Dream begins to fade under state of siege Sydney Morning Herald January 19, 2008
Palestinians see Israel's continued settlement building as proof of its bad faith in negotiations for a viable Palestinian state, writes Ed O'Loughlin. Visiting the Holy Land last week the US President, George Bush, repeatedly spoke of his vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, living in peace and security "side by side". Had Bush experienced more of the occupied territories than he did on his two short trips to Ramallah and Bethlehem he might have seen another vision taking shape in valleys and on hilltops, one expressed not in words but in concrete. A future, already at hand, in which two peoples live not side by side but one beneath the other. Take, for example, El Khader, only a few minutes' drive south of Jerusalem, where the Palestinian conurbation of greater Bethlehem comes up against Route 60, the West Bank's main north-south highway. Driving south along the road this Tuesday, the Israeli rights activist Hagit Ofran pointed out the high concrete wall separating the road, from which most Palestinian vehicles are banned, from the Arab city to the east. Then she gestured towards a large hole being dug on the other side of the road. "That," she said, "is going to be a tunnel. Five Palestinian villages are now trapped west of the wall and the road, between here and the Israeli border and the Jewish settlements over there. "So Israel is building a tunnel for the villagers under its road. The tunnel will also have an Israeli checkpoint. If they want to go to Bethlehem the villagers can wait however long it takes them to get through the checkpoint. If they want to have visitors they won't be able to. Only the people who live in those villages will be allowed through. Eighteen thousand people will live only through this tunnel." El Khader fell away behind and she pointed to the left again, to long lines of handsome, red-tiled houses stretching for three or four kilometres along a scenic ridge. "That's the Jewish settlement of Efrat. It lies on the east side of the road, so here the Israeli fence is going to go all the way round still further into the West Bank to include it on the Israeli side." A little further on the road narrows and begins to wind a little, passing through a couple of small Palestinian villages. "That nice valley you see below us, to the right, full of cultivation, is going to be a new bypass road for the settlers," she says. "So they don't have to pass through Palestinian villages any more. It's being built on security grounds, so the army doesn't even have to formally confiscate the land from the farmers. It can just tell them it's seizing it temporarily, and that maybe they'll get it back some day when it doesn't need it anymore." That, she suspects, won't be any time soon. As a field monitor for the Israeli group Peace Now, Ofran is responsible for monitoring the steadily growing Israeli network of hilltop settlements and military bases, industrial zones, restricted "bypass roads", walls and fences. Taken altogether, rights groups and United Nations observers say, Israel's West Bank infrastructure is turning the territory into an archipelago of disconnected Arab enclaves, controlled by walls, fences and checkpoints which Palestinian people and goods cannot cross without Israeli military permission. In the settlements and on the bypass roads, meanwhile, Jewish settlers and visiting Israelis - even foreign tourists with no connection to the land - enjoy freedom of movement and superior rights and protections to the indigenous Palestinians. Bush may have spoken forcefully of the need for a contiguous Palestinian territory - "Swiss cheese isn't going to work when it comes to the territory of a state" - but with at least half of the West Bank land already allocated to settler or Israeli military use, according to the Israeli rights group B'tselem, there seems to be little room left for a Palestinian state. Even moderate Palestinians are now asking whether Israel's introduction of more than 450,000 settlers into the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in defiance of international opinion and law, has killed off lingering hopes for the Palestinian state that both sides supposedly agreed to in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Increasingly there is talk of a "one-state solution", whereby the 3.7 million Palestinians of the occupied territories would, like residents of black homelands in apartheid South Africa, reject talk of autonomy and instead demand equal citizenship in the state that in practice controls their lives. Together with the 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel, the Palestinians are already approaching in number Israel's 5.4 million Jews. Palestinian demands for equal rights would therefore pose a deadly threat to the Zionist state's aim of remaining both Jewish and democratic as even the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert - formerly a champion of "Great Israel" - recently warned. "For me the one-state solution is not a political goal - the Israelis would not accept it - but it's rapidly becoming a reality," says Hanan Ashrawi, an independent Palestinian MP and winner of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize. "The settlements and walls and roads and tunnels are the superimposition of an Israeli reality over Palestinian land, a grid put in place to control Palestinian movement, resources and land, that is making it impossible to build a Palestinian state." The facts established, she says, already closely resemble the former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's proposal to impose on the Palestinians a "state" consisting of isolated "cantons", connected by Israeli-controlled bridges and tunnels. "Any sane person knows they can't swallow the land without the people, they can't expel all of us and they can't destroy all of us," she says. "What they