considered to be light gray.
There have been problems overlooking Nablus. You may remember one of the first incidents where a settler was killed was right around here. We have two very, even within an Israeli context, radical right-wing settlements, Yitzhar and Itamar, and there have been problems between them and along this road for months on end. Further south at a junction right here called the Tapuah Junction, which again is an important strategic crossroads between east and west and north and south on the West Bank. Many of you have heard of something called the Ayosh Junction, which is right here north of Ramallah and Al Bireh, which was notable and still is for confrontations between civilians and Palestinian police, as well Israeli soldiers. This area here sits just south of an important new military base which protects larger settlements here at Beit El and again has a very important strategic function controlling the north-south access on the West Bank. Further east there’s a settlement here called Ofra and then Shilo. Here there have been drive-by shootings in recent months. Further west is the Talmon bloc. Here are settlements. These roads around here for settlers have been closed for months on end because of rock throwing and so forth.
This road here [Route 443] is a main road. There are two ways that one can get from Israel proper to West and East Jerusalem. One is relatively an older road that goes through Israel proper by and large, except for a certain area here where it crosses no-man’s land. But then in the last few years, Israel built a road that goes from here past the settlement of Givat Ze'ev and into the city from the north. This road is not closed, but traffic on the road -- I think if you look in your packet, on the last page of the December issue, I think, it talks about -- the last page of the current issue in March, Israeli traffic along this road has decreased by something like 40 or 60% over the last months. They’ve even told people that they’re taken the police off the roads so you can go as fast as you want. Because it’s a speed trap. I’ve gotten stopped there on my way to the airport in the morning. But still Israelis understandably make a calculation, do I speed or do I get shot at? It’s not worth it.
So, again, there are problems along this road for months on end. And here, look, we haven’t even gotten further south and we haven’t even gotten to Gaza. So, there have been -- and I won’t go through this because we don’t have time. But there are extraordinary number of points of confrontation. And if one looks and examines these, one sees that, in large part, these points are a function of the creation, the existence of settlement areas and the need for the IDF to be in close proximity to them to protect them. And also secondarily the whole issue of roads that are needed to protect and to assure what settlers call a normal life to enable them to go back and forth to their places of work, to friends and so forth.
Now, it’s important to note the proximity of IDF bases to settlements. The close proximity in which they exist today was not always the case, and it is in some respects a function of Oslo. Before Oslo, Israel had the entire West Bank to put soldiers in. When it started withdrawing from certain lands, the areas which it had access to in order to locate bases became much smaller. Also, as it became a smaller area, the Palestinian focus or the problems associated with settlements became much clearer, as you’ll note if you read the Oslo II Agreement. Much of the agreement is concerned with assuring the protected status of settlers and settlements.
So the IDF, because it began to lose territorial options, had to locate closer to settlements. And because the need to protect settlements became more salient, that also contributed to this development. So that today, many civilian settlements are located next to new IDF bases, and, therefore, when fire is directed at IDF bases, that necessarily involves settlement areas as well.
And in a sense, if we have time, I’ll explore this a bit later, but this process has worked. If you’re an IDF person or even a settler, I think you can look upon the past few months and make a point that the deployment of the IDF as a function of the implementation of the Oslo agreements has managed to protect settlers, settlements, and with some caveats, most access roads.
At this point it might be helpful to examine the relationship historically between settlements and Israeli security, Israeli security both broadly understood and more narrowly understood as well. And in this context, I always recollect a statement that was made by Moshe Dayan quite some time ago. He said, “Without settlements, the IDF would be merely an occupying army in these occupied areas.” And what he meant was that settlements created a politically sustainable rationale to permit the IDF to pursue its regional security aims beyond Israel’s borders. And we have seen, in a sense, the converse of this in southern Lebanon where the IDF retreated last May.
And again, in some part one can attribute the withdrawal from Lebanon to the fact that there was no domestic Israeli constituency rooted in the land that could justify the deployment of the IDF beyond its borders. Because Israelis are not unlike most people, and if a situation is permitted to develop when there’s some controversy over the deployment of their own boys and girls in a foreign land, the automatic tendency would be to say, "well let’s get them out of there." However, if you have your own civilians on those areas and you’re in the process of making the lands your own, it becomes a much more problematic enterprise. And the people like Dayan who were responsible -- and Sharon -- who were responsible in the early years for creating the foundations of what we see today understood that the IDF would not long last in the West Bank or Gaza without a civilian Israeli presence. So, in that view, settlements themselves were not important for security. And it became clear quite some time ago to almost every Israeli leader, again with the exception of people such as Sharon, that the settlements themselves have no security value. But what they do is they make politically sustainable the security demands of the IDF itself.
Now again when we talk about Lebanon and the experience of the Israeli withdrawal last May, the lesson that the Palestinians drew, if one could say that they drew any at all, was that an Israeli withdrawal in the south was made possible through a war of attrition, which was carried out by a very small number of well-trained, dedicated, smart Palestinian -- excuse me -- Lebanese fighters. And it seems that that was an encouraging conclusion that some Palestinians reached. It was incorrect, and, again, fundamentally so, in terms of its relation to the occupied territories because of the point I made earlier, [which] was that, in Lebanon, there were no Israelis resident there. And if only for that the analogy does not pertain.
Now, getting back to the West Bank and Gaza. We have seen that Oslo brought the IDF in much closer proximity to settlers and settlements and that the mission of protecting them and their roads became much more explicit. Now, this objective necessarily intruded on all aspects of Palestinian life. And this was the case before the Intifada, as well, certainly. Okay? And this point was made, perhaps, as well as it could have been by Henry Seigman, who’s at the Council on Foreign Relations and who in an article that I think was published in Ha'aretz made the point that Palestinian Intifada owes far less to an appreciation of what went on at Camp David and the high politics of diplomacy than it does to the feelings of despair and humiliation and loss of hope that Palestinians themselves felt as a consequence of their own personal experiences trying to get through every day one day at a time. And that people who concentrate on diplomacy and so forth misunderstand the whole rationale and the entire sense of energy and commitment that sparked and that sustains the Intifada, certainly in its early months.
