They always were slow learners.
While we are on the topic of slow learners, here is a look on the other side of the fence you may find interesting.
Settlements are a liability
BY MARK A. HELLER
jpost.com
There's no particular reason why the debate about settlements should rear its ugly head again now.
Israel is not caught up in serious peace negotiations that require the dismantling of settlements. It is not yet dealing with a "road map" interim agreement or even with some Mitchell/Tenet/Zinni discussions about a cease-fire, all of which raise the question of a settlement freeze.
Nevertheless, the issue has again pushed itself onto the agenda, almost certainly because one of the candidates in the upcoming election, Labor leader Amram Mitzna, has signaled his intention to carry out a unilateral withdrawal and evacuate some settlements if renewed negotiations with the Palestinians fail to produce an agreement. Even so, there is no particular reason for those settlers determined to stay and expand their project to panic, or for those who would like to leave if they could afford it to get excited. This debate has a long history of producing periodic eruptions and then reverting to routine activity on the ground. It happened last month over the budget brouhaha that ostensibly brought down the unity government; it happened the month before when the defense minister belatedly tried to take down some especially illegal outposts and got into a fight with the hilltop hooligans; and it has happened before that, every few months, for the past few decades. In the words of the Arabic saying, "The dogs bark and the caravan moves on."
So why bother treating this outburst any differently? The answer is that Mitzna's proposal might actually be implemented, at least in part, even if he is not elected. After all, the factors that now make the fate of settlements a hypothetical question are the upcoming election and the waiting period before an American attack on Iraq.
The election will be history on January 29, and the waiting period will be over, sooner or later. After that, cease-fire proposals and road maps for interim agreements will be very much on the table, and the hypothetical question will be real.
At that point, the extent of public receptivity to ideas ranging from a reallocation of resources through a settlement freeze all the way to unilateral evacuation will be put to the test. And the question will then be not what the settlements do for the settlers, but what they do for the country as a whole.
SOME OF the earliest myths that sustained public support for settlements have long since been exploded. The one about settlements being a forward line of defense was discredited in the first hours of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the IDF had to waste time and resources evacuating civilian settlers from the Golan in the face of advancing Syrian forces. The settlements don't protect Israel; Israel protects the settlements.
Then there's the one about the pattern of settlements determining the future boundaries of the state, just as they allegedly did before 1948 "allegedly" because the borders then were really determined by the outcome on the battlefield; large parts of post-1948 Israel initially contained no Jewish settlements, while many pre-1948 settlements had to be abandoned. In any case, this myth has had no impact either on the Arabs or on the international matrix that frames the boundary question, a matrix that has persisted ever since it was defined by US secretary of state William Rogers, in the late 1960s, as the 1949 armistice lines, with "minor rectifications."
All that's left to sustain the argument is the insistence of the settlers, and the Right in general, that the settlers are now the same as all other Israelis, entitled to the same rights to home, hearth and security in the West Bank or Gaza that are taken for granted anywhere else. This argument flies in the face of their insistence on maintaining a separate status through the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria and the settlement-promotion body, Amana, and in demanding benefits based, not on universal socioeconomic criteria, but solely on geographic location. For what it's worth, by claiming that there is no distinction between the territories and the rest of Israel, they also undermine the Right's condemnation of the Palestinians for refusing to recognize Israel's legitimacy within the pre-1967 borders.
What about legality? The simple fact is that "belligerent occupation" i.e. Israeli military control of the West Bank and Gaza is legal; construction of Israeli civilian settlements, pending a final determination of the border, is not.
But we can recognize that legality is not yet a decisive factor in international relations. We can also concede, for the sake of argument, the claim that settlements are not a real obstacle to peace. The question still remains, even in the absence of peace, what the settlements do for Israel? The answer is: not much. The benefits are few, and the cost is high.
Settlements demand huge resources tax breaks, cheap mortgages, development-area assistance, bypass roads, etc. They oblige standing forces and reservists to spend a lot of time and incur a lot of risk to guard them, in some cases especially in Hebron and on outpost hilltops getting nothing but physical and spiritual abuse in return. And they disperse a limited Jewish population among a larger Palestinian population, thereby threatening the Jewish character, not of the Land of Israel west of the Jordan (which is a pipe dream), but of the State of Israel within its more modest pre-1967 borders.
In short, the pursuit of this ideological vision is self-defeating, and the settlements, even in the absence of any agreement with the Palestinians, are not an asset, but a liability. There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of anyone else willing to offer Israel some prize for relieving itself of this liability.
But why should anyone else do that if Israel will eventually be crushed by the weight of its own burden?
The writer is principal research associate at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. |
