Israel’s settlements: Beyond the freeze

To some extent, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is right. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is not the freeze on additional settlement construction that’s being demanded by the US and its buddies in the ‘Quartet’. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is making the Israeli-Palestinian peace. A final peace, that is.
And as everyone including Israel’s own settlers realizes, winning that peace will involve a significant evacuation of the settlements that Israel has invested so heavily in putting into the occupied West Bank for the past 42 years.
Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak is being dispatched to Washington today to try to win some flexibility for Israel’s large settlement-building interests. Haaretz daily also reported today that Barak’s defense ministry has approved the immediate building of 50 new homes in the settlement of Adam– part of a plan that will eventually put 1,450 new homes there.
Around 500,000 Jewish Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Any move by an occupying power to settle its own citizens in occupied areas has since 1949 been deemed quite illegal under international law.
In today’s NYT, Ethan Bronner reported on an interview he got with Barak on the eve of the latter’s departure to Washington, that:

    Mr. Barak himself declined to address the question of a temporary freeze, … saying only that settlements should be viewed as one issue in a larger framework needed to create a Middle East peace.
    “For us, it is very important that the Palestinians commit to seeking an end to the conflict and a finality of any claims,” he said. “We should not isolate this issue of settlements and make it the most important one. It has to be discussed in the context of a larger peace discussion.”
    He added, “Many Israelis fear that what Palestinians want is not two states but two stages,” meaning an end to Israel in phases. He also said that by focusing solely on settlement building and not on what the Arab countries should also be doing for peace, Israel felt that it was being driven to its knees and delivered to the other side rather than asked to join a shared effort.

