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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (9756)	11/4/2001 3:18:39 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

November 3, 2001 A Strangled People nytimes.com By ANTHONY LEWIS RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Jewish settlements in the West Bank are often described, and justified, as simply places for Israelis to make their homes in otherwise unused areas. When you see the settlements in and around Ramallah, a principal city of the West Bank, the reality is quite different. The settlement apartment blocks crowd closely in upon the Palestinian city. They hem it in, preventing the natural expansion that would have occurred in recent years as Ramallah has become a more important center. Israeli access highways have been carved through the city's hinterland, as through many parts of the West Bank. The effect is unmistakable. It is to assert ultimate Israeli dominion over this Palestinian land. And that was surely the purpose driving the settlement process over the last three decades. "You begin to see," said Raja Shehadeh, a Ramallah lawyer, "this country is not ours." Mr. Shehadeh is a longtime advocate of peace between Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. For a time he was legal counsel to Palestinian peace negotiators. Then, discouraged, he went back to private practice and a literary life. He has published several books and has another, "Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine," coming out shortly in the United States. I met him in his home on the outskirts of Ramallah. It is on a hill overlooking a once-unspoiled valley disfigured now by an Israeli bypass road running through it. Down the hill a bit is the ruin of a police building destroyed last May 25 by Israeli F-16 jets. We met after Israel sent tanks and troops to Ramallah and other Palestinian towns following the murder of the Israeli tourism minister. "We are more and more confined," Mr. Shehadeh said. "We can't go to Nablus, to Bethlehem" — towns that are less than an hour away. People who live in the many villages of the West Bank are even worse off, he said, because Israeli forces have blocked all roads into and out of them. Villagers cannot get to work and have little or no income. "Everybody who is able to is leaving for other countries," Mr. Shehadeh said. "We're losing the best-qualified people. Maybe that was a purpose behind the settlements, too." The Oslo agreement of 1993 did not touch the issue of settlements. Since then Israeli governments of both left and right have gone on building them. The number of settlers has doubled since 1993, to around 225,000 today. "I thought Palestinians would not accept Oslo because it didn't stop settlements," Mr. Shehadeh said. "But Chairman [Yasir] Arafat had such standing that he brought people to accept it. I'm afraid that he and the others who had been living in exile did not understand the real nature of settlements. Now they do. "The Israelis went on building housing and roads. So Palestinians who had come to believe in negotiating for peace said, `What is negotiation getting us? Our life is worse, not better.' " Why then, I asked, did Mr. Arafat turn down the peace plan put forward by President Clinton at Camp David last year? It would reportedly have required Israel to abandon most settlements, keeping only about 5 percent of the West Bank. Mr. Shehadeh said it was not clear what "5 percent" would mean on the ground. He suggested that Mr. Arafat's experience with Israeli negotiators after Oslo may have made him wary of agreeing to anything without precise terms. In any event, he said, the conflict of the last year has made Palestinians less willing to compromise. "After all the deaths, people may not accept anything less than all of the West Bank." I have known Raja Shehadeh for a long time. He is the most peaceful person imaginable, Western-oriented, trained in the law in London. If he is embittered by Israel's settlement policy, as he is, there is no way of avoiding the truth that the policy has been a disaster for peace. Listening to him, I thought sadly of the opportunity there was immediately after Oslo. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin could have removed the few thousand Israeli settlers from Gaza, where they hold 25 percent of the land in that crowded strip. It would have sent a message of hope to the Palestinians, and few Israelis would have objected. But the chance was missed. And no one can see when there will be another.