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Written by Gil Yaron
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Thursday, 23 September 2010 |
Israel Medad may not be a physician. But this Israeli settler, whose jovial smile and white beard inadvertently evoke Papa Smurf, nonetheless volunteers a medical prognosis: “Starting Sunday, Ehud Barak’s hand will ache.” Then, Medad predicts, Israel’s minister of defence will be forced to sign piles of construction permits for the settlements. For ten months, a moratorium on the construction of new buildings has brought settlement expansion to a grinding halt. Now, Medad is longing to hear again the sound of bulldozers braking ground for ever more houses. “We have not been idle in the last ten months”, says Medad, who speaks for the settler movement. “We have been preparing all the plans and permits to take off from where we were stopped last year.” Proudly, Medad points to a sign erected on a steep decline leading from his settlement of Shilo to a fertile valley below, where Jewish vineyards abut Palestinian olive groves: It shows white, terraced condos scheduled to be erected “the moment the moratorium expires”.
The houses of Shilo are no symbol of peaceful coexistence or Bible nostalgia. The end of the moratorium could spell the end of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, mere weeks after they began. Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu had ordered the building freeze as a sign of goodwill towards his new-found “partner in peace”, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Palestinians view the approximately 150 Israeli settlements as a ploy. They are to tilt the facts on the ground in Israel’s favour while negotiations are slowly dragging on: “The longer we talk, the more settlements they build, the less is left over for is supposed to become a Palestinian state”, says PLO-spokesperson Hussam Zomlot. Therefore, Abbas has so far only been willing to talk as long as the moratorium remains in effect. Settlers like Medad, on the other hand, wish the freeze had never been imposed in the first place, let alone extend it coming Sunday.
“On a clear day, you can see three of Israel’s four borders from here”, says Lior Shtul, Director General of Bnei David, Israel’s oldest military prep-school for religious students in the settlement Eli. “In the north shines Mount Hermon, in the east you can see the mountains of biblical Moab, which is Jordan today, and in the West the Mediterranean glimmers in the distance.” Equidistant from all borders and a mere thirty minute drive to downtown Tel Aviv, Shtul thinks his settlement Eli lies “in the heartland of Israel”. Not only geographically: Like in Eli and Shilo, names of many settlements have been taken from the Bible, alluding to the historical connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland. According to the Bible, Shilo housed the Israelite Tabernacle, a shrine containing the Holy Ark before it was moved to Jerusalem. Archaeological finds in the hills around Shilo actually support parts of this narrative. Jewish settlers therefore regard their movement as a return to their roots: “It simply is absurd to call Jewish construction illegal. This place is ours”, says Medad. To his neighbours, the very same swath of land is known as Palestine, home to Arabs that have been living here for centuries. To them, Medad is a colonialist trying to rob their soil.
But settlers’ arguments are not restricted to theology: “The moment we leave, Israel’s army will leave too”, says Shtrul. “Then it is only a matter of time before radical Islamists from Hamas take over, just like they did in Gaza after we left there five years ago.” The consequences could be disastrous: “They will start shooting rockets at Israel’s coastal cities, just as they have been pounding Israel’s south with rockets for years now”, says Shtrul. The strategic location of many of the 150 Israeli settlements, who take up about 10% of the West Bank’s land, makes them especially contentious: They usually command high ground. Shilo and Eli overlook the vital highway number 60, the main artery connecting the two large Palestinian cities Ramallah and Nablus. It is, Palestinians contend, the heartland of future Palestine. Should they remain in place, creating an independent, contiguous state could prove impossible. But many settlers do not want to leave even if Israel abandons them: “How can people think that peace could be achieved by ethnic cleansing of Jews in this part of the world?” asks David Haivri, a spokesman for the settlers.
As teacher of 500 students who are all about to be drafted, Shtrul knows the price the ongoing occupation of the Palestinians exacts of his people: “Twenty of my students have been killed by Palestinians.” Some of them have become Israeli war heroes, like the officer Roi Klein, who threw himself on a grenade to save his soldiers’ lives during the second Lebanon war 2006. “Klein’s widow and two children still live here with us”, says Shtrul. “His deed is a shining example for our students, who learn to sacrifice for the greater good.”
Netanyahu is now poised with a difficult dilemma: His government’s power heavily depends on the 300.000 settlers and their supporters in Netanyahu’s own Likud party. Their camp has already been infuriated by the moratorium: “No government has ever been so strict with us”, says Shtrul, who claims to have a waiting list with 50 families who want to come and live next to his college. Settlers are adamant the freeze should stop immediately: “Continuation of the freeze is the beginning of the uprooting”, say posters all over the West Bank that have been printed by the Yesha council, who claims to represent a majority of settlers here. For weeks, the council has been waging ad campaigns against the moratorium. Its chairman Dani Dayan is convinced it has been effective: “The moratorium will not be extended formally. Our efforts have made such a thing politically impossible. There is no way Netanyahu can consolidate a majority in Parliament or his cabinet. If he extends the moratorium, his government will fall in a matter of weeks or months.”
On the other hand, settlement construction at this point could cause a breakdown of the peace talks, leaving Israel internationally isolated: “We do not want to shoulder the blame for failure, especially after the American administration has invested so much prestige and effort”, says a senior source in Netanyahu’s office. For weeks now, both sides have been searching for a way out of this impasse. Nonetheless, Israeli sources rule out that the freeze could continue as before: “It’s time for the Palestinians to demonstrate some degree of flexibility”, a senior cabinet member told our paper. A possible solution would be to let the moratorium run out, and do nothing. “The end of the freeze does not mean that we will see construction right away”, admits Dayan. “There may be some construction by people who possess permits, but not on a large scale. For massive construction we need the government to publish tenders. But that could take months.”
This may be a workable compromise: “We will be looking at hard facts, not speeches or declarations”, said a source in the Palestinian negotiating team. As long as the Israelis only talked about building, without actually erecting new structures, Palestinians would not bolt. “It all depends on public opinion. The more they built, the more difficult it will be for us to explain why we are still talking”, said a source in Ramallah. American pressure is also applied on Palestinians not to leave the talks. Just days before the end of the moratorium Abbas has begun to defuse his own threats. During his visit in New York he said that construction would make it difficult for him continue negotiating, a far cry from his resolute threat to quit the talks if even a single room was built.
Even if talks continue, settlers remain sceptical: “I wish for peace, but I do not believe in it”, says Dayan. A Palestinian state would not guarantee his safety, but rather destabilize the whole region, opines Dayan. This former engineer and high-tech entrepreneur does not offer any heartening alternatives: “Some equations simply cannot be solved.”
View pictures here
© 2010 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable
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