Barak is right to note that the real issue is that of securing the final peace. And it is not at all unreasonable for him to spell out what Israel’s expectations of such a peace would be, just as it is not unreasonable for the Palestinians to spell out what their expectations are, as well.
But Barak is wrong to imply that getting an immediate freeze on settlement building is somehow unrelated to the quest for a final peace between the two sides. At its root, after all, the big issue between Israelis and Palestinians is a dispute over real estate: who gets what.
International law stipulates that being an occupying power– as Israel is in the West Bank and in Syria’s Golan, or as the US has been for the past six years in Iraq– confers no rights at all to sovereignty over the territory occupied.
(Just this week, the US is taking the first big step toward the complete withdrawal from Iraq that was negotiated with the Iraqi government last November. And the US has never sought to exploit its position as occupying power by moving groups of permanent American “settlers” into Iraq.)
But throughout the 42 years Israel has been the occupying power in the West Bank, it has put those 500,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers in there. And the fact of their presence inside the West Bank already makes a complete Israeli withdrawal from the area thousands of times harder to contemplate than it would have been without them there– just as Ariel Sharon and other highly placed settlement boosters all along intended.
But the idea that the Israeli government would continue boosting the settlers’ numbers (and their consumption of scarce West bank resources like land and water) while the permanent-status negotiations continue defies belief, and should be seen as a major indicator of lack of Israeli good faith in the negotiation.
It is as if, during a property dispute I’d have with my neighbor here in Virginia, in which all the law indicates my ownership of the property in question, she blithely continued to build a new condo complex on the property. In agreeing to take on my suit against my neighbor, one of the first things a judge would do would be to issue a “cease and desist” order against her building operations.
In the Israeli-Palestinian dispute it is effectively the US that has for many years now taken on the role of “judge” in the dispute. “Cease and desist” is the very least this judge should require as a token of Israel’s good faith and good intent in the final-status negotiations that must surely soon get underway. (Otherwise, where is the territorial basis for the independent Palestinian state? Where are the provisions of international law that must undergird any agreement among the world’s nations if it is to have any durability or legitimacy?)
There is a good question, however, as to how much political capital President Obama should actually expend on trying to win Israel’s compliance with the “cease and desist” order. And here I think that so far he has played the diplomatic/political game quite effectively.
He and his officials have all remained quite firm on verbally requesting a complete settlement freeze, and on justifying that request in the public arena; but they have as yet undertaken no actual policy actions to hold Israel accountable for following through on that demand. My sense is that they are holding their political “big guns” for a confrontation with Netanyahu’s government that may well lie shortly ahead– over the big issue of the final-status peace.
Meanwhile, by rhetorically holding firm on the settlement-building issue they have been able to educate many key members of the US Congress about the importance of the territorial issues underlying it, and about Netanyahu’s lack of good faith in this negotiating arena. They have also quietly but steadily been building the domestic constituency inside the US for forthright action on securing the final peace.
For the Palestinians and the Arab states, an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank is currently seen as an essential precursor to the resumption of any final-status talks with Israel. This is a cautious position that is solidly rooted in the Palestinians’ 18-year history of negotiating with Israel.
In the Oslo Accord of 1993, which was only an interim agreement between the PLO and Israel, both sides committed to completing their final-status peace agreement before 1999… But that deadline slipped by. From 1996 through 1999 Israel’s prime minister was Benjamin Netanyahu. He almost totally refused to negotiate final-status issues with the Palestinians, agreeing only reluctantly to engage on negotiations on a very few, very small, further “interim” steps. Meanwhile, throughout those post-Oslo years, Israel’s settlement-building program went into high gear.
So by 1999 the Palestinians did not have the promised final-status peace agreement; and meanwhile the territorial base on which they could hope to establish their state had been significantly further eroded.
Then in Annapolis in November 2007, no less a figure (!) than Pres. George W. Bush publicly vowed that his final peacemaking would result in securing the text of a final-status peace agreement before the end of his presidency. It didn’t happen. Indeed, as his presidency entered its final days Israel was pounding the Palestinians in Gaza extremely harshly and the very shaky peace talks that had been underway with Mahmoud Abbas fell completely apart, having gotten almost nowhere.
Oh, and throughout the period of what was once lauded as “the Annapolis process” Israel’s government implanted many additional thousands of settlers into the West Bank. That, in spite of what were supposed to be its commitments under the 2002 Road Map.
Fool me once, shame on you? Fool me twice, shame on me? Fool me three times– what?
That history certainly fuels much of the stress that the Palestinians– all Palestinians– place on the need for a settlement freeze. But they too, all of them, also share Ehud Barak’s view that the biggest imperative right now is not (just) a settlement freeze. And it is not (just) the lifting of a few roadblocks here or there in the West Bank; it is not (just) improving the quantity and mix of freight that Israel allows into Gaza, or Israel’s release of some proportion of the 11,000 Palestinian “security” detainees it currently holds in its prisons…
After all, any or all of those actions if taken by Israel can very easily be reversed so long as Israel is the still the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza. Recall how Likud strategic-affairs thinker Efraim Inbar talked about this in the amazingly candid interview he gave me back in March.
What the Palestinians, like Ehud Barak and also (if his rhetoric is to be believed) Benjamin Netanyahu, seek above all is a final-status peace between these two nations.
Yes, of course the two sides will enter into this negotiation with widely differing opening “requirements” and requests. That is natural. But if the US is to help midwife a final peace between them that is sufficiently fair to everyone concerned that it ends up being durable, then this peace must take international law as a starting point that can help it sift through and give due consideration to the claims and desires of both parties.
Pres. Obama has expressed his commitment to winning a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace since his earliest days in office. Thus far he has not defined a deadline for reaching this goal. (It’s probably wise to be a bit cautious on that, given the debacle of Bush’s ‘Annapolis’ deadline.)
But Obama has been lining his ducks up for a peace push in a very smart way.
So now, if Ehud Barak and prime minister Netanyahu are saying they absolutely cannot bear to be pressured on the settlement-building issue, Obama and his team should politely but firmly usher them into the next diplomatic chamber.
That’s the one where the US, the ‘Quartet’, the Palestinians, and the other Arab parties are all sitting down ready to negotiate the final peace.
And probably, that is also the point at which Washington should start implementing firm accountability measures against Israel for any further violations it enacts of the order to “cease and desist” building settlements. Accountability measures, after all, cannot be implemented against only one party to this negotiation.

41 thoughts on “Israel’s settlements: Beyond the freeze”

  1. Ms. Cobban.
    Your dedication in accentuating an encouraging “peace push” is honorable. But the realities on the ground reflect that “the point of no return” has been passed a long time ago. And the guilt rests principally with successive US administration.
    You state in part, ” and it is not (just) improving the quantity and mix of freight that Israel allows into Gaza”, while the following link portrays a much more truer reflection of the real actions of Israeli forces in Gaza.
    “http://www.americanfreepress.net/Supplements/NEW_Ga” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.americanfreepress.net/Supplements/NEW_Ga za_Zoo_Color_Flyer.pdf

  2. Helena,
    Thanks for the informative post.
    I am surprised that the settlement freeze debate was not handled in a more private way, especially if the Americans do not intend to press Israel to cease and desist.
    However, now that we are here, I believe it would be a mistake to “move to the next diplomatic chamber” without at least publicly criticizing Israel for its intransigence.
    If President Obama is going to achieve the stated goal of a viable Palestinian state, he is going to have to use American muscle to force Israel into compliance with his plan. This is not going to be easy and if successful will result from years of sustained effort.
    In the end, the U.S. promotion of a viable Palestinian State will necessarily mean a significant change in our “special relationship” with the Jewish State.
    If the administration is not prepared take off the gloves in dealing with the Israelis, there is no point in promoting the peace process.
    I see no point in delaying telling the Israelis no when it will have to be done sooner or later. A delay would only signal that the U.S. is not serious about peace in Palestine/Israel.

