AFTER THE ISRAELI ELECTION
By Gwynne Dyer
AZG Armenian Daily
28/03/2006
“It’s a trade-off,” said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli
organisation Settlement Watch, just after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
carried out the dramatic withdrawal from the Jewish settlements in
the Gaza Strip last August. “The Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks;
the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally
imposing borders. They don’t know how long they’ve got. That’s why
they’re building like maniacs.”
But they are going to have lots of time: Ariel Sharon may be in a
permanent coma, but his project is doing just fine. The new party
he founded, Kadima, will do extraordinarily well in the Israeli
elections on 28 March, probably winning almost as many seats as
the two traditional major parties, Labour and Likud, combined. The
only question about the new government is whether Kadima will have
to include either of those major parties in the new coalition, or
whether it can leave them both out in the cold.
Neither is there any doubt about what acting Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert will do once he is prime minister in his own right, with a
solid majority behind him. In far blunter terms than Sharon had used
in recent years, Olmert sketched out the new government’s policy
last month.
“Reality today obliges us to separate ourselves from the Palestinians
and to remodel the borders of the state of Israel,” said Olmert,
“and this is what I will do after the elections. This will force us
to evacuate [some] territories currently held by the state of Israel
[in the West Bank, but] we will hold on to the major settlement
blocks. We will keep Jerusalem united. It is impossible to abandon
control of the eastern borders of Israel.”
In other words, there will be no more peace negotiations: the
Palestinians will just have to live within the 420 miles (680 km)
of tall fences that mark out Israel’s new borders, in a pseudo-state
surrounded and almost cut in half by Israeli settlements. The whole
Jordan valley will stay in Israel’s hands, cutting Palestinians off
from the rest of the Arab world except for one Israel-controlled border
crossing into Jordan at the Allenby Bridge and one that crosses into
Egypt from the Gaza Strip.
The 200,000 Arabs living in the old city of Jerusalem are already
cut off from the rest of the Palestinian territories by a ring of
new Jewish suburbs and a maze of gates that they cannot pass through
without magnetic cards. New settlements linking the existing Jewish
suburbs east of Jerusalem with the settlement block of Maale Adumim
will push Israel’s frontier most of the way across the West Bank in
the centre, effectively cutting off the northern West Bank from the
southern part.
All the big settlement blocks in the West Bank — Ariel, Gush Etzion
and Maale Admumim — will formally become part of Israel, sheltering
behind the walls that divide them from the misery and desperation
on the other side. Some isolated settlements will be abandoned,
and the estimated 60,000 Jews who live in them will be moved to join
the 185,000 people who already live in the bigger blocks. The Israeli
army will police the areas that remain Palestinian, making incursions
as necessary. And there you have it: the permanent solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian problem.
Israelis justify this unilateral and highly one-sided “solution”
with the argument that there is nobody on the Palestinian side to
negotiate with, and since the victory of the radical Hamas party
in Palestinian elections two months ago that argument sounds more
plausible. But we arrived at this sorry situation because Israel
was unwilling to negotiate fairly with any of the previous, more
reasonable incarnations of the Palestinian leadership either. The
settlements always got in the way.
As former US president Jimmy Carter, who negotiated the 1978 Camp
David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, wrote in the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz last week, “the pre-eminent obstacle to peace is
Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. Israel’s occupation of Palestine
has obstructed a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land,
regardless of whether Palestinians had no formalised government, one
headed by Yasser Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, or with Abbas as president
and Hamas controlling the parliament and cabinet.”
For twenty years, while one peace initiative after another died due
to Israeli stalling and the patience of moderate Palestinians eroded,
the settlements doubled and redoubled in population, taking up more
and more Palestinian land. So now, since the Palestinians are too
radical to talk to any more, the settlements must become part of
Israel. Most Israeli voters are willing to accept this logic at the
moment, but it does not serve Israel’s long-term security.
At the moment, Israel holds all the cards in the Middle East. Its
army and its economy are incomparably stronger than those of its Arab
neighbours. It has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and they have none. And
it has 110 percent support from the United States, the world’s only
superpower. But a prudent Israeli leader would conclude that now is
therefore the right time to make a permanent peace with the Arabs,
including the Palestinians, because nobody can be certain that it
will still hold all those cards in twenty-five or fifty years’ time.
Israel cannot have a permanent peace and the settlements too. It is
making a bad trade.