Author: Helena

Two phenomena– both intimately linked to the settlement-implantation project that was Ariel Sharon’s most serious commitment throughout most of the years since 1967– are now combining to undermine any chance that a viable two-state outcome might somehow be plucked from the dense demographic intermingling now existing in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The first of these phenomena is the Israeli government’s determination to go ahead with constructing 3,500 new housing units in the crucial “E-1” area between East Jerusalem and the (already illegal) Israeli mega-settlement of Ma’ale Adumim– a decision that Ha’Aretz describes as a “provocation”.
The second is the growing prospect that militants among the angry settlers in both the West Bank and Gaza might now escalate their violence in protest against the government’s planned Gaza withdrawal to the level of something approaching an inter-Jewish civil war.
These two developments are connected– in a number of ways. One is that you can realistically assume that the Israeli government’s announcement at this time of its intention to proceed with the E-1 construction– plans for which have existed for several years already, but not hitherto been implemented– was designed in part to “reassure” the great bulk of Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank that the big plan to continue settlement-building there will continue, even after the withdrawal from Gaza.
Over 400,000 settlers live in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, while only around 8,500 live in Gaza.
Another way in which the developments are connected is through the Israeli government’s long-sustained policy not just of driving and implementing the settlement-implantation policy on its own account (or, more precisely, that of US taxpayers)– but more than that, on numerous occasions in the past, Ariel Sharon and many other government members and government leaders have winked at, or even actively encouraged, the “excesses” committed by militants among the settlers thus implanted.
When settlers have set up illegal “outposts” outside the boundaries of existing settlements, those outposts rapidly gained access to government services and (most of them) became entirely regularized. Settlers have nearly always been allowed to carry their guns wherever they go: when they have used their weapons and their “ubermensch” status under Israeli law to attack, humiliate, harrass, and on occasion murder people from the area’s indigenous Palestinian population, the most they have generally received has been a slap on the wrist. In short, the settler militants have been indulged, subsidized, and generally treated like spoiled children in Israel’s otherwise much more law-abiding society– and this, apparently, as part of a sustained government policy.
Is it any surprise that now, when the government tries to say “No!” to these always-pampered adolescents, the adolescents should turn round in confusion and with some violence in their hearts?
(If settler violence does escalate, I fear for the security of Palestinians in geographically isolated places who are as likely as–or perhaps, even more likely than–the Israeli government forces to be the target of enraged settler mobs… In general, when social order breaks down, it is the weakest and most vulnerable people who end up getting hurt the most.)
I want to return, quickly, to the question of why the E-1 construction is so important. E-1 lies between East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. MA is a settlement of (now) some 40,000 people that spreads eastward down the rocky hills toward the Jordan Valley. If E-1 is built, it will connect MA demographically to the great solid walls of Jewish-settler population that successive Israeli governments have already built around most of occupied East Jerusalem.
Given the present Israeli government’s clearly stated intention of continuing to hold on to all the large, Jewish-settled parts of the West Bank in any future peace settlement (an intention that received virtually total support from President Bush last April), proceeding with settlement construction on E-1 has two consequences:

(1) The portion of the West Bank left for the Palestinians becomes clearly cut into two by the E-1-MA axis, and
(2) The 150,000 or so Palestinians who have been able to cling to their families’ ancestral homes in East Jerusalem will be even more solidly cut off than at present from their family members and compatriots in both the northen West Bank and the southern West Bank.

At that point, all hopes that the Palestinians could win true national sovereignty over a land base that would have both the territorial and the political prerequisites of a viable national state would be dashed. All they could hope for at that point (and has it perhaps arrived already?) is a resource-poor, heavily politically constrained little “statelet”…
As we all know, the word for such an entity is “Bantustan”.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it here again: any viable two-state solution requires the establishment of two viable states. A situation that leads to the creation of one heavily armed, land-grabbing behemoth and one (or more) Bantustans is not viable and not stable.
Perhaps a delegation from the Verligte (enlightened) branch of South Africa’s Afrikaaner community could travel to Israel and start explaining some of those facts of life to people in the Israeli public and government?
Yes, the Afrikaaners had their own extremist bitter-enders. But thank G-d that finally–after 40 years of ghastly internal repression and numerous very damaging military adventures outside their borders– the vast majority of Afrikaaners came to understand that a continued reliance on colonial domination of the neighbors is not, in the modern world, a good path to ensuring any community’s wellbeing.
So far, a large majority of Jewish Israelis still continue to express clear support both for the withdrawal/evacuation from Gaza and for the establishment of a decent two-state outcome… But these relatively “Verligte” Israelis haven’t become nearly as strongly mobilized as the settler militants.
Meron Benvenisti thinks they are are not about to become so.
So what are the prospects? I would say, pretty bad. It looks to me as though the settler militants might actually succeed in hoisting Sharon on the petard of his own decades-long dedication to the expansion of the settlement project. Don’t get me wrong: I do, strongly, hope that Sharon can succeed– first, in his plan to withdraw all Israelis from Gaza (and please, may he make that a total withdrawal); and then, after that, in rapidly negotiating a decent, workable final-status outcome with Abu Mazen.
But does Sharon actually seek a “decent, workable outcome” with the Palestinians? The decision he has made most recently on E-1 indicates strongly that he does not.
If the Bush administration wants to work seriously for the success of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, it has to draw a quite unequivocal and unbreachable line in the sand over the E-1 construction plans. (It would also help a lot if Bush and his people started spelling out their own clear vision of what a viable and hope-filled two-state outcome would look like, and expressing their firm commitment to concluding the final-status talks that embody this vision by the end of 2005.)
But if the administration doesn’t establish the E-1 issue as a clear Red Line for US policy, then anything else it might do is just (pardon the phrase) pissing in the wind.