  3. Ms. Cobban, Thanks for this short and clear presentation of the I/P issue. Nothing needs to be added –

  4. I must get a thought across to you. I’ve discovered in a long life that the only thing that really moves people (and the world) to action is money- the most powerful five letter word around- and the day Obama not only threatens- but actually carries out– the withholding of money and/or arms to Israel will be the first day of some sort of settlement. This is certainly not a new concept, but I don’t see any progress being made about this when Natenyahu was here, Don’t threaten—do it – is the key.

  5. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is making the Israeli-Palestinian peace.
    Israelis keeping occupied land and her insistence to negotiated individuality parties showing this policies are going no where.
    While its works for Egypt and Jordan those two agreements was not backed by the will of people.
    May here I borrow stament commnly used by Israeli/ their fans when they talking here and other places:
    Why don’t you look inside and ask why the hell you had to go through that. Was it really Israel’s fault that you fought your neighbor.?
    Yab, If Israeli accepted to giveback the occupied land after 1967 with many attempted by her neighbour Israel and her people have not to go through all this.

  6. S.O.S.
    The humanitarian ship that left Cyprus is opposite the Haifa shore on its way to Gaza, the Israeli pirates had ordered to return back.
    Humanitarian aids are not allowed to reach the Palestinians who are under the mercy of the Israeli pirates .
    Please spread the message .

  7. Helena:
    Granny Lucille above has the answer.
    Shut off the money! ! !
    Or,in other words, squeeze them where it hurts.
    Or, hit them up-side-the-head with a two by four.
    Pussy footing around is a waste of time, and a waste of everything else you could think of.
    gsherscher

  8. Helena:
    Granny Lucille above has the answer.
    Shut off the money! ! !
    Or,in other words, squeeze them where it hurts.
    Or, hit them up-side-the-head with a two by four.
    Pussy footing around is a waste of time, and a waste of everything else you could think of.
    gsherscher

  9. Talking about stopping Israeli Settlements is wast of time and goes beyond believes:

    The homes are intended to house Jewish settlers who are to be evicted from a nearby unauthorised outpost, according to a court document obtained by the Associated Press news agency.

    According to an Israeli government document, it has approved construction of 50 new apartments in the settlement of Adam to house squatters living in the nearby Migron outpost.

    The construction is to be part of a far more sweeping plan – not yet approved – to build 1,450 new apartments in Adam, which is north of Jerusalem.

    Israel to build more homes
    By Our Foreign Staff and Agencies in Jerusalem
    Telegraph, 29 Jun 2009

  10. Day in the Southern West Bank

    It’s been very important for both me and my husband to spend at least a little time in the West Bank before we leave the country. We visited Bethlehem on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but we wanted to see Hebron and Jericho, and to have a local Palestinian take us to tell their histories from his perspective.

    I think what shocked me most during the day was how heavy the Israeli military influence was inside of the West Bank and how large some of the Jewish settlements are. The areas where Palestinians actually have “full” control (section A areas), are very small. Almost all movement in the West Bank really is controlled by Israel. A good map to check out can be found here.

  11. Helena:
    Granny Lucille above has the answer.
    Shut off the money! ! !

    I don’t know what makes the people in the western world who supported their governments on imposing and pushing sanction and threatening other countries who did not obeys International laws or UN resolutions.
    Why when it comes to Israeli case where the real breaking the International laws and did not obey UN resolutions when on earth this state immune from any punishment?
    Who is mistake? Israeli? or your government? or you as a people?
    Do thing stopping the money is the answer here? why this softness of crimes by states doing for the last 60 years? tell us why?
    What you think people of the other side in ME saying and thinking about your double stander?

  12. It is true that a country does not obtain sovereignty by becoming an occupying power. But it is equally true that merely being designated an occupying power does not extinguish any claims to sovereignty that the country might otherwise have.
    The fact that armistice lines were drawn in 1948 does not mean that those are the final borders, indeed, they were explicitly rejected as borders by the Arab states.
    The Obama administration, even in its call for a settlement freeze, has acknowledged that final status of the territories is up for negotiation.
    As for a settlement freeze, the early returns on the Obama announcement are mixed. It has brought Netenyahu to the table. On the other hand, it has not done anything to deal with the anti-peace forces on the other side. Already, some Arab voices are now demanding the freeze as a precondition for the Arab League proposal (really an ultimatum). This represents a step backward.