And this experience, again, proved to Palestinians, who certainly know far better than anybody in this room, that the continuing existence and growth of settlements poses insurmountable obstacles for the realization of their own political aspirations. This is something that they don’t have to read about or look at in the diplomacy or read the Oslo II accords. This is something they feel and see on an everyday basis.
Now, it’s extraordinary that in view of the contest that’s been undertaken these last many years where Israel has moved approximately 400,000 civilians into areas that it captured in June 1967, that the process of Palestinian opposition hasn’t been more violent. Because, again, these people view every day -- they see settlements taking away their land and their prospects for the future. Only now in these last months do we see Palestinians, more or less for the first time, specifically targeting settlers and roads.
Now the death toll here has been basically as follows. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, just came out with a report. Twenty-three Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian civilians, among whom B’tselem apparently counts freelancing Palestinians with guns. Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian security forces: 6. I think in terms of settlers, yes. Israeli security forces killed by Palestinian security forces: 8. Israeli security forces killed by Palestinian civilians: 12. Here I didn’t address the preponderant number of people who have died who are those Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli security forces. It’s around 300.
So we’ve seen that the number of Israeli casualties of this Palestinian strategy, if you can call it a strategy and for the sake of argument here we will, has been greater than it ever has been. But it’s not, in the absolute scale, a tremendous amount of people.
Now, as a consequence of this effort which has disrupted the day-to-day life of settlers undoubtedly -- schools have been closed, young kids have to take armored cars, if possible, when they go to schools. In some settlements in Gaza at certain points during the Intifada the only means of entry and egress was through helicopters, and so forth. But the IDF has adopted draconian measures of punishment and interdiction of Palestinians, closing all roads, doing something, which when it was first announced in November I considered extraordinary, to prevent, for example, men, Palestinian men, from driving alone in cars anywhere in the West Bank. It’s extraordinary. But it is happening in some places. All the checkpoints and so forth. All of these measures that have become defining characteristics of Israeli policy in recent months.
Now, in large part many of these -- the closures that we read about, the moats and all this -- has been implemented, in large part, to appease settlers and to enable them to pretend that normal life can be maintained in circumstances where they’re engaged in a violent struggle to control land that other people consider to be their own. Now to some degree settlers cannot be blamed, because, as I noted before, this is really the first time in 30 years that Palestinians have managed to mobilize in some ways, effective, ineffective, whatever you want to call it, to say no to this, and in a way in which the Oslo process didn’t begin to address. The Oslo process, if anything, consolidated the efforts of settlers and there again is no better proof of that than the fact that the settler population doubled over the last decade.
Now, again to get back to the issue of redeployment and disengagement. We have seen again that the Oslo map enables the IDF to choke off any measure of daily Palestinian normal life when it so chooses. At some cost, but not at an overwhelming cost that can’t be maintained on the Israeli side, at least, for days and weeks and perhaps months on end. Every town is surrounded, people can’t move. These kinds of restrictions on movement and the economy and so forth have never been as draconian and as extensive and as successful as they have been now.
And again, if you’re in the IDF, you say, “Okay. It worked. We were still able to cut this place into as many pieces as we wanted to even with the redeployment, even with the fact that the PA controls in some measure or other about 40% of the West Bank.” So, again, this uprising may not be seen by some Israelis as a need for reevaluating the status quo. In fact they may well reach the opposite conclusion.
Okay, let’s get to a quick look at how this began to change at Taba. This is the Taba map, which portrays the best offer made by Ehud Barak and his people, not the best offer made by Yossi Beilin and Shlomo Ben Ami and his people, the best offer made by the prime minister. Now what this map illustrates is the beginning of a change in certain basic concepts that have been consistently followed by Israel in the Occupied Territories since June, 1967. One conceptual change is to disaggregate settlements from security. And that’s most apparent in the Jordan Valley, where Israel at Taba conceded any civilian presence in the Jordan Valley; it conceded the relationship between its security forces in the Jordan Valley that were going to remain for a short period of time and settlements; it conceded the need to control permanently and exclusively access to these areas, east-to-west, on roads. This is an important achievement. And it should not be minimized.
And then because it disaggregated settlements from security, it meant that settlements would be evaluated on the basis of their success in creating demographic facts that could not be ignored. If the settlement was big enough, then it seemed to pass the test. So, therefore, you have an Israeli request for all of these areas here in blue, which amount to about 5% of the West Bank. The big exclusion here are settlements, some of which have more than 1,000 people. These settlements become part of Palestine. Now, there are important elements of this understanding -- it can’t even be termed an understanding -- that were not addressed. And they may -- they weren’t addressed, they may never had an opportunity to be addressed. For example, what would the status be of settlers and settlements that find themselves on the wrong side of the new border?
One thing that the Intifada has managed to do is to convince more and more Israelis that in the event of a deal that requires some territorial adjustment of the border, settlers, Israeli settlers, have no future in Palestine. Before the Intifada, there was a great deal of discussion, an assumption by many Israelis that there would be five, ten years, fifteen years, but settlers would be able to remain in Palestine subject to some measure of Palestinian rule. There aren’t too many people now who are thinking in those terms. And again, that’s primarily a function of the Intifada.
This map was understood to be serious by the Palestinians in a way in which previous maps weren’t. And in your packet, you’ve got some publications of ours, which seek to show how the maps have changed from Camp David to Washington, and last December until now, with an appropriate analysis by us to point out the way in which Israeli policy evolved.
Now Barak's offer was understood to be serious by the Palestinians at Taba. And it engendered the first Palestinian response, after which I’ll stop, by Abu Ala, a presentation of a map very poorly drawn, but which nonetheless showed a Palestinian willingness at that point to see 3% of the West Bank annexed by Israel. Again, that 3% number would be consistent with the Clinton parameters for a 3% territorial swap with land in Israel. And that territorial swap, what was talked about was this area here in Israel, south of the border with Hebron and also what’s called the Halutza Sands.
So the point is that Barak made a serious proposal. The Palestinians made a serious counter-offer. Neither side responded to the other, and that’s where things stopped.
DR.AMIRAM GOLDBLUM [Founder and Head of the Israeli Peace Now Movement’s Settlements Watch Committee]: I would like to thank Ambassador Wilcox and APN President Deborah DeLee for their introduction and especially Geoff now for his long expose to the subject, which saves a lot of my time. And although we will have some overlapping views about some of the issues, my stress would be somewhat different, and although Deborah DeLee presented Peace Now, I would like to reiterate some of the things that she said and tell those of you who were not here when Deborah spoke, and also to the others, that we are the largest and oldest peace group in Israel.
