Articles
December 2010, Pages 8-10
Special Report
Palestinians Reject a "Compromise" That Means Surrender
By Rachelle Marshall
"Today we return to build in all of the land of Israel."—Danny Danon, settler leader and member of the Likud party, at a ceremony celebrating the end of Israel's "settlement freeze,"New York Times, Sept. 27, 2010.
"Palestinians want to see their president stand up and say, 'Enough is enough.'"—Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, physician and peace activist, New York Times, Oct. 1, 2010.
Words and catch phrases often have flexible meanings when Israeli leaders use them. Nonviolent protest against land theft is "unlawful incitement"; torture, mass arrests, and collective punishment are "security measures"; and during the 10-month "settlement freeze," construction of more than 2,500 homes for Jewish colonists continued, and plans were laid for thousands more. These figures do not include the numerous trailer camps set up on Palestinian land during the slow-down that are certain to be provided by a friendly government with electricity, water, and roads.
As the partial freeze expired on Sept. 26, the four-week old peace talks initiated by the Obama administration threatened to expire with it. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu refused to prolong the freeze. President Mahmoud Abbas declared he would walk away from the negotiations unless Israel stopped all new settlement construction. At that point the peace process stalled.
Washington's solution was to propose "a compromise." If Israel resumed the settlement freeze for 60 days, during which the two sides would continue to negotiate, the U.S. would substantially increase the $4 billion-plus worth of advanced military hardware it gives Israel every year, veto all "anti-Israel" resolutions at the U.N. Security Council, and help forge a regional security arrangement to protect Israel from Iran.
An even more generous prize for Netanyahu would be a U.S. agreement to support Israel's long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley, an area the Palestinians regard as part of their future state and where the Israelis have been ousting scores of Palestinians from their homes. If the Israelis accepted the deal, they would be free at the end of two months to resume full-scale settlement construction."It's an extraordinary package for essentially nothing," commented Daniel C. Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel. "Who thinks that a two-month extension is enough?"
Palestinians were offered only Obama's assurance that if they continued to negotiate with Israel, the U.S. would accept the 1967 borders, modified by land swaps, as the baseline for future negotiations. The president did not promise to secure Israel's agreement to such an outcome. If Israel refused to go along, the Palestinians would be left with nothing while Israel continued to swallow up their land.
Abbas was faced with two stark realities: the overwhelming disparity of power between the two sides, and an Israeli government adamantly opposed to true Palestinian independence. He could choose to either give up on negotiations or rely on the word of an American president who has backed off from every demand he has made on Israel. With a go-ahead from the Arab League, the Palestinian leader finally consented to give Obama another month to persuade Israel to stop settlement construction.
Netanyahu's answer came well before the month was up: talks or no talks, settlement construction would continue. In the first few days of October construction began on 350 new houses, 54 of them at Ariel, one of the large settlements Israel hopes to keep in exchange for land in Israel. On Oct. 15 Israel announced that 238 new units would be built in Arab East Jerusalem, an area Israel captured in 1967 and the site of what Palestinians hope will be the capital of their future state. In mid-October the Israeli military condemned 1,000 acres of land owned by the village of Al-Jalud, just south of Nablus, claiming "security needs"—but in fact to allow for the expansion of settlements that surround the city.
In justifying the demand for a freeze, the Palestinians pointed out that all settlement activity is illegal under international law, and that previous compromises on settlement construction had ended by being cover- ups for unlimited expansion. The settler population has in fact tripled in the 17 years since the Oslo accords were signed. B'Tselem, citing official data and documents, recently reported that the 121 settlements and 100 outposts in the West Bank now control 42 percent of the territory.
Two weeks before the freeze expired, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that once an agreement was reached on final borders, "Some areas would be inside Israel and some areas would not be inside Israel." She was implying that the U.S. would back a future peace agreement allowing Israel to annex the large settlement blocs that contain most of the settlers. If so, Israel would continue to control a sizable portion of the West Bank, including its acquifers,
Two major settler cities, Ma'ale Adumim and Ariel, extend deep into the West Bank almost to the Jordan River, cutting the territory in two. If Israel retains them in exchange for land in the Negev, as some have suggested, the Palestinians would be left with a bifurcated territory, in which cities and towns would have to be connected by tunnels and overpasses. Israel would continue to control their borders.
Netanyahu's reluctance to accept the gift package and security guarantees offered by Obama in return for no more than a brief settlement freeze was a clear indication of his priorities. The Israeli leader is clearly less concerned with safeguarding Israel's security than with losing the support of the right-wing parties that help make up his governing coalition. Netanyahu's chief fear is of being replaced by his own foreign minister, the far-right nationalist Avigdor Lieberman.
As the talks remained suspended, Netanyahu proposed and the cabinet approved a bill to require all non-Jewish immigrants who wish to become citizens of Israel to pledge "loyalty to the nation-state of the Jewish people." He offered to impose a temporary settlement freeze if Abbas and other Palestinian leaders announced "unequivocally" that they recognized Israel as the homeland of the Jews.
He knew full well the Palestinians would refuse. Signing the pledge meant renouncing the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel and acknowledging the lesser status of Israeli Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Israel's population. (By comparison, African Americans represent about 14 percent of all Americans.) A spokesman for Abbas pointed out that Palestinians had long ago recognized Israel, and it was up to the Israelis to define their state. The peace group Gush Shalom reported that Israeli police were already practicing to suppress protest demonstrations against the bill, and building a detention camp in the Galilee in preparation for the mass arrest of Arab Israelis.
Netanyahu gave further proof of his disinterest in a peace agreement when he received government approval of a bill requiring either a two-thirds majority in the Knesset or a national referendum before any Israeli-held territory could be given away. The bill created another barrier to ending the Palestinians' long ordeal under occupation. Despite the on-again, off-again peace talks, that burden has grown steadily heavier.
