Israel's Policy of "Creating Facts" Wins over the Bush Administration

The quest of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon for a diplomatic framework to modify, if not to end, Israel's continuing rule over the occupied territories has moved into high gear. The publication of Sharon's draft disengagement plan in April, accompanied by an exchange of letters between the Israeli leader and U.S. president George W. Bush has refocused international attention on a new approach to address Israel's continuing occupation and the Palestinian rebellion that is now well into its third year.

Sharon has made an unprecedented decision to end Israel's military and civilian occupation of the Gaza Strip, and to evacuate four West Bank settlements.

"There is no one more familiar with the Gaza Strip than I am," Sharon told members of his Likud faction. "I have traveled its length not in a car but by foot. Over the long term I don't see that Jews can live there. All of us would like that we could be in all parts of the Land of Israel, including myself. But all those who fool themselves that under current political conditions, someone in the world, including the United States, will support such a policy is dreaming, incorrect, and mistaken."

Sharon has mobilized a large majority of the Israeli public as well as elite political and military opinion in support of the option. Indeed, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has declared that civilian Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip was a "historic mistake." Notwithstanding the surprising repudiation of the Sharon plan by members of his own party, Sharon's idea marks an important turning point in the history of Israeli occupation policy, and it will not be undone by the results of the Likud referendum.

The Sharon plan aims at managing rather than solving Israel's occupation of lands captured in June 1967. Israel's decision to proceed unilaterally returns diplomacy to a pre-Madrid era and represents a diplomatic coup against the Bush administration, which has been weakened by the unfolding debacle in Iraq and faces a difficult election in November. Confronted with Sharon's plan, which for the first time promises an evacuation of settlements, the White House in effect jettisoned its own "road map" as the centerpiece of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.

"Although the road map is an American plan," explained Yuval Steinitz, the chair of the powerful Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, "the president agreed to endorse another plan which is inconsistent with the road map."

The international community has followed the American lead. Terge Roed-Larsen, UN special coordinator for the peace process, noted in an April 23 meeting of the Security Council that "no Israeli prime minister has previously had the boldness and the vision to say that he will remove settlers--as long called for by the international community--and initiate a plan for its implementation."

Yet the international community remains wary of the limited, unilateral nature of Israel's intentions. Chris Patten, commissioner of the European Union, writing in the Jordan Times on April 26, noted, "It is not surprising that we have agreed with what has been for 37 years the consistent American position that settlements beyond the '67 line are illegal and represent ‘obstacles to peace.' We all know what will be the ingredients for a final settlement. They are there in the Mitchell Report and subsequent documents, including the Arab League peace initiative of 2002. They are there in the roadmap which has been endorsed by the international community. A settlement does not await some heavenly insight. . . .

"As the European Council has said again and again, a final settlement can only be achieved as a result of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, resulting in two viable sovereign and independent states based on the borders of 1967 (perhaps amended by agreement), living side by side in peace and security as laid out in the roadmap. This has been the main thread of European thinking from Venice in 1980 to Berlin in 1999 to Seville in 2002, right up to the latest European Council conclusions of last month."

The unilateral aspect of Israel's contemplated disengagement from the Gaza Strip reflects not only Sharon's opposition to political dialogue with the Palestinian Authority over the nature and extent of Israel's withdrawal. It also accommodates a Palestinian acknowledgment that it is preferable to accept rather than negotiate such an Israeli fait accompli and to exercise Palestinian sovereignty, in the sprit of the Palestine National Council decision in 1974, on any part of Palestine from which Israel withdraws.

Although Sharon has described his plan as a "mortal blow" to Palestinian aspirations for a state, Ha'aretz reports that a proposal for a joint memorandum of understanding among all Palestinian factions, issued by the leadership of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti, describes Israel's proposed evacuation of Gaza "as the most important achievement of the Palestinians in the intifada after ten years of Oslo did not move a single mobile home and during those years the settlements [population] doubled."

The Disengagement Plan

After a decade of Israeli-Palestinian agreements that routinely ran to scores if not hundreds of pages, the brevity of the original disengagement plan is notable (see page 4).

The plan's central strategic objective is to remove Gaza's 1.3 million Palestinians from the sphere of Israel's internationally recognized responsibility by formally ending the military occupation of Gaza that commenced in June 1967, while continuing to exercise control over the entry and exit of people and goods. No similar objective is intended for the West Bank, even that part of the area from which Israel will redeploy. Indeed, Israel will "evacuate" from the Gaza Strip, but merely "redeploy" in the West Bank.