It has been constructed in 1978 by 350, about 350, officers in the reserve forces of the IDF calling upon Begin in an open letter in the press, which became known as the Officers’ Letter, to do all that is in his hands to promote the peace with Egypt according to the Sadat-Begin initiative that started it. And, now we can also remind everybody that the settlement issue is not a new one. It was there in 1978 when Peace Now wrote this letter at its beginning calling upon Prime Minister Begin to refrain from constructing any more settlements because they present a hazard to the peace process with Egypt and to any peace process in the future.
And Peace Now being a movement that believes in the Zionist ideal of a democratic state for the Jews in the Middle East has been always involved and always focused on the wide aspects of security of Israel. And the wide aspects include the morality of its soldiers, treatment of an enemy, and sensitivity to the other side. And we are still worried about those same aspects today, as we were 23 years ago, unfortunately.
We are different than other peace groups in the world in the sense that Peace Now has always encouraged its members to enlist to the army, to participate in military activities, to enroll to elite units in the Israeli IDF, but on the other hand also to be sensitive to the difficulties and to the plights of the other side.
For those of you who are not that well acquainted with the details, I’d still like to go through some of the general information that includes the population, the size of both Israel and the Occupied Territories. Israel is a small country and a very dense one. It has about 6 million inhabitants over and area that is originally about 20,000 kilometers, square kilometers, which is just a little less than 8,000 square miles. This is without the West Bank, without the Golan Heights, and without the Gaza Strip. In the war of 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank and crossed that Green Line, which has been obliterated from official maps since then, but you can see it quite vividly here on this map. And it also exists very vividly in the minds of people who have to cross this line, although it is not signed and there is no sign of the Green Line anywhere on the ground.
The existence of the Green Line is still in the minds of people because it is quite real that over that Green Line there is a huge population of Palestinians. Three million Palestinians live in the Occupied Territories. About 2 million Palestinians…a little more than 2 million Palestinians in the West Bank, which has been called the West Bank because the East Bank is the Jordan, and that was the Kingdom of Jordan; and the Gaza Strip, which was part of Egypt before 1967, which is only 400 square kilometers large with a population of more than a million people. It’s one of the densest places in the world, if not the most dense area in the whole world. More than 7,700 persons per square mile in this area, compared to about a 1,000 in the West Bank and 700 inside Israel.
Israel has partially solved its problem with part of the Arab world. We have a peace treaty with Egypt; we have a peace agreement with Jordanians. Israelis can travel to Egypt, used to travel more in the past, less today, to Egypt, to Jordan. We still did not solve our problems in the north with Lebanon and Syria. But, the core of the problem is well understood by most Israelis to be the conflict with the Palestinians. This is the main issue that was mentioned already in the agreements with the Egyptians, and it is today the greatest impediment to the opening of Israel to the whole of the Middle East and to the ability to construct more peace treaties and to heaten up the cold peace accords that we have with the Egyptians and with the Jordanians.
So, Oslo. In 1993, we were all very hopeful that the agreement in Oslo would change this and it was signed right here. I had the great opportunity to be present here on the 13th of September together with some of the faces that I see in the audience. And everybody was very hopeful, not only here but also on the Palestinian side and among the Israelis. And, some of you may remember that in the first days of the IDF…was still an occupying force in Gaza and the West Bank, but Palestinian kids came out with olive branches and gave it to the soldiers who were on the jeeps immediately after the signing of the Oslo Agreement.
So, the hopes were tremendous and were rising at that time. And, there were lots of new contacts that were created between Israelis and Palestinians on many levels, both on the leadership level between PLO leadership for the first time and the Israeli leadership. People-to-people programs have become very common and lots of young Israelis met with young Palestinians. And there was cooperation at the security level between the IDF and the Palestinians.
The main problem was that the issue of the settlements was deferred in the Oslo Agreement to a later stage. That was the source of most of the problems that we encounter later. And this is also the source of what I believe the inherent violence in the situation. And the daily situation today goes back to the deference of the issue of the settlement and to the inability to deal with the issue of settlements until this very moment.
Oslo created a mechanism for transferring territories to Palestinian Authority from Israeli occupation to Palestinian-controlled areas that are under full Palestinian control. That means both civil control and security or some Israelis would call it military control of the Palestinians. They comprise -- in the beginning they were about 4% of the territory, but during the times of Prime Minister Rabin and later Netanyahu, some increase in that A-type area was achieved and more of that was transferred to the Palestinians. So those are the brown areas.
The yellow areas are a B-territory. The B-areas are those areas where Palestinians have only civil control and Israel still controls militarily, controls the security over the rest of the area. So, if one asks oneself what is -- and, of course, the white area is the rest of it, which is 60%, about 60% of the territory is completely under Israeli control. This is called C-areas.
But if one asks oneself what part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip does Israel still control and has its forces going around freely without having to clash directly with Palestinian military forces controlling the Palestinian areas, this is about 80% of the territory -- more, nearly even 85% of the territory. Am I right? About 85. And so the A-areas comprise about 15% of the area, plus-minus. The yellow areas, mostly rural areas, about 25%, and those areas, the A and B areas, are where most Palestinians live.
According to the Oslo Agreement, there were 190 -- 1-9-0 -- islands of Palestinian existence divided into those A and B areas. So all the rest -- all this was in Israeli hands, so all those Palestinian islands sort of floated in a sea of Israeli C-territory. So it was completed controlled from all sides. Each of those areas is completely controlled or could be completely controlled, depending on the conditions, completely controlled by Israeli, by the Israeli forces.
Let’s go into the details in one of those areas because I think this would be a good example for you to understand. Why was it designed in that way on the one hand, and what are the consequences on the other hand? Let’s look this canyon between those two A-areas in the north. This larger A-area, the largest of the A-areas in the north of Samaria, that is, the area of Samaria is that northern part, has about 150,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including the town of Jenin, which is the largest town in that part of the territories.
