There's a bit of a fracas today just below Michael Crowley's astute Plank, "Obama v. Netanyahu," about whether or not I had ever
criticized the settlements. Well, the truth is that I have,
actually from early on when they were creations facilitated by peace
icons like Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. Just to test me,
take a look at my writings from Hebron during the summer of
2005.
Having said this, let me make clear that in the 42 years since the Six
Day War, the Palestinians haven't shown any serious readiness to make
peace with Israel that would encourage Jerusalem to make any more
one-sided concessions in advance that experience proves will just be
pocketed and not be reciprocated at all. In the exchange of
demands between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the Netanyahu
government has asked that the P.A. recognize the State of Israel and also
that it is the state of the Jewish people. One would think that
there would be nothing simpler than this. It was the basic
presumption of the League of Nations mandate to the British in Palestine,
starting in 1921-1922. And most significantly from the point of
view of international history, the United Nations General Assembly
sanctioned and provided for a "Jewish state" in Palestine and
an "Arab state" in Palestine already in late 1947. I will
make my not-at-all-pedantic little point again: The imagined Arab state
was not denoted as Palestinian because no one in their right mind at the
U.N. saw a Palestinian people on the horizon. The local Arabs were
mostly satraps of the surrounding Arab countries. They defined
themselves within tribes and clans, extended families and gangs of
ruffians There was no national vision with which to see the lost
opportunity.
They now apparently do really want a state and they even call themselves
Palestinians, which is a promising start. Mazal tov. When the
Zionists aspired to statehood they built national institutions, and
they were building those national institutions ever since World War I, at
least. Not so the Palestinians who have supped for almost 60 years
at the penurious gruel fed to them by UNRWA, which is the U.N.'s
instrument for keeping them dependent. And their case for a state
was made by waves of successive organizations whose identity was tied to
distinctive forms of terrorism.
Still, Israel has committed itself to withdrawing from the 92% of the
land it captured in 1967, plus compensation in Israeli territory abutting
an envisioned Palestinian state. No, no, said the
Palestinians. We'll take nothing less than 100% of the very
territory Jordan had ruled after annexing it in 1949. It was Yassir
Arafat, after all, who walked out of Bill Clinton's Camp David talks in
2000 and not Ehud Barak who actually gave and gave and gave.
Now, the Obama administration is engaged in another try at the peace
process, egged on presumably by the preposterous idea that, if Bibi only
utters the magic phrase "two-state solution" and halts
construction even for natural growth in every single one of the
settlements, America's troubles in the world of Islam will not only ease
but be transformed. Not surprisingly, Hilary Clinton, our martinet
secretary of state, has enthusiastically rushed to formulate these
instructions to Israel in the harshest possible terms.
This has been a long detour to coming back to my view of
settlements.
From my point of view, there are settlements and then there are
settlements. I'll get to the differences soon.
But the idea of stopping all construction in all settlements means that
once again the Israelis will be ceding something in advance and for
nothing in return. This is a destructive negotiating tactic and
will encourage the same kind of intransigence -you give me, I take- that
has marked the Palestinians in all of the talks. After all, the
West Bank is one of the prime subjects of the parleying. Telling
the Israelis that they can't build another house in this settlement and
in that one, too (in all of the settlements, in fact) means that no
one can marry and no one can have children and no one can add a room to
the house. This is not diplomacy; it is the smothering of ordinary
life. Since there is an ongoing demographic race in Jerusalem,
which is also one of the subjects at any future conference, why doesn't
the administration also demand from the Jews and the Arabs that they
cease pro-creating?
In fact, the 2003 "road map" made distinctions among
settlements, envisioning that most would be vacated by Israel but that
the largest would remain sovereign Israeli territory. The very
largest happen to cling to Jerusalem. I wouldn't withdraw from them
in a million years. Not even the crankiest peacenik in Israel would
pull out from Ma'aleh Adumim, virtually cheek by jowl to Jerusalem and
with more than 35,000 inhabitants. There are other smaller towns
close to Jerusalem that will not be given up. This is a matter of
the security of the city, its breathing room and, yes, its centrality in
Jewish history and in contemporary Jewish life. There is a price to
be paid by the Palestinians by their suicidal politics over the
decades.
In fact, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert withdrew from four West Bank
settlements. But that was before the Gaza settlements and the
entirety of the Strip which Israel vacated became a war front with
missiles and rockets regularly fired into Israel. Jerusalem had
prepared for a much wider retreat from Judea and Samaria so that
Palestine could emerge as territorially intact. If Netanyahu is
reluctant now to utter the "two-state solution" mantra it is
because the mistakes of his three predecessors -Ehud Barak, Sharon and
Olmert- have taught him that Israel should not give by declaration in
advance what is properly the subject of a treaty and of its enumerated
and believable guarantees.
And if I were Netanyahu, I would expect also to be able to increase
defensive settlements in the Jordan Valley rift as a protection against
Palestinian terror flowing east to west and west to east between the
kingdom and the new Palestine. The regions populated by
Palestinian Arabs would still be coterminous and coherent.
And if he has to give a little more of the Negev to the Palestinian
state, so be it. As the Israelis have demonstrated, the desert also
produces...If you will it is no dream.
A peace process should not be an invitation to mayhem. I am afraid
that the Obama administration has embarked on a perilous journey.
It should stop trying to orchestrate what Israel does in the (vain) hope
that the Palestinian Authority will come around and say something
realistic.
P.S.: The Yale University Press has recently published a book, One
State, Two States: Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict, by the brave and truthful historian Benny
Morris. He is also a frequent contributor to TNR. I've learned from every piece of writing he has done, even
when some of the material shocked me. One of the original "new
historians" of Zionism, Morris writes in this book about a possible
solution to the "problem." It is a federation between
Palestine and Jordan. OK with me; not OK, I believe, either with
the king or the politicians of Palestine.
The National Interest has had this book reviewed in its current issue by Walter Laqueur, certainly the most distinguished living historian of
almost every aspect of the subject. A clear headed Zionist, he is
not a patsy for anyone. He also thinks that the settlements, if
held too indiscriminately and too long, would ruin Israel. But he
knows well the intrinsic impediments to the Palestinians actually dealing
with real realities on the ground. Here and there, I
disagree with Laqueur (as with Morris). But it would be a good deed
for someone to slip either Morris' book or Laqueur's review essay, at
least, into the president as he starts off on a trip to wherever.
And it better be soon, before he flies to Cairo and promises the
impossible and gets nothing in return.