This is a good editorial. It is one thing to disagree with the settlement policy. It is another to say, "the settlers have it coming, you can kill them big and small" as many so-called liberals are now saying (in effect, and sometimes in almost those words):
EDITORIAL: Are settlers human?
St.-Sgt. Noam Apter's last act was to lock himself inside a kitchen with two Palestinian terrorists, thereby saving the lives of many fellow students eating Shabbat dinner in the adjoining dining room. To Apter, 22, defending those students was worth sacrificing his own life. Listening to some Israelis, Europeans, and Americans, one might gain the impression that settlers do not deserve to live at all.
Relatively early on in the current Palestinian offensive, Hebrew University Prof. Ze'ev Sternhell wrote in Ha'aretz that "many in Israel, perhaps even the majority of the voters, do not doubt the legitimacy of the armed resistance in the territories themselves. The Palestinians would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements, avoid harming women and children, and strictly refrain from firing on Gilo, Nahal Oz, or Sderot."
If a respected Israeli academic, writing in a prominent Israeli newspaper, can advise the Palestinians to concentrate their "armed resistance" against settlers, it is not surprising that this has become the European and American position too, with different degrees of candor.
The Europeans have openly thrown their weight behind "cease-fire" talks between the PLO and Hamas in Cairo, even though no one expects the latter to agree to ending attacks on settlements.
The goal of these talks seems to be to pursue Sternhell's solution: no more ugly suicide bombings, just "legitimate" attacks like the one that just took the life of Noam Apter and the three other young men in a kitchen in Otniel.
The Palestinian Authority not only failed to condemn the Otniel attack, but a Fatah spokesman, Hatam Abed el-Kadar, stated the attack does not negatively affect the Cairo talks, whose purpose is to calm the situation only within the 1948 borders. As a senior Islamic Jihad figure, Sheik Abdullah Shami, said dryly, "The operation was carried out within the natural parameters of armed conflict."
The US has been less involved in the Cairo talks, but is reportedly giving Egypt credit for hosting them, and therefore does not see any particular problem with treating Hamas as a legitimate negotiating partner, rather than a terrorist group to be dismembered and crushed. This too is not so surprising, given the American drumbeat against the legitimacy of settlements, at times labeled "obstacles to peace." Even Sen. Joseph Lieberman, on his recent trip, warned Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that settlements would be an increasing irritant in US-Israel relations, without suggesting that he had a contrary point of view.
Indeed, according to the latest draft of the US road map, Israel must commit to ending even the natural growth of settlements a requirement not included in the Oslo Accords in exchange for which the Palestinians "begin" to take concrete actions against terrorism.
What is behind this obsession with settlements? Having kindly offered the Palestinians his preferred war strategy, Sternhell also spelled out the impeccable logic of throwing the settlers to the wolves: "By adopting such an approach, the Palestinians would be sketching the profile of a solution that is the only inevitable one: The amended Green Line will be an international border and territory will be handed over to compensate the Palestinians for land that has already been or will be annexed to Israel." In other words, settlements matter because the Arab-Israeli conflict is a border conflict. Settlements block a territorial compromise, so they are, in this thinking, a strategic obstacle to peace, perhaps more so than terrorism itself, which can in theory can be stopped at any time.
Now it is true that the settlement enterprise is a hybrid phenomenon: Some were founded more with an eye to bolstering national security, others more to prevent a Palestinian state from ever coming into being. It is possible to debate the validity of either or both of these goals with respect to the past, present, and future. What should not be debatable today is that the basic premise of Oslo, and in fact of all post-1967 Western and Israeli diplomacy that the conflict was essentially a border conflict has been disproved. In the summer and winter of 2000, the Palestinians first rejected a near total territorial capitulation by Israel, and followed with a war, in case the point had not been made clearly enough.
The premise that the Arabs were ready for peace and the only question was terms was a false one. If there were no settlements, there would still have been a war over what even the West's current great moderate hope, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), is unwilling to concede: the "right of return." The stubborn focus on settlements, including by the Labor Party, is a distraction from confronting the real source of the conflict, which is the refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel as a permanent Jewish state.
The settlers are Jews, Israelis, and human beings. The Palestinian terrorists, whether or not they follow Sternhell's tactical advice, make no distinction between Israelis living in Otniel or in Tel Aviv, and Palestinian Authority statements routinely refer to our cities and towns as "settlements." So long as people who care about peace play into the settlement distraction, they shift the spotlight away from where it belongs: on those Arabs who reject a sovereign and Jewish Israel under any circumstances.
jpost.com |