This other A-area has more than 50,000 Palestinian inhabitants. The only reason that they have not been made contiguous is the existence of two Israeli settlements in this canyon, in this wide canyon between those two A-areas. One is called Sa Nur, 47 inhabitants. Forty-seven Israelis live in Sa Nur. Homesh is the other one. One hundred and sixty-eight live in Homesh. If you want to include also Shave Shomron here in the south, you get another 500. So less than 1,000 Israelis live in this whole long canyon of about 25 miles and surrounded by 150,000 -- 50,000, and I did not include the Palestinians who in live in B-areas, which are accessible to the Israeli military. Those are about 20,000 more Palestinians live in those areas.
So this is typical. This is just the very strong, a very strong example of that kind of canyon-like structure that was constructed by the Oslo Agreement, and you can follow this canyon structure anywhere in the territories. Take this one over here between this left-side A-area and the B-area to the south of it. So there’s another canyon here. You can follow this canyon all the way through. And whenever you follow those canyons, what you find is small settlements, small tiny settlements, completely surrounded by Palestinian villages and towns.
What effects does this have on the need for security, on the ability to achieve security? First of all, the length of the border. The older Green Line is about 310 kilometers, about 200 miles. The new borders -- some of them are not official borders. But if you take all the length of the borders between us and the Palestinians today, between the areas C, between those white areas and the combined circumference of all the A and B areas you get to about 2,000 miles. So it’s ten times longer. The border is ten times longer. This must be longer than the Israeli -- well, it’s not as long as the United States-Canada border, but it’s probably less peaceful. It’s much longer than any of the other Israeli borders. So there’s no surprise then to find out that today Israel has more divisions, more divisions, in the West Bank itself, more divisions than on the border of Israel with Lebanon and Syria combined. Eight divisions in the north, nine divisions only in the West Bank. Three divisions in the Gaza Strip, or two plus divisions in the Gaza Strip. And when I’m saying a division, I mean something like 2,500 soldiers in each division.
So this is one of the main sources of difficulty for Israeli security. The only reason, the only reason -- this has already mentioned by Geoff in some of his arguments. The only reason that those soldiers have to be there is to protect the settlements. So the settlements are the only source for Israel’s need to deploy so many soldiers in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. And Israel still controls -- although most Israelis, if you ask Israelis in a public opinion poll, is Israel still controlling Gaza?, 90% would say we got out of Gaza. Israel still controls 20% of the Gaza Strip, controls 42% of the beach of Gaza, which is the only accessible beach for the Palestinians, and, of course, controls also the roads, the main roads of Gaza, because there are isolated settlements such as the famous Netzarim and Kfar Darom that are at the midst of the most densely populated parts of the Gaza Strip and require a lot of Israeli soldiers to protect them. And part of that protection is to block the roads to the poor Palestinians to pass from the northern part to the southern part of the Gaza Strip in order for the people of Netzarim to come in and out of their settlement.
The only real security assets that Israel has in the West Bank are well known to anybody who has been involved with Israeli security for many years. There’s an important base near Nablus, there’s another one not far from the settlement of Ofra, but has nothing to do with the settlement itself. Those are two important bases overlooking what we call the eastward front, the possibility of Iraqi forces or other forces coming to attack Israel from the east. And this is still an important security asset. But this is something that we could get along with the Palestinians, had we achieved a peace agreement with them.
Just to show you, to give you one -- it may look funny to some of you. This is from a paper just about a week ago, 23rd of March, just to show you the change in the structure of the IDF in the West Bank and the need for increase, increased forces. Yitzhak Eitan, head of Central Command, issued an order that prevents soldiers from riding settlers’ busses and called upon them to reduce their use of public Israeli transportation in the territories. This order follows complaints by settlers that soldiers take their seats in those busses, which just gives you an idea of how many soldiers are there because there are 200,000 or nearly 200,000 settlers in the West Bank, and the amount of soldiers has increased tremendously.
I have also smaller view of my own. I used to spend most of my reserve service in the Gaza Strip, mainly in the city of Gaza, until about 1992. And in the '70s and the '80s -- and I was a company commander. And in the '70s and the '80s, we used to have two battalions, about 500 people controlling the whole of the Gaza Strip. Now, we have more than two divisions, about 6,000 soldiers doing the same thing, while Israel controls only 20% of the Gaza Strip.
Take Hebron, another example. In Hebron, we used to -- before Oslo, there were about two battalions -- there were about two companies, two to three companies taking care of the whole of Hebron. Now there are two battalions stationed in about 20% of Hebron, that is, in this H-1 area, which is under Israeli control. I have here an aerial photograph of a small part of the Hebron, the Hebron settlement. I have a photograph of a place called Tel Rumeida. There are six families -- six families that live in those mobile homes here surrounded completely from all sides by Arab houses, by Arab families. And the Israeli forces, about 100 soldiers, are stationed in this formerly Arab building in order to take care of the security of those six families.
This happens everywhere in the territories. There’s a couple near the settlement of Tapuah. In the Tapuah junction over here, there’s a couple from the Tapuah settlement who decided to have their honeymoon, two years ago they decided to have their honeymoon opposite the road of the other side. So they built a mobile home there and there are 10 soldiers taking care of them for the last 2 years.
And those are some of the typical things that happen everywhere. There are today 43 permanent roadblocks in the territories, which require 3 battalions. Three battalions take care of -- a whole division takes care of only roadblocks in the West Bank. There are another 40 -- someone counted 40 roadblocks in Gaza Strip alone, which is much smaller than the West Bank. So there’s no need to explain why there’s more friction, daily friction between Palestinians and Israelis. The roadblocks, the length of the borders, the need to pass from A to B and cross Israeli roadblocks, or from A to C, or from A into Israel, or from B into Israel, wherever Palestinians move they encounter roadblocks of the Israeli IDF. And that increases friction, that is the source, one of the main sources of violence. It is not the only source, but it is a very important one.
The visibility of ammunition in the Occupied Territories. There are tanks in the territories today. There are armored trucks everywhere. It’s a different country. And there’s an overall deepening of the occupation. And I think, this the main -- this is the main -- this is the main reason for the deterioration of the atmosphere of peace that existed right after Oslo and that is required and is extremely important in order to resolve the conflict. And I’ll stop here and later respond to questions.
Thank you.
