JERUSALEM // Peace Now’s revelation this week that Israel plans
to build more than 70,000 homes in the West Bank is the latest in a string of
troubling disclosures about settlement expansion. The plans were released with a
transparent goal in mind: embarrassing the Israeli leadership as Hillary
Clinton, the US secretary of state, arrived on her first visit to the region
since her appointment.
According to the report, about 73,000 homes – most still on the
drawing board but 9,000 of them already built – would double the current
population of nearly 300,000 settlers in the West Bank (an additional 220,000
are in East Jerusalem).
Of those homes, nearly 20,000 would be built beyond the limits of
the steel and concrete barrier Israel is erecting mostly inside the West Bank
and which is widely assumed to be Israel’s vision of its future political border
with a Palestinian state. Another 3,000 would be built in a corridor of land
known as E1 that would seal off Palestinian access to East Jerusalem, and about
6,000 are planned for East Jerusalem itself, the only viable capital for a
future Palestinian state.
Mrs Clinton has made clear that she wants
to push negotiations with the Palestinians “vigorously” in the direction of a
two-state solution, despite the expected establishment in the next few weeks of
one of the most rightwing governments in Israel’s history, led by Benjamin
Netanyahu, the Likud leader.
The Israeli media have already reported that panicked officials
are worried US President Barack Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, George
Mitchell, will threaten a Netanyahu government with economic sanctions if it
further undermines hopes of Palestinian statehood by expanding the settlements.
Mr Netanyahu, concerned about his standing in Washington, has suggested vaguely
that he will restrict settlements to what is called “natural growth”, or
expansion to cope with the housing needs of the existing settler population. But
he is publicly opposed to a two-state solution.
While Mr Netanyahu and his officials are the ones discomfited by
revelations of a West Bank construction boom, it should be remembered that these
plans were drawn up while the Likud leader was sitting in the opposition.
It was Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, the leaders of the centrist
Kadima party, backed by Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor party and their
powerful defence minister, who either sanctioned or turned a blind eye to much
of this planned orgy of illegal construction.
They did so as they supposedly gave their support to the
Annapolis conference held in 2007 that was designed to revive the peace process
and at which Israel vowed to freeze settlement growth. Only weeks after the
conference, it was revealed that settlers were moving trailers on to Palestinian
land near Ramallah unopposed and building in the Jordan Valley.
British newspapers, meanwhile, reported that Israeli companies
were selling cut-price homes in West Bank settlements at London property
exhibitions.
There has been barely a pause in the drip-drip of such
revelations since.
Mr Barak has personally overseen the failure to dismantle even
the most patently problematic settlements of all, about 100 so-called “outposts”
that are illegal under Israeli law but which are used by settlers to take up yet
more land for their benefit.
In a deal with the settlers’ political representatives announced
last month, the largest outpost, Migron near Ramallah, may eventually be
dismantled. But Mr Barak’s achievement came only at the self-defeating price of
agreeing to build an even larger “legal” settlement for Migron’s inhabitants
nearby.
Far less has been achieved with the 120 official settlements
which, rather than fighting for survival, are growing at a rate not seen since
the Oslo process of the late 1990s.
Last week another human rights group, B’Tselem, revealed that
Israel’s military government in the West Bank, known misleadingly as the civil
administration, was preparing the infrastructure, including water and sewage
lines, to cope with thousands of new settler homes in the West Bank.
At the same time, reports surfaced that Israel had seized some
330 acres near Bethlehem, declaring it state land, to build a new settlement
eventually expected to house 10,000 settlers.
Dror Etkes, who monitors settlement
expansion for the human rights group Yesh Din, noted that Israel had arbitrarily
declared some 30 per cent of the West Bank “state land”, forbidding all
Palestinian development on it. But the land theft does not end there.
Details of an internal defence ministry database of the
settlements were leaked in January showing that officials had been allowing
settlers to build on vast areas of land not confiscated by the state but
ostensibly still in private Palestinian hands.
The consequences, as Mr Etkes pointed out, are that, whereas 97
per cent of Palestinian building permits were approved by Israel in 1972, early
in the occupation, today that figure has fallen to just five per cent. There is
no “natural growth” for Palestinians, even when it is on their own land.
Allowed a free hand, Mr Netanyahu would probably advocate a
policy on West Bank settlement not much different from that pursued by his
immediate predecessors. But paradoxically, it is likely to be Mr Netanyahu’s
very hawkishness that offers Washington a pretext to finally crack down on the
settlements.
The question is whether such intervention has arrived too late to
salvage the two-state solution.
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