  13. The fact that armistice lines were drawn in 1948 does not mean that those are the final borders, indeed, they were explicitly rejected as borders by the Arab states.
    This is history not valid any more Joshua.
    Arab states and nation were clear demanding 1967 borders to be the lines to negotiate their peace, this is started during Jamal Abdul Nasser agreement to Rogers Peace Plan, followed by the messenger trips Henry Kissinger to ME.
    The last Arab proposal for peace plan still on the table is Saudi King Abdullah peace plan still borders 1967 is key demands by Arab nation to go with peace with Israeli. Israelis rejected before know what exactly details the plan all about
    The Arab Peace Initiative – 2002. King Abdullah’s Peace Plan.

    I- Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.

    II- Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

    III- The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

    3. Consequently, the Arab countries affirm the following:

    I- Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region

    II- Establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.

    I thing Arabs as far as their concerns they came far more and scarifies more in matter of land and money to get peace process going.
    Joshua, looks the history always working for Israelis but not for other side, So a dream of 2500 years of Premised land still Valid History to occupying land and brings more Jewish from around the world and building settlement and it’s a Natural Growth!
    And Right of return for Jews is valid but for Palestinians there is not such right for them.
    Jews got paid compensations from Holocaust crimes still valid history but not to these innocent who lost there life and land and farms because of Israeli occupations for generations.
    Looks how some things the history work in one way and used it for themselves, but it’s a crime if other side say word about their rights?

  14. And my friend Salah, who shall be the West back returned to? It was taken from Jordan in a fair and square war initiated by the Arab camp and joined by Jordan. Now Jordan renounced their claim. Should it taken to lost and found? Or posted on Ebay?
    Follow the land for nothing Arab formula, just as in Gaza? Settlements are the most rational way of creating the time incentive for the Arab side to settle in our lifetimes. Without settlements they perceive that time plays in their favor, and the neighboring Arab countries would continue to keep the open wound for another century. Like the stateless refugees in Lebanon shamelessly marginalized since 1948. A rallying cry for all retrograd Arab regimes to deflect attention, like your own Saddam Hussein, may his soul live in hell, launching Scuds to Tel Aviv just to crystalize Arab support. Why Salah, why the scuds?
    Just go study bargaining games in game theory and you’ll see that settlements are akin to the discount rate that makes the players agree sooner rather than later. And by the way, why is it OK for Arabs to reside in Israel and Jews cannot live in Palestine? Highly asymmetrical, look at Gaza, the Nazis would be proud of how pure it is.

  15. “The fact that armistice lines were drawn in 1948 does not mean that those are the final borders,..”
    This is very true. And is a position shared, I believe, by most Palestinians, including Hamas.
    And what it means is that the legitimacy of the “State of Israel” is itself a mattter for negotiation. Much of the land within ‘Israel’ is undoubtedly Palestinian land, from which the inhabitants wrre ejected in 1948.
    The position that the Occupied (in 1967) Territories are, in toto, Palestinian is a minimalist position. They most certainly are Palestinian and Isreal’s occupation of them is not only illegal but illegitimate.
    The only colour of right Israelis can advance is the extraordinarily tenuous claims advanced by zionists, firstly to represent, by descent, the inhabitants of the lands two millenia since and, secondly, that the actual inhabitants (the Palestinians) are recent arrivals.
    It is rather like the Afrikaaner claim to have got to South Africa before any black people did. Only less credible.
    Joshua’s views would be amusing were they not so deadly.

  16. First, the premise that the settlements are illegal, is false. Recalling that the IVth Geneva Convention was drafted soon after WWII, it is not surprising that it should speak about “transfers” of populations and deportations:
    Article 49
    Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive…

