Blocs and Borders
March 14, 2016 § 3 Comments
Shaul Arieli has a smart op-ed in Ha’aretz today arguing that the concept of the sanctity of settlement blocs is leading Israel astray. Arieli goes through the history of how the blocs came to be, and more importantly demonstrates the way in which their contours have changed, from security zones in the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem envelope to settlements intended to obliterate the Green Line to more recent efforts on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s part to include areas that bifurcate the West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Arieli argues that the blocs have no security, demographic, economic, or political logic, and that in fact the idea of these inviolate blocs that Israel will keep in any permanent status agreement actively harms Israel by establishing an incoherent and unstable border. Were Israel to adopt a border that incorporated only settlements not separated by the Green Line from Palestinian towns or infrastructure, Arieli writes that it would significantly shorten the length of the border, leave 75% of Israelis living over the Green Line in their current homes, and create a border that is more secure without hurting the social fabric and contiguity of Palestinian locales.
It’s an excellent piece and I want to highlight it so that people go and read it, but I also want to make two brief complementary points. First, the history of the changing definition of blocs to include, in Netanyahu’s current formulation, places like Ofra, Kiryat Arba, and Kfar Adumim demonstrates the urgent need to define the border of the blocs. The idea that negotiations for two states proceed with an assumption about Israel keeping blocs and nobody knows what those blocs entail means that an agreement in principle might easily blow up once the details have to be hammered out. Furthermore, allowing the blocs to gobble up more and more area destroys any semblance of trust among the Palestinians, and is fundamentally unfair to Palestinian society in the West Bank. The current government’s definition of a border for the blocs would be a very different one than I would draw, but limiting things at all would still be a positive step. It would also force the Israeli government to provide a visual for its current settlement policy, which would make it more difficult for it to insist that everything is fine as is. “Blocs” cannot continue to be an amorphous concept that everyone tiptoes around as if it is – pardon the pun – settled, when in fact the blocs continue to be defined differently depending on who’s doing the talking.
Second, Arieli’s rundown demonstrates to me why a complete settlement freeze is unworkable. I get the argument that any deviation from the 1967 lines as a starting point undermines the core Palestinian conviction that agreeing to negotiations on that basis was their key concession. But Israeli politics cannot be ignored either, and a complete settlement freeze that includes Jerusalem neighborhoods like Gilo is going to be anathema to 95% of Israeli Jews. Each side is going to have to bend on something, and defining the blocs in a fair manner and then freezing everything outside of them – along with a concurrent declaration that everything, including territory inside the borders of the blocs, is subject to future negotiation – is my view of what constitutes a reasonable and likely way of moving forward. Just as the Palestinians view their core concession as recognizing the 1967 lines as relevant at all, Israelis view their core concession as recognizing the PLO and agreeing to negotiate towards a Palestinian state. The reality is that both sides are destined to be deeply disappointed in some manner, and that is how agreements are forged.
Rightwing Competition And Settlements
December 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
I wrote a piece for the Atlantic yesterday about how Israel’s recent announcements on settlements in the West Bank and building in East Jerusalem is widely viewed as an effort to punish the Palestinians in the wake of their statehood bid at the UN, but that’s not the only thing driving Israeli policy. The sudden emergence of serious competitors on Bibi Netanyahu’s right flank accounts for much of what is going on as well. Here’s a teaser:
Over the past few weeks, the Israeli government has been on a building spree. First came word that planning and zoning would begin for E1, a controversial move that would further encircle East Jerusalem with settlements — cutting off from the West Bank the part of the city Palestinians demand to be the capital of their future state. As part of the same announcement, Israel said that it was going to build more housing in other parts of the West Bank as well.
This week, the government approved 1500 new housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in East Jerusalem — the same housing units whose initial announcement in 2010 during Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel caused a temporary rift between the United States and Israel and Hilary Clinton’s chewing-out of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Interior Ministry and the Jerusalem Local Committee are also expected to approve plans to build in Givat Hamatos and Gilo this week, both of which are new Jerusalem neighborhoods that are also across the 1967 armistice line that divides East and West Jerusalem.
This is all taking place despite enormous pressure and condemnation from Western countries, who are not happy with the escalation of Israeli plans to expand settlements or to build up Jerusalem neighborhoods that challenge the viability of a future Palestinian state. Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal are about to formally condemn Israel over its East Jerusalem building plans, and the 14 non-American members of the United Nations Security Council are going to do the same. Even the United States seems to have lost its usual patience with the Israeli government, deeming the new building announcements part of a “pattern of provocative action” that endangers the peace process and the two-state solution. Israel seems hell-bent on isolating itself over the settlement issue, and appears determined to move ahead with plans for both the West Bank and East Jerusalem no matter the cost.
