I am totally delighted that the Israeli Knesset has voted for the bill that authorizes the compensation package for the 9,000 settlers who’ll be relocated out of Gaza this summer.
Here are some details from a story filed late Wednesday by AP’s Ravi Nessman:
- The bill, approved Wednesday by a vote of 59 to 40 with five abstentions, allocated $871 million for the estimated 9,000 settlers who will be displaced when Israel pulls down all 21 settlements in Gaza and four others in the northern West Bank.
The vote took hours as legislators decided on nearly 200 proposed amendments, soundly defeating one requiring a national referendum on the plan. Sharon has rejected such a vote as a delaying tactic.
The plan still needs to overcome several more hurdles before it can be implemented.
Sharon must pass a budget by March 31 or his government will collapse, possibly taking the withdrawal down with it, because a new election would have to be called…
The Cabinet will hold a procedural vote Sunday on the plan and will have separate votes later on each of the withdrawal’s four phases.
It seems to me that the settlers have gotten themselves a wonderful deal.
Imagine this: You take your family to a lovely seaside villa built on somebody else’s land (maybe some of the land expropriated for the Sinai settlements from my friend Freih Abu-Middain?) The government is so keen to have you move there that they give you all kinds of sweet deals on financing or renting your home, and perhaps the lovely irrigated orchards all around it. (Did you ever read Amira Hass’s lovely book Drinking the sea at Gaza, where she writes about the strong salinity of the water the Gaza Palestinians have to make do with, given how much of their customary water supplies have been overdrawn by Israel and the settlements?)
… Anyway, moving right along, you’re this Israeli settler, and you’ve been having this lovely life there. And then the government comes and tells you, sorry buddy, it’s time you moved out… and they give you nearly $100,000 for every man, woman, or child in your family.
Wow!
Great work if you can get it, eh?
Nessman gives more details of how the buyout will work:
- Under the plan, a couple with two children who have rented a home in a settlement for the past 15 years would receive just over $230,000. A similar family who owned a home would get about 30 percent more, or about $300,000. Families who own farmland or businesses in an affected settlement or who agree to move to development zones in the Negev desert or the Galilee would receive extra money.
Note those uses of the word “own”. Own???? What the heck are they talking about?
This is from Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949:
- The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
Time was, many people in the US were a little fuzzy on what a “military occupation” or an “Occupying Power” was. Not so much now, I think. We have, sadly, much more general familiarity with the situation.
So would Americans support implanting whole communities of US citizens into a territory our army happened to be in occupation of? I think most of us would see the unfairness of that.
The Geneva Conventions were extensively re-codified and adopted in their present form in 1949, precisely in light of the gross kinds of abuses the Nazis had committed in the territory that they had brought under military occupation throughout Europe.
There is a very good reason for the limitations clearly laid out in Article 49. And every government in the world except that of Israel (what a coincidence!) considers that Gaza, the whole West Bank, and Golan are all still “occupied territory”. They didn’t stop being that under Oslo, as Israeli government lawyers made clear at the time… And they won’t stop being technically “occupied territory”– that is, territory in which Israel as occupying power has many continuing responsibilities for the welfare of the indigenous residents– until a final peace treaty is signed.
Please. Let’s hope that’s soon.
Meanwhile, back in the Israeli debate over the Gaza withdrawal, Nessman notes the extreme, hateful kinds of threats some of the militant settlers have been making against Sharon and other architects of the pro-withdrawal movement:
- Former Jerusalem police chief Aryeh Amit said the rhetoric was reminiscent of the atmosphere preceding the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist.
“All the signs that there were then, which people pretty much ignored, are back again but much clearer,” he told Army Radio. “The extreme right is saying that now war has really been declared, and in their view, in war they feel they are entitled to do anything they want.”
Nessman also quotes the head of the Settlers’ Council as saying the parliament’s passage of the withdrawal-funding vote (by 59 to 40!) marked, “a black day for democracy.”
How’s that again? I can understand that maybe they’re upset. But “a black day for democracy”?
Let’s talk democracy in Israel/Palestine. Let’s talk numbers of actual living, breathing men, women, and kids.
First, a clear majority of Jewish Israelis support this withdrawal; and according to the Steinmetz Center’s opinion polling a strong majority also supports considerably deeper withdrawals in the West Bank than the ones Sharon is as yet proposing.
But that’s only within the “universe” of the 5 million Jewish Israelis. Then, there are 1 million Palestinian Israelis, that is, Israeli citizens who are of indigenous Palestinian ethnicity. Then there are 3 million-plus Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. Then there are at least 4 million Palestinian refugees– people, that is, whose claims on their ancestral homeland have not been annulled by any amount of forced migration out of it, and who therefore still have a claim on its bounteousness and resources.