    However, the last clause is certainly not about settlers; rather about deportations for forced labor and deportation:
    The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. [Note the terms “deport” and “transfer” to the exclusion of “settle”.]
    I agree that it would be nearly impossible to relocate 500,000 people (although I don’t know why, then people think that Israel could transfer over four times that number of Palestinians; but that’s a different issue). However, the actual number might be closer to 10% of that.
    First of all, the Palestinians have agreed on several occasions to a land swap for the Ariel Salient and the area settlements of Betar Illit and Modiin Illit that overlook Ben Gurion Airport and which holds a large percentage of the West Bank population. Second, even Helena’s “mentor” Jimmy Carter agreed when he was here a few weeks ago that the “settlement” of Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion would likely both come under Israeli sovereignty in a final status peace agreement. And the “settlements” of East Jerusalem – many of which are built on Jewish-owned land taken over by Jordan in 1948 and uninhabited for 19 years as “no-man’s” land – account for close to 200,000.
    This is all that Barak is saying. I don’t think that he is “imply[ing] that getting an immediate freeze on settlement building is somehow unrelated to the quest for a final peace between the two sides.” He’s not saying that at all.
    Two additional points. First, is the assertion (or perception) that the West Bank settlements are continuing to grow. According to Census Bureau figures:
    The population of 21 West Bank settlements was static or declined in 2007, and the population at another 74 grew by 100 people or less, according to figures compiled by The Jerusalem Post from the Central Bureau of Statistics.
    In fact, nearly all the construction has been in Beitar Illit, Modi’in Illit and Ma’ale Adumim, and it’s likely in preparation for transferring those settlers from other settlements after a final status peace agreement.
    The second point is that this is not a simple dispute about “real estate” and “who gets what”. It has never been a dispute over “real estate”, and the sides apparently have come to an accomodation on the land-swap issue not once, but twice: once after Camp David/Taba and, as we learned last week, a second time during negotiations with Ehud Olmert.

  17. JES, the Security Council and the World Court have unanimously ruled, without abstentions, that the Israeli settlements are illegal by Article 49 (6). It manifestly makes them illegal and clearly does not specifically concern “forced labor and deportation.” If it did, it would be completely superfluous. It is clearly written to cover moving willing “occupier” settlers. That is explained further in the commentary to the Geneva Conventions, written long before 1967. “It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories.” See http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/COM/380-600056?OpenDocument . The Germans organized their settlement program under their Generalplan Ost. A good reference for this plan and the German settlement program, which bore many similarities to Israel’s, is Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, by Gotz Aly and Suzanne Heim. ISBN 0691089388.

  18. But if the US is to help midwife a final peace between them that is sufficiently fair to everyone concerned that it ends up being durable, then this peace must take international law as a starting point that can help it sift through and give due consideration to the claims and desires of both parties.
    The claims and desires of both parties? One “party” is the occupier, the other “party” is formed by the occupied, locked up in their prisons, called Westbank and Gaza. The solution is actually very simple: according to international law Israel’s occupation is illegal, the settlements are illegal, and Israel should withdraw to its pre-1967 borders (perhaps with some ‘minor and mutual modifications’).
    That’s all there is to it.
    Actually, the whole world (with very few exceptions) agrees that this is what Israel should do. But Israel, the occupier, can ignore this consensus because the US not only rejects the demands of international law by allowing Israel to continue to occupy and repress the Palestinians, but by actually giving Israel the means – the weapons, the money, the political support – which enables it to occupy and to repress.
    But rather than demanding an end to this immense injustice the world prefers to watch this surreal and cruel play called “peace process”, in which the reality of brutal oppression of Palestinians is being replaced by the fiction of two parties, with their own justified claims and desires, engaged in a difficult struggle to find a “modus vivendi”. The main culprit, the United States of America, without whose material and political support Israel could not continue its illegal occupation for a single day, is represented in the play as a well-intentioned, honest broker, doing its best to find a just and lasting peace for all parties concerned.
    This surreal and cruel play is undoubtedly one of the most succesfull plays in the history of theater. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the play has been performed year after year, and it always has been received with great enthousiasm, as if the public never tires of hearing the same empty promises and the same illusory expectations. And meanwhile in the real world the occupation and the settlement-project continue, while the play is either being performed, or (between two performances) at least in expectation of a new performance.

  19. why is it OK for Arabs to reside in Israel and Jews cannot live in Palestine?
    Who tells you Jews not allowed to reside and live in Palestine? give us your sources please?
    Your inaccuracy shows well how close mind and bubble you had, you better of go and learn how Jews lived side by side on Arab land for centuries before spells these words.
    Btw, Israelis well represent Nazi behaviour in Palestine go figure out first.

  20. JK, first off the UN Security Council resolutions are opinions not legal decisions. Secondly, the ICJ ruled that, in its opinion, the separation barrier was illegal. Thirdly, the ICRC is also an opinion and, further, it points out the same concerns about the wording and location of the final clause in Article 49.
    Be that as it may, I still maintain that there are plenty of other reasons to oppose the settlements than their legality or lack of same, and these are primarily in the costs – both monetary and social – that they mean for Israel.
    Two additional points. First, you seem to have ignored three-quarters of my post (actually more like 90% considering that I cut and paste the relevant portions of the IVth Geneva Convention). And that is the important 90% – not a technical question as to whether the settlements are legal or not.
    Which brings me to my second point. To reduce this to a legal dispute is pointless. It’s not, as Helena points out, as simple as a real estate dispute in Virginia.