It is easy to chalk this up to Israel’s fury with the Palestinian Authority’s statehood bid at the United Nations, as the E1 announcement came the day after the vote, amidst stated determination on Israel’s part to punish the Palestinians for pursuing unilateral moves outside of the Oslo framework. “We felt if the Palestinians were taking unilateral action in the UN, we had to also send the message that we could take unilateral actions,” Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren said this week, making the connection explicit.
Yet, this does not account for the scope of the recent Israeli announcements, or for the seeming recklessness of drawing real anger and censure from Israel’s Western allies immediately following American and EU support during Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza. There is indeed something else going on here, and it has nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with the political jockeying taking place on the right of Israel’s political spectrum before Israelis go to the polls on January 22 to elect their next government.
To read the article in its entirety, please click over to the Atlantic’s website.
Thinking Strategically on Settlements
July 13, 2012 § 1 Comment
Shimon Peres gave a speech this week in which he warned about the danger that settlements pose to Israel’s Jewish majority. He spoke about a “threatening demographic change” and pointed out that without a Jewish majority, Israel will cease to be a Jewish state. This prompted predictable outrage from the right, with Yesha head Dani Dayan inveighing that the only danger to the Jewish state is conceding the right to the West Bank and 350 rabbis sending Peres a letter in which they said he should beg for forgiveness for the peace process and criticized his “hallucinatory ideas.” Peres’s speech also, however, brought opprobrium from the left, as various people were upset that Peres framed the problem with settlements as a strategic problem rather than an ethical or moral one. In this view, the primary problem with the settlements is that they are furthering the occupation and preventing a Palestinian state, and thus the argument against them should be that Israel is perpetrating an unethical policy in the West Bank and settlements should be denounced primarily as conflicting with the value of a democratic state and a Jewish state.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but it ignores the politics of the situation and misses the long view. The left and center-left do not need any convincing on the need for Israel to abandon the settlement enterprise outside of the major settlement blocs that Israel will presumably keep in a peace deal. If there is to ever be real movement on this issue, it is the right that needs to be brought around, and arguments about Palestinian rights are unlikely to be convincing. I do not mean to suggest that everybody on the right is completely unconcerned with the status of the Palestinians on the West Bank, but this has historically not been a winning argument on the right. If the right is to be swayed, it will be by arguments about Israel’s security and future, and in that sense, the demographic argument is the only one in town. I’ve heard that people in the upper ranks of the government don’t take the demographic threat seriously and believe that time is actually on Israel’s side, and I have had similar impressions in talking to friends and colleagues who are more rightwing on Israel issues than I am. When I was in Turkey two years ago, I got into what turned into a heated discussion with an older American Jewish couple whom I met while their cruise ship was docked in Istanbul for the weekend. During a conversation about Israel where I brought up the argument that Israel was running out of time to separate from the West Bank, the wife heatedly insisted that I had no idea what I was talking about because her daughter lives in Israel and has five kids, and so she absolutely refuses to believe that in 20 years there will be just as many Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank as there are Jews. The only way to convince rightwingers and conservatives that settlements need to be dealt with is to keep on pushing the demographic argument and make people realize that every day that passes increases the possibility of a binational one state Israeli future. This is why Peres’s speech was the correct response to the Levy Report, and while it might make folks on the left upset, a little more strategic thinking on this issue is required.
On a similar note, this is why I think that the Levy Report is so dangerous and why I disagree with Brent Sasley’s argument that Levy does not represent anything new. Has Israel been extending its control over the West Bank? Yes, it has. But that doesn’t mean that the Levy Report is not a dangerous development, because by legally eviscerating the line between Tel Aviv in Israel proper and Efrat over the Green Line, and between authorized settlement bloc Ariel and unauthorized outpost Migron, it brings a one state solution ever closer (for those whose Hebrew is less than stellar, Elder of Ziyon has a useful translation of the legal reasoning section of the Levy Report). The report’s significance is not in what it signals about past Israeli intention in the West Bank, but in what it signals about Israel’s political future and survival as a Jewish state. Brent and others think that the report is simply more of the same and that the declaration that there is no occupation is just the Israeli right showing its true colors in a more public manner, but this loses sight of the fact that Levy represents the opening salvo in the growing calls for a rightwing one state solution. Quite simply, this will be the end of Israel as we know it, and the right needs to be convinced that this is a path to oblivion. If this requires hammering away at the demographic argument and dropping language steeped in morality and ethics, so be it. Peres is on to the right idea here, and people on the left and the center should start thinking along these lines as well.