MR. WILCOX: Thank you very much, Geoff and Amiram, for helping to untangle this puzzle. Both of our speakers would be glad to take your questions. Please identify yourself and be brief.
MARK ROSENBLUM: Marc Rosenblum, founder of Americans for Peace Now.
I have first two very quick quotes that emphasize the context that both of our speakers tried to present. One is a comment quoting Amiram. The other's quoting Uri Savir. Amiram referred to the September 13, 1993 South Lawn Signing Ceremony where he was one of the invited guests. And, in fact, both of use were sharing a little box of Kleenex. I don't know if you remember. And Amiram put his arm around me when this reluctant handshake took place, and he said "Mark, you better enjoy our tears of joy now, because the tears of blood are going to follow.”
The sense of not being Utopian, of understanding the huge problems that lay ahead, I think, is an important context for this discussion. And Uri Svir suggested when he was asked, when he first began to head a negotiating team for Israel, in the United States he was asked what’s the greatest challenge Israel faces in negotiations in Oslo. He thought for a minute and he said, “Not taking everything and not winning everything. There's a power to win at the negotiating table."
And I think the comments here that both Geoffrey and Amiram are making is to suggest structural flaws, one of them, the structural flaws at Oslo from the '70s there were left in. And the questions are, one, we can't immediately get into the permanent status negotiations, one could argue, because of the crisis and the murder and mayhem in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel today. But I would like to at least ask both of you for a moment to pretend we could get beyond the current murderous environment and project what settlements would have to be removed in a permanent agreement to allow for a continuously viable Palestinian state, keeping in mind what we know was talked about in Taba.
And, secondly, in reference, Geoffrey, to your comment about the here and now, you said one of the perhaps unintended good consequences of the latest Intifada is that settlements that are in the bad side of the settlement line that is this map of 2001, Barak’s map, understand there's no future for them.
My question is, and it goes back to statistics, one of the bad-news components of the present moment is that however Israelis view some of the casualties you didn’t talk about within Israel -- the suicide terrorist attacks and the like -- have convinced many Israelis that the Palestinian goal is not a state in the West Bank and Gaza, and it has hardened Israeli public opinion. So I’d like a brief reference to how do you see the settlements being withdrawn, what is the map look like with fewer settlements? And secondly, how do you address the current political environment, both on the Israeli and Palestinian side -- Amiram referred only to the Israeli side -- in terms of the violence that has perhaps changed public opinion. Amiram, in particular, has Israeli-Jewish public opinion hardened in terms of its support for settlements because of the attacks that have taken place against Israel within the Green Line? What public opinion polls are there, if any, about how Jewish-Israelis feel about the evacuation of settlements?
MR. ARONSON: You’re talking about a probable map. Rather than you or I dreaming about a map, we have the beginning of a map here, or what the Palestinians appear to think is a good beginning, and what some Israelis, although very few today, and very few when this map was first proposed, believe is a good beginning. The main -- what this does is this leaves 41 settlements with 65% of the settlers who live in the West Bank and Gaza today on the Israeli side of the prospective border. That would require the evacuation of 87 settlements comprising 35% of the settler population in the West Bank.
Gaza surprisingly has never been specifically or explicitly on the table since the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in 1994. And from time to time, every 6 months or so, I ask my Palestinian and Israeli friends, "if Gaza is so easy -- you know, Netzarim, some of these places with two and three people in them, why don’t you do that? Why don’t you make progress on that score?" And I said this to my Israeli friends and my Palestinian friends, because from the Palestinian point of view in a sense they’d be pushing on a door that’s a bit further open than places in the West Bank. And for some reason I’ve yet to get a satisfactory answer, and now it’s only a question of history, as to why neither side in the last seven years has attempted to make progress on territory in Gaza. There’s been no further redeployment in Gaza at all since 1994. I don’t understand it.
So here we have the Israeli view. Okay? It does help territorial continuity for Palestinians. There is a remaining problem here, which Palestinians point to, between this area and the West Bank further south. There is a real problem with Ma’ale Adumim and, of course, that is why Ma’ale Adumim is where it is, which is to create a problem between connecting Ramallah with Bethlehem and further south. So the Palestinian idea, the Palestinian counterproposal, such as it was, took Ma’ale Adumim out, altogether out, which, of course, the Barak people did not find terribly appealing since 25,000 people live here today, not to mention Givat Ze'ev and elsewhere.
So, we’re getting -- they’re getting a bit closer to where the rubber meets the road here. That is an undeniable fact, which both parties would attest to. However, it’s important to note that neither side, even then, even in December-January, was able to command a majority even within its own ranks for the maps that they proposed. On the Israeli side, there’s a majority today in the Labor Party in support of Sharon, as opposed to this map. And on the Palestinian side, Abu Ala and the Palestinians have run away as fast and as quickly from what they have put on the table in Taba, at least publicly, as anybody else. Although, in their heart of hearts, and when they’ve been discussing this with the United States, these two maps were still put on the table.
So this map shows us where the problems will be, if we’re making any progress at all. Certainly the Sharon map does not look at all like this and looks far more like the current A, B and C map – the Olso II map. Gaza Strip, again, is something else. The breezy assumption that Israel is not interested in remaining in the Gaza Strip is a mistake, in my view. I think there are in the Israeli view solid security reasons for maintaining a military presence in the Gaza Strip. I think in some respects the Intifada of the last six months is understood as justifying this concern that the IDF has not only to remain in strategic control of the Gaza Strip, vis a vis Egypt, for example, but also to be able to split the Gaza Strip into manageable Palestinian pieces to prevent the creation of a Palestinian drive toward Israel proper, for example. This is a historical problem, which the Israelis have considered for 50 years, and it’s one that’s not going to go away easily. And I think that the fact that there’s been no redeployment in Gaza during the Oslo process is in some measure a reflection of the lingering concerns that the IDF and others have to maintain a presence even in places like Netzarim, in Morag, all these tiny places that are like Fort Apache, the Bronx.