  21. Oh yes, JK, unlike the Nazi conquest of the East, the government-sponsored settlement program only began in earnest in 10 years after the war. I was here, and I remember how the Labor government fought tooth and nail with the grass-roots settlers in Sebastia. I suggest you study up on that. I also suggest that you take into consideration that, unlike the Nazi program under which the Jewish population of Europe declined by one half, the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza has doubled since 1967. It will make you appear less foolish.

  22. No one, including a president of the United States of America, can presume to tell me, a Jew, that I cannot live in the area of my national homeland.That’s one of the main reasons my wife and I chose in 1981 to move toShiloh, a so-called settlement less than 30 miles north of Jerusalem. After Shiloh was founded in 1978, then-President Carter demanded of Prime Minister Menachem Begin that the village of eight families be removed.Carter, from his first meeting with Begin, pressed him to “freeze” theactivity of Jews rebuilding a presence in their historic home. As his former information aide, Shmuel Katz, related, Begin said: “You, Mr. President,have in the United States a number of places with names like Bethlehem,Shiloh and Hebron, and you haven’t the right to tell prospective residentsin those places that they are forbidden to live there. Just like you, I haveno such right in my country. Every Jew is entitled to reside wherever hepleases.” We now fast-forward to President Obama, who declared on June 15 in remarksat a news conference with Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, that Jewish communities beyond the Green Line “in past agreements have beencategorized as illegal.” I believe the president has been misled. There can be nothing illegal about a Jew living where Judaism was born. To suggest that residency be permittedor prohibited based on race, religion or ethnic background is dangerously close to employing racist terminology. Suppose someone suggested that Palestinian villages and towns in pre-1967Israel were to be called “settlements” and that, to achieve a true peace,Arabs should be removed from their homes. Of course, separation or transferof Arabs is intolerable, but why is it quite acceptable to demand that Jews be ethnically cleansed from the area? Do not Jews belong in Judea and Samaria as much as Palestinians who stayed in the state of Israel?
    [Snip. Cut at 308 words. The commenter is asked to read the guidelines and note that if he formats for legibility, that is also more courteous to other readers. Also, please NOT to simply cut and paste into here text that has clearly been composed for other venues, which gives it the air of a robo-comment.]

  23. Yisrael, your comment is an amazing example of self-referential arrogance. Every Jew is entitled to reside wherever he pleases… There can be nothing illegal about a Jew living where Judaism was born…?
    Why on earth should this apply only to Jews and not to every member of the human race, regarding their own religion or nationality? Are Jews more entitled to certain rights than any other peoples? Why would you expect the 99.8% of humanity who are not Jewish to accept that claim?
    Your claim is particularly striking when you think about the five to six million Palestinians whom your government has condemned for 61 years now to live in a (frequently very tragic) exile. Why are they not allowed to live where they please– that is, in their own and their grandparents’ homes and farms? Why are they not allowed to live in the place where their nation was born? Why are the many Christians among them not allowed to live in the place where their religion was born?
    You make particularist claims for Jews– but you deny these same claims for your neighbors? Why would you expect anyone to accept your claims on this basis?

  24. Note to HC: Yisrael Medad is a settler and writer. The person posting here is not Medad. Sarah Honig is a regular columnist at the Jerusalem Post. The person posting under these and other names of mostly extreme right-wing Israelis is simply cutting and pasting their work in its entirety.
    And now, if you will kindly discipline “Muezzin” who has made highly inflamatory, threatening statements on another thread….

  25. But throughout the 42 years Israel has been the occupying power in the West Bank, it has put those 500,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers in there. And the fact of their presence inside the West Bank already makes a complete Israeli withdrawal from the area thousands of times harder to contemplate than it would have been without them there– just as Ariel Sharon and other highly placed settlement boosters all along intended.
    Well… the Israelis brought those imaginary “orders of magnitude” of difficulty on themselves, and they are absolutely nothing compared to the real hardship they have dealt the Palestinians over the past 4 decades+ by stealing their land and water and driving them from their homes.
    Get a grip on reality, please.
    There is a good question, however, as to how much political capital President Obama should actually expend on trying to win Israel’s compliance with the “cease and desist” order.
    No, there is no question of “political capital”, there is only the question of doing the right thing after four decades of doing the wrong thing.
    Barack Obama closed the “deal” on change.
    Changing the illegal and immoral state of affairs inherent in “American” foreign policy in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran… is what the man needs to do. Now.
    I’m glad that G S Hersher took the time to post his reminder twice.
    If the line of credit had been withdrawn forty years ago there would now be both Israeli and Palestinan states and a real settlement in place in the Middle East, instead of illegal settlements.