Well, I guess if we’re talking “democracy” these days– and some of the weirdest people in the world seem to want to do so– then I make that into a total of 8 million-plus ethnic Palestinians who have a claim on the land, and around 5 million Jewish Israelis.
I wonder when, at any of these different levels, “democracy” came to mean the imposition by the minority of its will upon the majority?
The Palestinians, meanwhile, have since 1974 been offering to cede their claim to the exercise of national rights over some 77% of their original homeland (though of course the Palestinian Israelis have not ceded their claims to individual civil and political rights within Israel, at all.) That Palestinian offer has met with some good response, from some Israelis. But oh no, not from the settlers, who have been the spoiled babies of Israeli politics for ways too long.
And now, they’re getting paid handsomely to, in effect, “stop beating their wives.”
You can guess who gets to pay that “compensation” to them, can’t you? All of us suckers here in the US who’ve been paying for the whole illegal settlement project (in more ways than one), all along.
Okay, fair enough. Maybe. If it’ll help lead to a sustainable and “fair-enough” peace. But when will we see an equivalent amount being paid from our tax $$ to help compensate and/or repatriate the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families who have been stuck in forced exile for 58 years now?
Helena wrote:
The Palestinians, meanwhile, have since 1974 been offering to cede…
This text is a link to Word document from the “Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research of Tel Aviv University” that says nothing about ceding or 77%. Was this a mistaken link?
Um, the problem is that the first link was not properly terminated with <⁄a>.
This is the text about the opinion poll. Put the <⁄a> after the text “yet proposing”
Oops, my HTML mistake there, now corrected. That was ways past my bedtime when I posted it.
So here’s what I don’t get.
Why not just let them stay there if these so-called settlers like Gaza so much. They can pay taxes to a Palestinian state, depend on Palestinian police for protection, carry Palestinian passports, and defend their land claims in Palestinian courts if indeed they are legitimate claims.
If Palestinians can live as a minority within Israel, then Jews certainly should be able to live as a minority within a Palestinian state.
On the other hand, why not expand the deal? Now that Texas has turned Republican I could use a similar buyout so my wife and I can cash out and return to the safety of a blue state! After all, fair is fair and it is ultimately the same tax dollars that pay for it.
Helena:
You or I can say (for whatever it’s worth) “You don’t own that land, you have no right to compensation, in fact you owe $x.y million back rent to the Palestinian Authority / J. Random Falasteeni.” But the Government of Israel can’t reasonably say that after years of assuring the settlers that the land was theirs.
The first link in the post is to a story about Shaul Mofaz’ decision to end home demolitions, not the Knesset vote on disengagement. (I assume, also, that the second Nessman quote ends with “anything they want,” and the subsequent paragraphs are your comment.)
At any rate, I think it’s fairly obvious when the Palestinian refugees will be compensated: every serious final-status proposal made thus far has called for such compensation. It also seems fairly obvious why the Israeli government is paying generous compensation to the Gaza settlers: in order to convince as many as possible to go quietly, and to minimize the possibility of violence. Sharon paying compensation to the settlers (for whom, as you know, I have less than no sympathy) is no more objectionable than Abbas choosing to co-opt rather than disarm Hamas; both are working within their respective political constraints and trying to do what’s necessary without destroying social cohesion. And for the record, I don’t believe the United States is providing any additional financial aid to facilitate the evacuation, and it has pledged $350 million this year to the PA.
Kent: Some Israeli settlers have expressed the wish to remain in Gaza as Palestinian citizens, but isn’t it up to the Palestinians whether to grant this request? As non-Palestinians, they don’t have an inherent right to Palestinian citizenship any more than non-Israelis have an inherent right to Israeli citizenship.
Oh gosh, sorry about that first link. (Which I’ve now removed.) I looked for that same Nessman story again today on the Yahoo feed, but they’d put a new lede onto it so it wasn’t quite the same. And maybe it wouldn’t be a stable link, anyway.
Hey, I’m really sorry, folks; it was worse than I thought.
When I hit “publish” on this post last night I’d left in another HTML error, in addition to the one WarrenW caught. The other one made a chunk of text in the middle of the post fairly unintelligible.
I’ve now corrected it.
That’ll teach me to post so long after bed-time, eh?
Here’s a permanent link to an article about the disengagement vote.
furthermore, isaac herzog (the current housing minister and member of the labor party) recently came out saying that there would be nothing stopping the settlers, after being compensated handsomely as helena points out, from moving into a west bank settlement. he says that would be “totally within his [the settler’s] rights”. huh? rights? he says that it would be fine to move to gush etzion because that fell within israel in clinton’s 2000 proposal. as if clinton’s proposal is now the gospel. gimme a break.