MR. GOLDBLUM: I don’t think my point of view’s very different than the one presented by Geoff. But I’d like to say something about some of those areas that have been termed the settlement blocks by Israel, especially be Prime Minister Barak in his discussions in Camp David. We can also go back to some of the terms used by Rabin at the time. And Rabin divided the settlements between the political settlements and the security settlements. And the security settlements were those that were along the Jordan River. And this goes traditionally back to the idea of security combined with villages or with kibbutzim, mostly in the north and the south of the country before the creation of the state. The same idea still prevails in the minds of many people connected to the border between Israel and Jordan or between Israeli-controlled area and Jordan, as well as the border between Israeli-controlled area and Egypt.
So the idea of the settlement blocks could have been useful for those settlement blocks that are close to the Green Line and are not disruptive in terms of the Palestinian contiguity. This area has two great defects. Although this has been very closely constructed according to the Beilin-Abu Mazen Agreement. This area, on one hand, all the Green Line was passing here. This is about 10 miles long. The line that is created because of the need to annex Israeli settlements and to prevent the annexation as much as possible of Palestinians is about 100 miles long.
So if you’re going for full and loving peace forever, then you don’t really have to care about the borders, and this is the basis of the idea between -- behind the Beilin-Abu Mazen Agreement. However, once we are in need to take care of our security, those are not defensible borders. And this is a very difficult border to take care of. And, Ariel -- although some people, even in Israel, believe that it’s a large city, it has 50,000 people surrounded -- you take any circle around Ariel, you’ll find more Palestinians around Ariel than the population of Ariel itself.
And this is true for most of the settlements in this most-inhabited Israeli area in the West Bank, which is West Samaria. West Samaria is inhabited by more Palestinians still than by Israelis. They are not that visible because the settlements are constructed on the top of mountains and the villages, the Palestinian villages, are more in the valleys. So you won’t see them if you cross or if you travel there you’ll see more of the settlements. But there are more Palestinians there. And most of those settlements are still and have to still to be termed isolated settlements.
And isolated settlements is the rule rather than the exception in most of the occupied territories. We have very few settlements that are not isolated settlements. Gush Etzion may be one of them. But not Ariel and not most of those areas. So I warn against the idea of annexing this area, which will require also the annexation of a large Palestinian community, At least 50,000 Palestinians will have to be annexed to Israel in this area. And the length of the borders is another difficulty.
Q: I wanted to ask whether you
see any signs that there’s any pressure from within the IDF or from any
source of power in Israel, including Sharon, that has any likelihood of
moving in this direction? If there’s any sign of interest or
willingness in pulling back some small settlements, because it’s just
too difficult if this is going to be a long-term thing to protect them.
And the second question is, if there were some
sign of that, how do you deal with this phenomenon that I think is
worrying a lot of people who want to pull back settlements, which is a
Hezbollah mentality. If you’re trying to pull back some small
settlements as a signal to get talks back on the road, how do you
prevent this from giving the wrong signal to the Palestinians, which is
the Hezbollah phenomenon, if we use force, they’ll pull back, so why
negotiate?
MR. GOLDBLUM: I guess, as you know, some of the Israeli journalists, you know that Ze’ev Schiff published in Ha'aretz before Sharon came here that Sharon has the intentions to evacuate or to dismantle a few of the small settlements, such as Netzarim and Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip.
I was stationed in 1970 in the Gaza Strip. And that is the time when Sharon constructed as a general of the Southern Command, he constructed Kfar Darom, although he was not a politician, he was a general in the army. But he was responsible for the construction and for the creation of all the security measures around Kfar Darom. And I see it as very unlikely, I would say, that Sharon would be the one to uproot the people of Kfar Darom, especially as we say in Israel, under fire.
So the prospects of evacuating or dismantling small settlements were very high in the past and in some situations. After the murder by Goldstein in Hebron, there was a chance to take those six families out of Tel Rumeida. They’ve not done it. There was a lot of pressure on the Israeli public to do it. But Rabin did not do it. There is a lot of pressure on the IDF to get out Netzarim. This is well known.
So it is not the IDF that prevents the dismantling of settlements. It is the Israeli politicians who prevent it and the pressure from the right wing, and the threats of the right wing. And the right wing can become very violent when it gets to uprooting settlements. And we remember what happened to Rabin without even trying to take out any settlements, but just having some vocal reactions against the settlers and their supporters.
The effect of the Hezbollah, some people attribute the current wave of violence to our getting out of Lebanon in last May. But since last May we didn’t have even a single casualty on the Lebanese border. There’s not a drop of blood that was spilled on the Lebanese border since last May, since Barak got out of Lebanon. This does not mean that it could not happen still. But at the moment, we had a year of quiet on the Lebanese border. So I asked recently one of my Palestinian students -- I asked him, “What’s going to happen after --- let’s assume that we’ll get out. Aren’t you folks going to follow us into Israel?” So he says, “Well, we are going to do this. We’ll write a few songs about it.”
That’s about -- I mean what are we talking about, following Israel into the Green Line? They have 40,000 guns; they’ll have 80,000 guns. They’ll have a few more heavier ammunition, such as anti-tank guns. Does that amount to what Israel, to the kind of force? I mean once we’re facing the Palestinians as a state, vis-a-vis a state, and not a state vis-a-vis people, that changes, I think, the whole situation. If there will be a war, there will be a war between two states. It is not a war of the IDF against civilians. This is the situation today.
MR. GOLDBLUM: I guess, as you know, some of the Israeli journalists, you know that Ze’ev Schiff published in Ha'aretz before Sharon came here that Sharon has the intentions to evacuate or to dismantle a few of the small settlements, such as Netzarim and Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip.
I was stationed in 1970 in the Gaza Strip. And that is the time when Sharon constructed as a general of the Southern Command, he constructed Kfar Darom, although he was not a politician, he was a general in the army. But he was responsible for the construction and for the creation of all the security measures around Kfar Darom. And I see it as very unlikely, I would say, that Sharon would be the one to uproot the people of Kfar Darom, especially as we say in Israel, under fire.
So the prospects of evacuating or dismantling small settlements were very high in the past and in some situations. After the murder by Goldstein in Hebron, there was a chance to take those six families out of Tel Rumeida. They’ve not done it. There was a lot of pressure on the Israeli public to do it. But Rabin did not do it. There is a lot of pressure on the IDF to get out Netzarim. This is well known.
