The Founder Volume 5 Issue 4

10 The Founder | Thursday 4 November 2010
tfComment
& Debate
Israeli settlements are not the issue
Stephen Beckwith puts forward his views on the
ongoing turbulence of the West Bank
Here Obama goes
again, asking
Israel to extend
a settlement
construction
freeze in the
West Bank for another two months
while demanding nothing from the
Palestinians. Two months seems
an arbitrary number unless you
remember the upcoming November
elections.
It seems that Obama does not
want to have another public confrontation
with the Jewish state,
until after the November elections,
in order not to upset Jewish voters.
Meanwhile, he is trying to temporarily
appease and convince the
Palestinians to stay in the negotiations
until after the elections, when
he will again start pressuring Israel
for even more concessions.
Otherwise, how do you explain
the fact that the US president is
adopting the Palestinian point of
view and recycling a mostly mythical
controversy that settlements
are the major obstacle to negotiations
and peace in the Middle East?
Those who believe this farce never
visited the West bank as I have
done, or they would realise that the
settlements are physically a negligible
issue and a cover-up and excuse
for Arab Palestinian rejectionism.
The claim that settlement activity
is an obstacle to peace because it
will supposedly diminish the territory
of a future Palestinian entity
is baseless. The amount of territory
taken up by the built-up area of all
121 settlements in the West Bank,
with approximately 290,000 residents,
is estimated to be just 1.7%
of the territory. Two thirds of the
settlers reside in five major blocks,
and half of the settlements have 500
or less settlers. Four of the blocks
are very close to the 1949 armistice
line (“Green Line”) and many of
them are suburbs of Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv. Ninety eight percent of the
Palestinian population lives within
roughly 40% of the West Bank, in
six major cities and 450 villages.
Consequently, 60% of the West
Bank is empty of any build-up. You
can drive for a long while in the
West Bank and find no Jewish settlements
or Arab cities, or people.
Moreover, the settlements are a
major source of jobs and income
for the Palestinians.
The argument that settlements
will undermine a future territorial
compromise lost much of it force
after Israel dismantled settlements
in the Sinai in 1982 as part of its
peace treaty with Egypt and unilaterally
withdrew 9,000 Israeli settlers
and dismantled all settlements in
the Gaza Strip in 2005.Moreover,
for the last five years prior to the
10-month construction freeze,
all Israeli governments, including
the present one, have adhered to
the guideline that there would be
no new settlements or physical
expansion of existing ones except
for construction confined to the
boundaries of existing settlements
for “natural growth.”
It has been understood in the last
decade by both Presidents Clinton
and George W. Bush that, in any final
peace treaty, Israel will keep the
major close-in blocs of settlements
and compensate the Palestinians
accordingly with land swaps from
within Israel itself. President Clinton
endorsed this in 2000 at Camp
David and in 2001 at Taba, Egypt.
President Bush endorsed this
principle in a 2004. During the last
decade, the only obstacle to peace
was the Palestinian leadership, who
twice rejected the so-called “twostate
solution”. In fact, whenever
an Israeli government has offered
the Palestinians a sovereign state
with eastern Jerusalem as its capital,
while agreeing to dismantle the majority
of those “hated” settlements
outside the major blocs, Palestinian
leaders rejected the offer and
never even made a counter offer. In
2001 in Taba, Prime Minister Ehud
Barak, in the presence of President
Clinton, offered this to Arafat, who
rejected the offer and started the
second Intifada, a campaign of
terror that resulted in the death of
over 1,000 Israelis.
In December 2008, Prime
Minister Olmert, in the presence
of President Bush, made Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas
an unprecedented peace proposal
where the PA would receive an area
equivalent to 100% of the West
Bank, by swapping land inside
Israel, and where Jerusalem would
be divided, but Abbas rejected the
offer and started a campaign of
de-legitimisation against Israel. It
seems the Arab world still has only
a one-state solution for the Middle
East. It is a “final solution” that
eliminates Israel altogether.