  26. If the line of credit had been withdrawn forty years ago there would now be both Israeli and Palestinan states and a real settlement in place in the Middle East, instead of illegal settlements.
    I might remind you, the “line of credit” was only extended after Israel had conquered the occupied territories in 1967.

  27. Imagine sharing a loaf of bread between two people. One person is busy stuffing large chunks of it in his mouth while the other is held at bay by a man with a gun. How can negotiations to share fairly even begin when one is busy devouring the loaf?

  28. I do think Obama is being smart in the way Helene described.
    But I have no illusions about the Israelis being smart. They have been crazy for a long time. Crazy people don’t cure themselves. Someone is going to have to put them in a padded cell.
    So cut off the money. All of it, every penny. If we and the world cut off enough Israel will be too strapped to venture outside their wall.

  29. “line of credit”

    When Lord Derby asked Sir Lewis Namier, the great historian of Georgian England, why he, as a Jew, didn’t write Jewish history, Namier replied: “There is no modern Jewish history, only a Jewish martyrology, and that is not amusing enough for me.” It might be said that the underlying purpose of the Zionist project – which Namier passionately supported – was to reject Jewish martyrology, and to turn the Jews from passive victims to active makers of their destiny.

    As it happens, Emanuel has something in common with Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni: their fathers all served in the Irgun. This was the intransigent Zionist militia – described as terrorists by Isaiah Berlin among others, and as fascists by Albert Einstein among others – which waged a campaign of violence against the British, and the Palestinian Arabs, in the last years of the British Mandate in 1946-48. Its exploits included the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with great loss of life, the hanging of two captured British sergeants in reprisal, and the massacre of villagers at Deir Yassin.

    Behind that brutality lay something else. Men take revenge for small wrongs, Machiavelli said, unable to avenge the larger, and the Irgun was avenging an incomparably and unimaginably greater crime just suffered by the European Jews. The Jews had tried to be nice to the goyim, Zionism said in effect, and see where it had got them. A Jewish state would now be created and guarded with all necessary force, indifferent to what the outside world thought. If need be, Israel will borrow the old chant of the Millwall fans, “No one likes us, we don’t care”– and no more Jewish martyrology.

    Not that Namier was the only Zionist to use “Jewish” in a derisive sense. When someone mentioned Trotsky’s phrase “No war, no peace”, David Ben-Gurion said that it was “some stupid Jewish idea”, and there is a well-known Israeli story about Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the Six Day War. When he taught at the Israeli staff college, Dayan used to expound a problem, ending with the words, “And I want no Jewish solutions here.”

    Geoffrey Wheatcroft: How Israel gets away with murder

  30. Namier also replied to the rantings of one Nazi at Oxford in ’38 with the laconic, “We Jews and other coloured peoples think differently.”
    Wheatcroft’s _The Question of Zion_ was actually fairly sympathetic to the situation of Jews and Israelis in a world that would rather be rid of them. He WAS a fairly good historian, too, so I’m a bit abashed to add him to the “enemies list.” Machiavelli, machismo, and Millwall. How cheap, how patronizng, how flip. Can “we Jews” as colored people please have some better analysis?
    Another sixty years of war, Salah, and the refugee camps still full. How do you feel about that?

  31. Eurosabra,
    as usual bash him, tag him “Nazi” is very simple excuses coupled with personal attach.
    Eurosabra, you miss one? anti-Semitism.
    You should discussing to correct what its said above before rushing to personal attacks at him and what written above.

  32. Israel Again Rejects Total Settlement Freeze
    In comments today, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon once again rejected the US demand to freeze all settlement activity in the West Bank, saying that Israel willl never halt “natural growth” in the settlements, and “will not suffocate the life of 300,000 Israelis who live in settlements in all legality.”
    Despite repeated demands from the Obama Administration, the right-wing Israeli government has repeatedly rejected the call and insisted that the US will eventually change its mind. The move has proved relatively popular, and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s approval rating has remained strong.
    Obama… he didn’t say nothin’.