An Increasingly Heavy Burden
Israeli settlers burn mosques and vandalize Palestinian property almost at will. As the annual olive harvest began this year, settlers turned to a new tactic to drive Palestinians from their land by burning olive trees or cutting the ancient trees at their roots. When the settlers are stopped during the day, they come at night. Villagers who protest peacefully against the confiscation of their land are brutally beaten by Israeli police, arrested, and sometimes shot.
A military court on Oct. 11 sentenced Abdallah Abu Rahma, an internationally respected peace activist, to a year in prison for "organizing illegal demonstrations and incitement" in the village of Bil'in, where the separation wall has taken over a large portion of village land. Human rights groups and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, charged Israel with preventing Palestinians from exercising their legitimate rights.
Because only a small number of West Bank Palestinians are allowed to enter Israel, thousands of men desperate to feed their families regularly climb the separation wall and lower themselves by rope on the other side in order to get into Jerusalem. There they work as laborers on construction projects, sleeping outdoors all week and going home on weekends.They risk their lives in doing so. On Oct. 2 Israeli police shot to death 35-year old Izzedin Qawasmeh, a construction worker with five children, as he tried to climb over the wall.
The Israeli amy regards Gaza as a free fire zone, shooting at Palestinians who come within 700 yards of the border and using air strikes to assassinate suspected militants, so that bystanders die as well. On Sept. 11, the day Americans commemorate an act of Islamic terrorism, Israeli tanks crossed the border into Gaza and fired mortar shells that killed 91-year-old Ibrahim Abu Sayed, his grandson Hossam, and a 16-year old neighbor as they tended their land and animals. A neighbor, Majdy Abu Oda, said, "The people here are farmers who have been living here for years. The area is full of observation cameras so the Israelis knew them."
Israel's May 31 armed attack on the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza returned briefly to the news in late September when the U.N. Human Rights Council announced the results of its investigation. According to the Council, Israel used "unnecessary and incredible" violence in its attack on the Turkish vessel, the Mavi Marmara. Two of the men aboard were shot to death while filming the Israeli commandos, and four others were killed while trying to get out of the way. The Council concluded that the Israeli accounts were "so inconsistent and contrary to the evidence... that it has to reject it." A U.S. spokesman called the report "unbalanced" but did not deny its accuracy.
The Israelis treated a boatload of Jewish peace activists, most of them over 60, only somewhat more gently. As their catamaran carrying humanitarian supplies, the Irene, headed for Gaza on Sept. 28, it was surrounded by Israeli warships and towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod. The captain, Glyn Secker, reported that Israeli commandos ransacked the boat and fired a Tazer directly into the heart of one passenger, former Israeli air force pilot and refusenik Yonatan Shapira. At Ashdod, Secker was arrested and charged with being "illegally" in Israel. "They didn't laugh when they said it," he said.
Gaza remains a prison, its population living on the edge of destitution. Israel claims to have eased border restrictions, but in fact it allows only 240 truckloads a month to enter Gaza, compared to 5,000 before the closure. Still barred are construction materials and the raw materials and machinery needed for manufacturing. There is a total ban on agricultural exports. The continuing blockade has also caused a severe shortage of schools. At least 100 more are needed to provide for the growing number of Gaza's children. Because new schools can't be built, classes hold more than 50 children at a time and are held in shifts. Thousands of students have been turned away.
The continued punishment of Gaza's two million inhabitants is certain to continue until unity is restored between Abbas' Fatah party and Hamas. Haaretz reported in late September that Hamas had again announced it would accept a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, and asked the U.S. to open a dialogue and end its opposition to reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. The message was sent to Washington via a group of American academics and politicians who were visiting Gaza.
There has been no public response from the Obama administration. Meanwhile, with help from the U.S., Abbas is cementing the divide between Hamas and Fatah. His 25,000-member security force, trained under the supervision of an American officer, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, cooperates closely with Israeli forces in rounding up, and sometimes killing, Hamas members and their suspected sympathizers.
In the Oct. 14 issue of the New York Review of Books, Nathan Thrall writes that Palestinian and Israeli forces working together have "all but eliminated" Hamas' social institutions, charities, and businesses in the West Bank. Some 1,500 Hamas members, many of them civil servants, are in West Bank prisons. Thrall writes that, shortly after Israel's 2008-09 assault on Gaza, Dayton spoke before the pro-Israel think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and boasted of his force's cooperation with Israel in working against Hamas during the war.
Fortunately for Washington policymakers, the media's collective memory is short. News reports seldom mention that Hamas won free and fair elections in 2006 in both the West Bank and Gaza, or that in February 2007 Fatah and Hamas leaders met in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and agreed to form a unity government. Shortly afterward, the Bush administration, in cooperation with Israel and Egypt, funneled arms to Fatah forces in Gaza to allow them to take exclusive control of security in the territory. But in the subsequent fighting, Hamas fighters defeated the Fatah forces and drove them out of Gaza. Thrall quotes former U.N. Middle East envoy Alvarao de Soto as saying the violence might have been avoided had not "The U.S. clearly pushed for a confrontation."
The exclusion of Hamas from peace talks may similarly backfire. If peace negotiations come to a standstill or fail once again to lead to a fully independent Palestine, Palestinians may lose faith not only in Abbas and Fatah, but in diplomacy and nonviolence as well. As Israel's occupation becomes steadily more oppressive, the impatient are likely to turn to groups far more radical than Hamas—a result that could prove tragic for Palestinians, Israelis, and the entire Middle East.
Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Mill Valley, CA. A member of A Jewish Voice for Peace, she writes frequently on the Middle East.