So it is not the IDF that prevents the dismantling of settlements. It is the Israeli politicians who prevent it and the pressure from the right wing, and the threats of the right wing. And the right wing can become very violent when it gets to uprooting settlements. And we remember what happened to Rabin without even trying to take out any settlements, but just having some vocal reactions against the settlers and their supporters.
The effect of the Hezbollah, some people attribute the current wave of violence to our getting out of Lebanon in last May. But since last May we didn’t have even a single casualty on the Lebanese border. There’s not a drop of blood that was spilled on the Lebanese border since last May, since Barak got out of Lebanon. This does not mean that it could not happen still. But at the moment, we had a year of quiet on the Lebanese border. So I asked recently one of my Palestinian students -- I asked him, “What’s going to happen after --- let’s assume that we’ll get out. Aren’t you folks going to follow us into Israel?” So he says, “Well, we are going to do this. We’ll write a few songs about it.”
That’s about -- I mean what are we talking about, following Israel into the Green Line? They have 40,000 guns; they’ll have 80,000 guns. They’ll have a few more heavier ammunition, such as anti-tank guns. Does that amount to what Israel, to the kind of force? I mean once we’re facing the Palestinians as a state, vis-a-vis a state, and not a state vis-a-vis people, that changes, I think, the whole situation. If there will be a war, there will be a war between two states. It is not a war of the IDF against civilians. This is the situation today.
Q: I was thinking about something
a little bit different, though. If there were decisions to pull back
from a few settlements now, both as a security measure and as part of
the process that I think Geoff mentioned what one might do to get back
to the table, and if the goal were to get back to the table and
negotiate the rest -- and I know that the likelihood of this is highly
improbable. But would it give the wrong impression to pull back a few
settlements “under fire,” if the aim was to go back to the table and
negotiate the whole thing? In other words, would that fuel the belief
in the street that you don’t need to negotiate, you know, if you keep
up the struggle -- or maybe this belief isn’t in the street -- but the
belief in some Palestinian quarters that it's better to push by other
means than to go back to the table. Would that fuel the idea that
Hezbollah brought Israel out by force; therefore, why continue to
negotiate?
MR. ARONSON: They don’t need Hezbollah
to understand that that is part of their own historical experience. As
you well know, the popular Palestinian mythology around the Intifada is
that, "we forced Israel to get out of Gaza." And they’re right. Without
the Intifada in the late '80s, the Israelis would have had no incentive
to get out of Gaza, because it didn’t hurt them until then. And it's a
simple calculation that people make. The discussions about the
improvement in Barak’s map from Camp David to this, some people would
ascribe to the fact that there was an Intifada. And, I mean, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not unlike any place else. When people
are powerful, they don’t want to compromise. When they’re weak, they
feel that it will be a symbol of their weakness if they compromise. And
this is certainly the case when it comes to evacuating settlements.
There’s a continuing debate in Israel about the decision to evacuate
Joseph’s Tomb, for example, in Nablus in October, where there are many
people who are arguing that this, again, at the beginning of the
Intifada was the wrong signal to send, that the IDF is prepared to
leave under fire.
Regarding the prospects of evacuating the so-called isolated settlements by Sharon, I think Goldie is absolutely right. From what I know of that Schiff article, I haven’t yet found a source for that article that is what you would call authoritative. It may be, and knowing Zev Schiff, there should be. But the people whom I’ve spoken to who claim to be sources, as much as I like them, are not the folks who are around the table making the decisions.
MR. WILCOX: We have time for two or three more quick questions. Yes, ma’am.
Regarding the prospects of evacuating the so-called isolated settlements by Sharon, I think Goldie is absolutely right. From what I know of that Schiff article, I haven’t yet found a source for that article that is what you would call authoritative. It may be, and knowing Zev Schiff, there should be. But the people whom I’ve spoken to who claim to be sources, as much as I like them, are not the folks who are around the table making the decisions.
MR. WILCOX: We have time for two or three more quick questions. Yes, ma’am.
Q: My name is Suzanne Rose from
the Lyndon LaRouche organization. And I think in terms of the failure
of the peace process, it’s important to look at what happened, the
failure to implement the economic accords of Oslo, which were
negotiated by Mr. [inaudible] and others for large-scale water
infrastructure projects, desalinization projects, which would have
given both sides the political support to make concessions. And in
terms of the current situation, I think we have to look at the larger
picture, which is a deteriorating global economic and --
MR. WILCOX: Could you phrase your question, please.
Q: Well, my question -- what I’m
trying to say is the comment is that we have a worsening economic
crisis and the dynamic inside the Middle East is unstoppable toward
war. I think we must look at the larger picture. And governments agree
the kind of measures that FDR took in the 1930s in the depression….
MR. WILCOX: Thank you very much. Next question? Corinne?
Q: I am Corrine Witlatch from
Churches for Middle East Peace. I'd like you to offer some suggestions
as to what people in the United States can do. I mean what suggestions
would you give for advocacy by Jewish citizens or non-Jewish citizens
of the United States. What could the Congress do? What could the
administration do? What are the points of constructive pressure that
would influence Israel to remove some of those settlements?
MR. ARONSON: This is such a Washington
question, and it's one that I don’t really look at too often. But I
mostly describe what’s happening and leave it to people like you,
Corinne, to figure out how to fix it. [Laughter.] Look, this is a long
historical process. The first settlements in the West Bank, some of
them are now 30 years old. So one cannot expect this to be turned
around overnight. One can’t expect a final status agreement to be
conducted and completed within a matter of months. That having been
said, this particular -- we’ve seen over 30 years that settlements as
such are not particularly important to the United States. And the
clearest expression of this, in some respects, was made clear in the
Clinton parameters of December when he did not fall back on UN
Resolution 242 as regards settlements and territory, but said simply
those places where Israelis are in the majority can be Israel, as he
did, and those places where they aren’t, they should become part of
Palestine. He made this in the discussion about what to do in East
Jerusalem. But in a sense, this idea was applied everywhere.
So this is a very simple calculation. And if that’s the one that he focused upon, perhaps that’s an entrée for people like yourself and others who are looking for a hook, which the United States has evinced some support for, in order to minimize the extent of the damage that settlements will do in the future. However, having said that, Clinton’s calculus had no timeframe. So this is a dynamic process, as we’ve seen. Settlements double every ten years in terms of their population. So the longer this process goes on, as we know, the harder it is to effect any sort of change on the ground.