  33. I pointed out that Namier considered Jews Europe’s “coloured” and colonized, and that he opposed Nazism. Also, the “we Jews” is critical when you consider that Namier was a convert like Disraeli. I criticized Wheatcroft for psychologizing a political situation, and in particular blaming the legacy of the Irgun is clumsy when the REAL far Right (Rehavam Ze’evi, Abba Ahimeir) never made it anywhere near the Prime Minister’s Office. I might argue that Palestinians like Khaled Meshaal and Zakariah Zubeidi are the heirs of Fawzi al-Qawkji and Abd-el-Kader al-Husseini, and that therefore the Palestinians–at least their elected government– openly wish to carry out genocide against the Jews, and encircle and starve West Jerusalem, and therefore the only remedy is force. I recognize that the “real” Palestinian government is HAMAS, and that their goals remain unchanged, but I do believe that Israel has the capacity to defend itself while using minimal force.

  34. It’s clear and obvious after 1973, Arab and the Palestinians have reach to point that Israel is fact and reality they voiced not once but many times that they like Israel to obey UN 242 resolution to withdraw from Arab/Palestinians land (1967 Borders).
    If you ignore all that keep hold in your minds a history just like your 2500 dream of promised land then her you have it, not just more 60 years more as you suggested, but the next century the status of war and hate will continued.

  35. And yet, in practical terms, every withdrawal is followed by more war (Oslo, Gaza, Lebanon) except when there was a strong, established state with a monopoly on violence to enforce the peace “against” a population calling for more war. (Egypt, Jordan). Some of the farther Maghreb and Emirate states (Morocco, Mauritania, Qatar) seem to have developed a cultural attitude towards peacemaking that makes real peace, on a personal, societal, AND state level a possibility.

  36. Now, what else do the Oslo, Gaza, and Lebanon “withdrawals” have in common…..let me think……hmmmmmm………

  37. And yet, Eurosabra, accordingly then there is no ends of any conflicts on land be solved including withdrawals of land have conflict of interests/ occupied?
    This is not right, you go and read carefully many disputed land conflicts examples from old history or recent history how been solved peacefully without wars.
    Yet again, you cannot dictate for the other side what sort of rulers, government and lives they had and conditioned your will to do deals.
    You need to go through the Israelis attitude/ behaviours in regards of making peace you will find that Israelis have insisted and conditioned in all peace talk individually done deals! Why this?
    Simply is very clear that this mantra is as you hold the gun to the head of the other side to surrender to your will.
    Here the biggest mistakes/ requirement / excuses that you/Israelis come with same sort of thinking and ranking regimes/ rulers in you statement above.
    You do not think about the nation will you things about entrusted / nationalistless regime that speaks with your tong to do deal.
    If both side come to respect and approved their nation wells both Israelis and Arab and across their nations then it is easy to find foundations for long lasting peace.
    You need to understand that Arab regimes have not yet practice democracy freedom and represents fully the will of their nations oppose what Israelis government had.
    So this very crucial issue here to move and deal with it. You either do deals with regimes properly will not lasting forever as it is not a democratic /elected regimes, and then you run in trouble eventually.
    Here is Israeli have to deal in honest and willingness attitude that give “some” to strength Arabs regimes in their nation eyes for going on the road for peace.
    This needs long time with commitment for peace and replacing love with hate.

  38. Islamist parties running government de facto?
    I do not think Palestine’s or Lebanon’s de facto governing Islamist parties can or will ever make peace, at least not on terms that will preserve a State of Israel in any meaningful sense. They have announced that doctrinally and any Israeli who thinks that their acceptance of the ’67 borders would be anything but a tactical ruse is delusional.
    We do have a modus vivendi along the Purple Line which would be a good start, if the “state-on-the-way” and Israel could respect the Green Line equally, and the legal infrsstructure for an Israel-Lebanon peace already exists.

  39. Islamist parties
    Eurosabra, as long as conflict running out from the peace then you feeding these beasts.
    Peace will strip not just many Arab corrupted governments who used this conflicts for their long stay, also these what you call them “Islamist parties” their case and will be rejected by the majority.

  40. Cynthia McKinney and the Kidnapping of the Spirit of Humanity
    Cynthia Mckinney, without support from her own government, stood up for the principals on which her country was founded 233 years ago and spent Independence Day inside a foreign jail. All people of peace and good will salute her and her colleagues who sailed the Freegaza Spirit of Humanity with the universal message of self determination.
    Good for Franklin Lamb. Others’, including Barack Obama’s silence is astounding!
    Read the article.

  41. Hey. You know what’s interesting about Washington? It’s the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.
    I am from Iceland and bad know English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: “That means two in every one hundred people across the globe have to deal with excessive sweating on a daily basis.”
    Best regards ;), Imogene.

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