are condemning us to instead is to occupation that will last for generations." While most Israelis blame Palestinian terrorism for the repeated failure of peace initiatives, Palestinians see Israel's incessant settlement building as proof of its bad faith in past negotiations. Far from declining with the signing of the Oslo Accords, the pace of settlement growth accelerated dramatically, so that there are now three times as many Jews living in the occupied territories as there were in 1993. The Israeli Government even drew rare criticism from the US when, only days after Bush's Middle East peace conference in Annapolis last November, it announced plans to build hundreds of new homes in two Jewish settlements on the outskirts of Jerusalem, further isolating Arab areas of the city from the rest of the West Bank. The announcement was a grave embarrassment to Israel's supposed negotiating partner for the "two-state solution" - the Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas - struggling to retain some authority despite his loss of the Gaza Strip to Hamas last year and his repeated failure to win any significant relaxation in the occupation regime in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, a rump government without a state or territory, responded by cancelling several meetings with Israeli negotiators. Bush's visit last week finally gave the impetus for talks to begin, even though Olmert bluntly stated in Bush's presence that Israel's previous promises to freeze settlement do not oblige it to stop building in large West Bank settlements or anywhere in East Jerusalem, which Israel has unilaterally declared to be its sovereign territory. "We do believe that there is a natural growth issue - if a family has another child and needs another room we approve that, if they need a new school we approve that," says Arye Mekel, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "As far as Jerusalem is concerned there is a basic disagreement between us and the Palestinians . We don't see that this is a settlement issue. We need to set it aside for a little while." He rejects Palestinian charges that the settlements have left them no room for a viable state and that, by continuing to expand them, Israel's actions speak louder than its words. "The fact is that we are discussing every issue and every issue can be on the table," says Mekel. "The borders of the Palestinian state are a real issue. We are trying to define them together . Nobody has said all the settlements will stay. All that is said is that there will be painful concessions on either side." But after Israel's 2005 withdrawal of 7500 settlers from Gaza, the predominantly Jewish fundamentalist settler movement has vowed to resist, violently if need be, any further attempts to uproot Jews from what they see as their sacred homeland. Not only do these "religious Zionists" feel, like many of their secular counterparts, that Jews have a superior historical right to live in the Holy Land, most also believe it is their religious duty to further extend Jewish control over all of "the Biblical Land of Israel". "It was never their [the Muslims'] land," says Arieh King, a leading campaigner for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem and a reserve officer in an elite Israeli commando unit. "They lived there but for how long? One hundred or two hundred years. Can you compare that to two thousand years or three thousand years, like the Jews? The Christians have more rights here than the Arabs. They were here before them." He dismisses the notion that today's Palestinian Muslims could be descended in large part from the mainly Christian Palestinians who converted to Islam following the Arab invasions in the seventh and eighth centuries. "There was nobody here when the Arabs came. The Christians all ran away back to Europe, and there was only 10 or 12 thousand Jews who never left their homeland." A self-avowed racist, King is a leading light in a movement, financed as far as is known mainly by wealthy foreign Jews and - critics say - with quiet backing from the state, to secretly acquire Arab property in East Jerusalem to build Jewish settlements. "It's racist because I believe any Jew that believes in our holy book, the Bible, or any Christian who believes in the Bible, he knows that Jerusalem was and will forever be a Jewish city, the capital of the Jewish nation, of the state of Israel. I'm a Jew, and I'm not ashamed to say that what is interesting to me is the future of the Jewish nation, not the future of the Muslim nation . The Arabs can do whatever they want. I'd prefer them to take the money that we are offering them to sell up and leave the country." Such views have their counterparts on the Palestinian side, where Muslim fundamentalists talk of all Palestine, including Israel, as sacred Islamic soil from which all infidels - and especially Jews - should forcibly be driven. Rabbi Arik Ascherman bemoans the notion that Jews should concern themselves only with Jewish rights and welfare. A leader of an 80-strong Israeli group called Rabbis for Human Rights, this week he and several supporters were again risking assault and arrest by placing themselves between Palestinian farmers and the extremist settlers who were trying to prevent them from tending their olive trees. "A lot of what the settlers say has some basis in the Bible, but at the same time one of the first things we learn from the Book of Genesis is that all people are created in God's image," he said. "One way to understand that is that we have an obligation to honour God's image in every human being. I think the major dividing line in the Jewish world today is not whether you are Reform or Conservative or Orthodox or secular. It's whether you see our basic obligations as human beings as only being towards our fellow Jews - or even just to our fellow Jews in our own community - or do you have the same obligations towards all other human beings."