DEBRA DELEE: I’d like to make a comment answering that question. It is a Washington-type question, and so I’m going to jump in as a longtime Washington person. And this is going to be an organizational pitch, also.
I think, particularly as an American Jew who wants to get involved, that is what Americans for Peace Now does. We bring a pro-Israel, pro-peace message to the Hill, to the administration, to the Jewish community, the public at large. And we work with the media and we work with the Arab-American community. There're a number of ways to get involved. We have an action network, which we hope you will sign up for before you leave. Our action network is a way that we communicate by e-mail and by mail, on occasion, to ask thousands of folks across the country who have signed up to participate, to send letters, to make calls, send faxes, e-mails. It might be to a members of Congress, it might a specific member of Congress, it might be to the President or the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, asking to express your views about peace in the Middle East. We also ask people through that system to do letters to the editor or a sample op-ed they might put out there as a means of getting this voice heard.
It’s very important to remember that in spite of all of the difficulties that are going on right now, the majority polls continue to show the majority of American Jews still support peace in the Middle East and still support the kinds of proposals that were on the table during Camp David discussions and Taba. So there are ways to get involved. I would hope that you would sign up, I would hope that you would check www.peacenow.org on an ongoing basis. Again, there’s information there on where to send letters, how to make calls, and it is important. Again, I would repeat what I said at the beginning that we continue to deliver the message that confidence-building measures on the part of all of the stakeholders, whether it be Arafat’s security cooperation, whether it be Israel and stopping collective punishment, whether it be our government, President Bush in getting and remaining engaged. It is important that we show, not just to the public sector, but that the majority of American Jews, that their voice is heard, since we know this is what people feel when their voice is heard on the Hill and in the public.
MR. ARONSON: It's such an important point here. The United States is committed to Israel’s security, as it should be. It’s not committed to the realization of a greater Israel or the expansion of settlements in areas that do not contribute to Israeli security. You can make the argument that Israel has found alternative means of assuring its security in the region, both on the Egyptian front, and if we’re to believe what both Barak and Assad agreed to, such as they did on the Golan Heights, on the Golan Heights as well. They were able to separate Israel’s demand for controlling territory from its demand to maintain security vis-ą-vis its neighbors on the eastern front and in Egypt. That has not happened in the West Bank. But one can certainly make a strategic argument that Israel need not control physically the West Bank in order to enhance its security vis-a-vis Jordan and Iraq. And the settlements that have no relationship to Israeli security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in fact, detract from Israeli security rather than enhance it. And I think that’s probably the best and the most evocative and sensible way of relating to U.S. policy towards settlements.
MR. WILCOX: I’m sorry we’ve run out of time and that we couldn’t respond to all of your questions. I want to express our warm thanks to Amiram Goldblum and Geoffrey Aronson, to Americans for Peace Now, our partner in this forum, and to all of you for coming.
So this is a very simple calculation. And if that’s the one that he focused upon, perhaps that’s an entrée for people like yourself and others who are looking for a hook, which the United States has evinced some support for, in order to minimize the extent of the damage that settlements will do in the future. However, having said that, Clinton’s calculus had no timeframe. So this is a dynamic process, as we’ve seen. Settlements double every ten years in terms of their population. So the longer this process goes on, as we know, the harder it is to effect any sort of change on the ground.
DEBRA DELEE: I’d like to make a comment answering that question. It is a Washington-type question, and so I’m going to jump in as a longtime Washington person. And this is going to be an organizational pitch, also.
I think, particularly as an American Jew who wants to get involved, that is what Americans for Peace Now does. We bring a pro-Israel, pro-peace message to the Hill, to the administration, to the Jewish community, the public at large. And we work with the media and we work with the Arab-American community. There're a number of ways to get involved. We have an action network, which we hope you will sign up for before you leave. Our action network is a way that we communicate by e-mail and by mail, on occasion, to ask thousands of folks across the country who have signed up to participate, to send letters, to make calls, send faxes, e-mails. It might be to a members of Congress, it might a specific member of Congress, it might be to the President or the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, asking to express your views about peace in the Middle East. We also ask people through that system to do letters to the editor or a sample op-ed they might put out there as a means of getting this voice heard.
It’s very important to remember that in spite of all of the difficulties that are going on right now, the majority polls continue to show the majority of American Jews still support peace in the Middle East and still support the kinds of proposals that were on the table during Camp David discussions and Taba. So there are ways to get involved. I would hope that you would sign up, I would hope that you would check www.peacenow.org on an ongoing basis. Again, there’s information there on where to send letters, how to make calls, and it is important. Again, I would repeat what I said at the beginning that we continue to deliver the message that confidence-building measures on the part of all of the stakeholders, whether it be Arafat’s security cooperation, whether it be Israel and stopping collective punishment, whether it be our government, President Bush in getting and remaining engaged. It is important that we show, not just to the public sector, but that the majority of American Jews, that their voice is heard, since we know this is what people feel when their voice is heard on the Hill and in the public.
MR. ARONSON: It's such an important point here. The United States is committed to Israel’s security, as it should be. It’s not committed to the realization of a greater Israel or the expansion of settlements in areas that do not contribute to Israeli security. You can make the argument that Israel has found alternative means of assuring its security in the region, both on the Egyptian front, and if we’re to believe what both Barak and Assad agreed to, such as they did on the Golan Heights, on the Golan Heights as well. They were able to separate Israel’s demand for controlling territory from its demand to maintain security vis-ą-vis its neighbors on the eastern front and in Egypt. That has not happened in the West Bank. But one can certainly make a strategic argument that Israel need not control physically the West Bank in order to enhance its security vis-a-vis Jordan and Iraq. And the settlements that have no relationship to Israeli security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in fact, detract from Israeli security rather than enhance it. And I think that’s probably the best and the most evocative and sensible way of relating to U.S. policy towards settlements.
MR. WILCOX: I’m sorry we’ve run out of time and that we couldn’t respond to all of your questions. I want to express our warm thanks to Amiram Goldblum and Geoffrey Aronson, to Americans for Peace Now, our partner in this forum, and to all of you for coming.
[APPLAUSE AND END OF EVENT.]