No Way Out of the Settlement Conflict? by Wiliam Pfaff

No Way Out of the Settlement Conflict?

Wiliam Pfaff

Paris, June 25, 2009 – The Obama administration’s confrontation
with Israel over its colonies inside the Palestine territories began
as a test of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s willingness to enter
serious negotiations on a Middle Eastern settlement. It actually
possesses potential dimensions that few today imagine.

Netanyahu first counted on the Likud and settlement lobbies
in Washington to produce, as always in the past, a disingenuous
formula that would allow the colonies to continue to expropriate
Palestinian land and expand the settlements, while the American
government oversaw essentially meaningless negotiations with the
Palestinians.

The prime minister was just in Europe, and told
RAI, Italian state radio, that after President Barack Obama had
declared in his Cairo speech that the construction of new settlements
must stop, he – Netanyahu – had replied “No,” but had accepted
Obama’s call for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, which he
previously had refused, provided that it took place under specified
conditions.

The conditions would deny a prospective Palestine state of
full sovereignty, control of its frontiers or of its security,
economy and trade, airspace, and water and other natural resources.
The conditions are obviously unacceptable, as they are meant to be.

Netanyahu’s proposal constituted a message to the Palestinians that
they should expect nothing from his government, and to Barack Obama
that Israel expects the United States to ask nothing further from it,
and to resume the meaningless negotiations that have gone on since
the first George Bush tried and failed to confront Israel on
extension of the settlements.

The Israeli president went on to say, “I think the more we
spend time arguing about [the settlements] the more we waste time
instead of moving towards peace.”

On Wednesday he paid an official visit to France, expecting
congratulations on his agreement to the creation of a Palestinian
state. Instead, President Nicolas Sarkozy told him that France
“would no longer accept Israeli subterfuges meant to disguise colony
construction by the pretext of ‘natural growth’ in the settlements.”

This position already had been characterized by Israeli Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman as making it “impossible for Israel to
build synagogues or kindergartens, or to add rooms for expanding
families in the settlements.”

Lieberman, who immigrated to Israel from Moldavia, wishes Israel’s
Arab citizens – survivors of the original Arab population of what is
now Israel -- issued with special identity documents and encouraged
to quit Israel. One might think that if they did they would leave
real estate vacancies that could accommodate expanding Jewish settler
families.

Prime Minister Netanyahu was scheduled to meet on Thursday in Paris with
former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy
on Middle Eastern affairs, but the meeting was canceled by the
American side (according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth),
and Mitchell stayed in Washington. The White Houses unofficially
made it known that there would be no further meetings with Netanyahu
until there was a real settlement freeze. (The Israeli denial of the
newspaper report, and the Washington statement that the cancellation
was mutual, were obvious flimflam.)

Now this is all very well, in principle a long-overdue restoration
of justice and realism to American policy on Israel and Palestine,
but what follows? Would the American position on a settlement freeze
be enforced with financial or political sanctions if the Netanyahu
government refused to yield?

Netanyahu was elected in order to defy the United States on the
colonies and on Palestinian statehood. Since few sensible people in
Israel wish to alienate Washington, the Netanyahu government, again
in principle, might be brought down by American sanctions.

What then? The settlement movement, which has gone on now for some
four decades, has become integral to the Israeli perception of
national destiny and national security. The number of Israeli
settlers in the West Bank and the Palestinian sector of Jerusalem now
approaches a half-million. The settlements with their connecting
roads, security installations and outposts dominate some 40 percent
of the West Bank Territories.

Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in
Washington, sympathetic to the Palestinians, writes in the
Foundation’s most recent newsletter that merely a freeze in
settlement construction would require Israel to “undo the system by
which the military establishment, the legislative and executive arms
of the state, settlers, and public, private, and supranational
communal organizations collaborate in the encouragement and expansion
of settlements.”

Major elements in the state administration, defense forces,
planning and budget agencies, and security programs and practices,
plus the incentives to individuals and business to develop the
settlements, would have to be undone.

He concludes that even a real freeze would require “an undertaking
so complex and requiring an Israeli political decision so profound
that no Israeli government would undertake [it] except as a result of
a broader decision to terminate [the entire occupation of the
Palestinian territories].”

That is wholly impossible without a huge, internationally-
guaranteed reconstruction of the security relationships of
Palestinians, Israelis, and the surrounding Arab states, which is all
but unimaginable. But then what is imaginable? Going on as things
are? Clarification of Obama administration policy is essential.

© Copyright Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.



This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com
The URL for this article is:
http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=411