Maybe it would be cheaper to just pay the Palestinians to leave….
Sweet deal? The Palestinians are getting more external aid per capita than the recipients of the Marshall plan, and unlike the Marshall plan they have nothing to show for.
Sweet deal was for the Pakistanis that got $800 per family of US debt erased for their token collaboration against the Taliban/Al Qaeda disease.
Sweet deal was for Egypt to get its US debt erased for their participation in the Gulf War coalition, where they saw no military action.
Sweet deal is for the Iraqis to have their foreign debt erased in spite of their inability to even credibly protect themselves at the most basic level.
All these are paid with somebody else’s money. Israel can do with its budget as it pleases, in particular when the allocation was arrived at within a democratic process at the Knesset. The settlers were sent on a mission by the nation, and maybe the nation is grateful to them even if the mission is longer needed. The settlers did not go there for the money, for the fertility of the land, for the night life, or for the appeal of the neighborhood.
Your obsession Helena with Israel is getting to pathological dimensions, blog rules or not there is no other way to describe it.
David
Was Jonathan Edelstein trying to slip one past us Palsymps here?
As non-Palestinians, they don’t have an inherent right to Palestinian citizenship any more than non-Israelis have an inherent right to Israeli citizenship.
As non-Palestinians, they don’t have an inherent right to Palestinian citizenship any more than non-Israelis other than the refugees of 1947/48 have an inherent right to Israeli citizenship.
David – Don’t bother. You can’t respond to mendaciousness and bile with facts.
It doesn’t matter to some people that the Jews were expelled from Gaza by the British in the 1920s to ‘protect’ them from Arab pogroms and that despite this Kfar Darom was rebuilt pre-1948, before the Jews were once again ethnically clensed by the Egyptians. Don’t even bother explaining about the 1700-year-old synagogues in Gaza or the continuous Jewish presence in Gaza from Joshua to Yochanan to Benjamin of Tuleda to Rabbi Azoulai to Nissim Ohana.
Again, facts don’t matter… just as Helena won’t question why an area in Gaza might be known as “Khart Al Yahood” (the Jewish neighborhood). Only Palestinians have rights; only Jews have obligations. Ethnic cleansing of any other community would be an abomination, but when it is the Jews that is ok.
What Israel is doing by forcing the Jews to leave is a crime against humanity. However, it is necessary, because if Israel doesn’t do it, it knows that the Palestinians will do it (or worse) and it knows that once again the world would just stand by and say isn’t that a shame.
This is a tragedy and, by showing no sympathy, Helena once again shows her true colors.
Was Jonathan Edelstein trying to slip one past us Palsymps here?
Quite possibly. I’ll grant that those Palestinians who lived in what is now Israel prior to 1948 have a moral right to citizenship under the ius soli, and possibly a legal right under Resolution 194. (I say “possibly” because 194 conditioned the refugees’ right of return on their willingness to “live at peace with their neighbours,” and if I were arguing the case for Israel in a court of law, I might contend that the refugees’ representative organizations forfeited this right by not agreeing to that term for several decades.)
At the same time, it’s clear that the repatriation of Palestinian refugees (and even the question of who qualifies as a refugee) has long since become a political rather than a legal issue. It’s also clear that in most cases their legal and/or moral rights will be purchased with financial compensation (which is also provided for in 194, although the resolution appears to contemplate individual rather than collective decisions). So yes, the refugees may have an inherent right, but one that isn’t politicfally meaningful at this point. Your mileage may vary.
Jonathan Edelstein:
. . . the refugees may have an inherent right, but one that isn’t politicfally meaningful at this point.
Politically infeasible? Sure. Politically irrelevant? No way. [Details left to the reader to prevent threadjacking.]
And every government in the world except that of Israel (what a coincidence!) considers
that Gaza, the whole West Bank, and Golan are all still “occupied territory”.
This is incorrect or misleading. Israel goes to amusing lengths to disguise and hide its own official position, but the official position of the state of Israel agrees with everybody else – it is and always has been that these territories are occupied by Israel, and that the law of belligerent occupation applies there. Take a look at paragraphs 1 and 23 of Israel’s recent wall decision: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=21369 . Israeli statements for widespread consumption usually say now that they should not be called occupied territories, not that they are not occupied territories. Like the name of God, I guess, the word “occupied” is too holy to be said.
By the way, elsewhere, Argyll (and Warren W) referred to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. While perhaps well enough speaking loosely, to go beyond, like Argyll, and speak of Syria as an “Occupying Power” with Geneva Convention responsibilities, to imply there is a Syrian occupation under international law, is nonsense; agreement is equally universal here. For the law of belligerent occupation to come into play a belligerency – a (nonexistent) Syrian war with Lebanon – would have been necessary.