Israel's broken romance with its settlements

[Englander]

Most of its leaders agree that, to preserve a Jewish state, the question
now isn't whether to withdraw from the West Bank but how and when.

By Gershom Gorenberg,
GERSHOM GORENBERG is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977."

March 6, 2006

BIG, HISTORICAL shifts sometimes show up in small news items, between the lines. Like the recent report in an Israeli daily on new requirements for high school students majoring in the Bible: Henceforth, they will have to take at least four field trips to places where key biblical events occurred.

>snip

In the years that followed, to avoid fringe status, a political party had to state where it favored settlement. When the right took power in 1977, the process accelerated. As settlement czar, Ariel Sharon worked with Orthodox settlers to dot the West Bank with small Israeli communities. Closer to the Green Line, the government built heavily subsidized suburbs.

Now a quarter of a million Israelis live in the West Bank. Yet arguments once voiced by isolated critics are now accepted by the political center and moderate right. The bloodshed of the last five years has shown that trying to hold the entire West Bank and defend isolated settlements is an insupportable yoke on the military.

Exactly as prescient critics suggested years ago, the Arab population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza has risen toward parity with the Jewish population. Two and a half years ago, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — a lifelong rightist — declared that Israel would have to withdraw from much of the occupied territory in order to remain a Jewish state. Olmert's belated but essential realization apparently spurred Sharon's decision to pull out of Gaza last summer — which further legitimized the idea of giving up land.

The last year has also brought home the extent to which the settlement effort has eroded democratic decisions. A government-sponsored report explained how more than 100 tiny outposts have been established in the West Bank without legal approval but with the connivance of officials — a massive rogue operation. When Olmert, now acting prime minister, decided to go ahead last month with demolishing homes at an illegal outpost, his spokesman lectured me passionately on the need to uphold the rule of law.

More at;
Los Angeles Times

[Wordie]

1. Gorenberg tells it like it is, again. He's a great author.

He describes the relationship of Israel with it's settlements as a fading romance:

Like many a divorce, the end of this relationship is slower than the infatuation at the start. New homes are still going up in Israeli communities in occupied territory. Settler ideologues still insist that the West Bank mountains are the real biblical homeland and describe Tel Aviv as the land of the Philistines. The practical difficulties of disentangling from the West Bank are huge. But for the Israeli mainstream, disenchantment has set in.

...From the start, dry, dissenting voices challenged the infatuation. At a Cabinet meeting in June 1967, one minister warned that keeping the West Bank and its Arab population would create a binational state. Nearly all the territory must be relinquished, he said, or "we're done with the Zionist enterprise" of building a Jewish state.

The next winter, when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was toying with letting Jews settle in Hebron, the editor of his party's newspaper admonished him that "our boys will have to serve an extra three months" to guard the settlers. Settlement would be a military burden, not an asset.

Soon after, when settlers moved into the town without government permission, dissidents warned that letting them stay would undermine democracy. That warning was also ignored.

I so hope that as the article suggests, there truly are an increasing number of Israelis, both in and out of the government, who want to make the hard choices regarding all the settlements (Gorenberg did mention that even for many who recognize that the settlements must be dismantled, the larger ones, such as Maale Adumim (population: 32,000) or Ariel (population: 18,000) are considered too large to dismantle. What I wonder is if the infrastructure of those settlements could be considered as part of a deal with the Palestinians, as part of reparations. Of course, maybe that makes no sense; as the land they are built on belongs to the Palestinians in the first place, I suppose that technically that makes the infrastructure Palestinian property as well.

Gorenberg's conclusion is this:
Ideologically, Israel is tired of the West Bank. The love is gone. Practically, getting out is difficult. Once settlement was a national goal. Now it is the national dilemma.

I'd like to recommend Gorenberg's books to anyone new to the I/P forum who would like to find out more about what's going on there. He's an Israeli journalist, not an academician, and as such his work is quite accessible for the average reader, and pretty non-ideological. He writes beautifully.


On edit: Thanks for finding and posting this, Englander.

[Englander]

2. Thanks, Wordie.

I haven't read any of Gorenberg's books, I came across an article of his
in the WaPo, I think, months ago, & remembered his name when I saw this
opinion piece.

[Wordie]

3. I think he's especially good because he doesn't just amass facts, but

tends to give a "flavor" of what's going on. That may be his journalism background.

[Englander]

4. Israelis were warned on illegality of settlements in 1967 memo

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Published: 11 March 2006

Israeli ministers were secretly warned just after the Six-Day War in 1967 that any policy of building settlements across occupied Palestinian territories violated international law.

A "top secret" memo by the Foreign Ministry's then legal counsel said that would "contravene the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention". Growth of Jewish settlements over the next three decades followed.

The official advice that a policy which is now a major obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had no basis in international law has been highlighted by the Israeli historian, Gershom Gorenberg. His new book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements will generate fresh debate on the legality of the West Bank settlements in the wake of Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw 8,500 settlers from Gaza last August.

Most of the international community has held that Jewish settlement in the territories seized in the 1967 war contravened international law, and the Geneva Conventions in particular, but this has long been publicly contested by Israel.

The highly classified internal advice was given by Theodor Meron, who left Israel a decade later and became a leading international jurist who until the end of last year was president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article350586.ece