In the case of the West Bank, the plan claims to create "territorial contiguity" in the region around Jenin, from which Israel will evacuate four settlements. This area will continue to be surrounded by Israeli-controlled checkpoints. Israel's territorial objective for the remainder of the West Bank, in contrast, is defined as "transportation contiguity," that is, connecting separate Palestinian enclaves by bridges, tunnels, and crossing points, all of which will continue to be controlled by Israeli forces.

The western security barrier now under construction will follow the route approved by the government. An eastern barrier has never been approved. According to Sharon, there will "not [be] a fence being built there today, unless we need to. Here and there we will block access points to the Jordan Valley."

In the security realm, Israel intends to continue exercising exclusive control over Gaza's "security envelope"--land and sea borders and preventing the construction or operation of sea ports and air ports--according to existing "arrangements" that are more restrictive than Oslo-era "agreements." It also claims the right to initiate preemptive military operations and to limit Palestinian arms to those specified in existing (Oslo) agreements. Sharon is well aware that the contradiction implied by continuing Israeli control over Gaza's frontiers puts his strategic objective at risk.

Israel is currently considering a wide range of options regarding the disposition of settlement assets. These include the repatriation or destruction of moveable assets and the destruction of all buildings and infrastructure or their transfer, intact, in return for compensation, to Palestinians or a third party.

The Bush Letter

The April 14 letter from President Bush to Sharon signifies the extent to which U.S. policy has moved away from its earlier championship of negotiations and the road map as guides to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy to a framework based on an Israeli-led approach excluding Palestinian, Arab, and international interlocutors from the decision-making core.

The Bush letter also marks a conceptual change in the U.S. approach. It outlines Washington's preferences on the relationship between borders and Israeli settlements that are not materially different from the compromises discussed in the Camp David-Taba talks. But unlike these "previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution," Bush's recent commitments were declared not in the context of final status negotiations between the parties, but in support of a unilateral, interim Israeli plan that may not materialize.

The letter violates the 1991 Letter of Assurances provided to the Palestinians by the first Bush administration on the eve of the October 1991 Madrid conference. That letter affirmed that "the United States has opposed and will continue to oppose settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967."

The letter to Sharon departs from U.S. support for the international consensus that Israel's borders are to be based upon the need to be "defensible." To that condition, the Bush letter adds that Israel's borders should be determined by another element--"the new realities on the ground"--namely settlements. Defensible borders may not require Israel to annex territory captured in June 1967, but the inclusion of settlements within the borders of Israel does. Israel's border, if based upon the Bush prescription, will be based not only on the new map created by dynamic Israeli settlement expansion but also on the territorial requirements necessary to defend it.

The letter's description of the separation barrier as a temporary, security instrument without influence on an agreed upon border marks the end of U.S. efforts to change or alter its course. These views recall eerily similar descriptions of settlement activity popular in official circles during the 1970s. Settlements, like the separation barrier, are "facts in the ground" that the Bush administration has now granted a central status in the determination of Israel's final border.

The Sharon and Weissglas Letters

Sharon, in his letter to Bush, claims that the disengagement plan is "independent" of if not "inconsistent" with the road map. He promises to accelerate construction of the separation barrier and evidently views the Bush letter as a license to do so.

The Weissglas letter is more detailed. It recounts a series of bilateral understandings relating to settlements and other issues, including a bilateral effort to agree on a settlement by settlement basis on a "better definition of the construction line of settlements." The latter phrasing reportedly appeared in a letter from Weisglass in June 2003 outlining "understandings reached between Israel and the US regarding the Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza: . . . No new towns will be built, and construction will be frozen in existing towns except for building within existing construction lines--as opposed to the municipal border." The United States never officially acknowledged such an agreement. In any case, the terms Weisglass outlined one year ago failed to limit Israel's continuing expansion of existing settlements or the establishment and consolidation of new settlement "outposts."

The significance of these new understandings is that it suggests an unprecedented U.S. willingness to become a direct agent in the approval of Israel's policy of settlement expansion. Such intimate involvement and complicity in this policy marks another significant shift in U.S. policy, which once viewed all settlement activity as illegal and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.