June 12 2009 - Settlements

It was exactly how many days ago that the issue of Israeli settlements again arose as a divider between Washington and Jerusalem? At first I thought to myself: “There’s nothing substantial here. It’s another tempest in a tea pot. Settlements can’t be all that critical in the overall picture that is the Middle East today.” After all, every nation in the world is struggling to find a way to deal with North Korean insanity which now includes an underground test of a nuclear device of the size that wiped out Hiroshima, and continuing test firings of missiles of various sizes and range. Everyone in the world is trying to make sense of Iran and of its drive for a nuclear weapon with which it has promised to take out Israel. People should be taking notice of the slaughter of innocents that has taken place among the Tamil population as the Sri Lankan army wiped out the remnant of the Tamil Tigers along with untold numbers of civilians. People should be trying to do something about the mess that Somalia is as different Muslim factions catch hundreds of their civilian brothers and sisters in their cross fire in Mogadishu. People ought to be screaming about the injustices that are occurring daily in Zimbabwe, as President Robert Mugabe runs that country and its economy deeper and deeper into the ground…to the point that the International Red Cross, this week, had to send in food stuffs to keep thousands of jailed prisoners there from starving to death. And where is the outcry over the constant carnage emanating from Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as, again, Muslims slaughter Muslims in what seems to be endless incidents of senseless violence and wholesale murder?

In the midst of all this turmoil, just as a team of suicide bombers on horseback attacked the Karni Crossing on the border of Gaza, in an attempt to kidnap more Israeli soldiers, and three Hamas inspired women sought martyrdom in an effort to execute PA officials, the issue of settlements is erupting. I have to admit to a certain level of incredulity over the seeming incongruousness of it all. I don’t yet fully understand what the purpose of this flopping fish is if it isn’t a red herring. Is it that the Administration in this country believes that by raising the pressure on the Israelis, it is going to win points with the Arabs? Is that why the President and his Secretary of State have rejected any building on any land outside the pre-67 border areas including those suburbs of Jerusalem that allow both for population expansion (natural growth) and the security of that city? Well, if that’s the case, I wish someone would say so.

I’m not raising this issue to criticize the United States or its policies. I’m merely asking to try to understand what is going on here. I don’t get it. The fact that Israel walked away from the Gaza Strip, of its own accord, leaving thousands of its citizens without homes, livelihoods, and futures, presenting, as though on a silver platter, the Palestinians and Hamas the opening to lay the foundations of a state, and Hamas chose the destruction of the Jewish state over raising up one of its own; this doesn’t seem to have settled on Israel’s friends’ consciousness. I am not, therefore, surprised, to hear the complaints of Israelis who say that they are tired of giving and giving, and getting little to more-than-nothing-but-violence in return.

Every time Israel pulls back from something she has captured in a defensive war, she seems, actually, to achieve less. This is as true of southern Lebanon, now home of Hizballah, as much as it is of Gaza. If Benjamin Netanyahu, in the speech he is to give at the Bar-Ilan University this Sunday, makes any point to his Palestinian counter-parts, he should address these following points:

1) It is time for you as well as us to consider the steps that must be taken in order to achieve peace between our people. And, therefore, it is time for you to shoulder an equal part of the burden in order for us to get there. You will show the world you are ready for peace when you curb the violence against Israel both in deed as well as word, and begin to teach and display to your people the rubrics of self-governance.

Of course, what the Israeli Prime Minister cannot say---but what everyone knows---is that the Palestinian Authority will prove its worthiness for governance when it tackles its own internal corruption and puts the welfare of its people beyond the collective leadership’s own greed and avarice. After all, there are realistic reasons why Israeli Arabs including the Arab business community of East Jerusalem wants no part of becoming citizens in a Palestinian state. For all Israel’s faults, they cannot expect the benefits they have accrued being citizens of Israel to continue under the rule of their own people./p>

2) What Netanyahu can say to his Palestinian counterparts is the following: You don’t achieve peace by sowing hatred and bigotry in your children. Therefore, you must change the curricula in your schools that stigmatize and demonize Jews and the Jewish state. If you truly seek peace, then it is better to ennoble the process of living together than to foster cynicism in those you say you would see as your neighbors./p>

Even if peace were possible, given Hamas’ rejection of not only Israel’s statehood but also every agreement that has been reached to this point as well, the future is bleak if the basics of trust and mutual respect are missing. Unless we are talking about a three state solution, something has to be done to eliminate the threat that Hamas embodies both to the state of Israel and to their Palestinian rival in the Palestinian Authority./p>

But even these are elements that can wait until the Palestinians genuinely accept the idea that statehood is dearer to them than anything else in the world. To date, I don’t think we have seen the evidence of that.

I do understand that Palestinians have never stopped carping about Jewish encroachment on land that is, reputedly, going to be part of their state. But, and here I quote Dore Gold, who is one of Israel’s brightest and most articulate and insightful advocates:

     Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the 
     built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is 
     estimated to be 1.7 percent of the territory (emphasis, mine), the marginal 
     increase in territory that might be affected by natural growth is 
     infinitesimal. Moreover, since Israel unilaterally withdrew 9,000 
     Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the argument that a 
     settler presence will undermine a future territorial compromise 
     has lost much of its previous force.
	 

I, who am familiar with the history of the conflict, have been scratching my head, wondering what the recent fracas between Israel and the U.S. has really been about. Maybe the President, as some commentators have suggested, is wrapping Israel on the knuckles in a way that doesn’t affect her security in order to score those points I spoke of earlier. Maybe, although I doubt this, it is meant as a way to help the Netanyahu government deal with the radical members of Israel’s far Right Wing which encourages illegal settlements and trumpets disregard for the laws of the country. Or maybe something else is afoot that none of us is seeing…like a gesture by our government to secure some similar compromise from the Saudis on their peace plan.

But to listen to Secretary of State Clinton on ABC’s program last Sunday morning is to understand that whatever our reasons for promulgating this policy, the United States means no expansion of settlements for any reason. Period! Full Stop!

As a bystander, I am curious to see how all this plays out. Actually, I have a sense of having gone down this road before when the United States, under Bush 41, putting heavy pressure on Israel to demonstrate its sincerity for peace according the U.S.’s plan, by ceasing all settlement building. In any case, given the way things work between the two countries, the United States usually gets its way because it holds enormous “or elses.” But I have a hard time seeing or understanding the light at the end of this tunnel.

Oh, there was a small, temporary success this past week, when Lebanon elected enough pro-Western legislators to keep the country turned in our direction, even though it does so with a Hizballah asp at its neck. And there are election results forthcoming tonight in Iran where “moderates” may be unseating Mahmoud Achmadenijad….not that such a phenomenon would curtail that nation’s Ayatollahs who are bent on developing a nuclear weapon.

But I fear that focus of the world is off kilter when settlements in Israel are front page, above-the-fold news, and Iran’s having 7000 centrifuges working night and day toward a region/world upsetting bomb appears somewhere deeper back, if there at all. I scratch my head and wonder, if the worlds’ leaders were all Moses’ and could speak to God, whether their first concerns would actually be settlements or something else.

In the sea of irrationality that seems to be sweeping our globe; in these tough economic times when people are looking for scapegoats for their personal troubles and misery, Israel must raise up wise leaders who can steer a course through great dangers which threaten her. She must ultimately be the arbiter of what is in her best interest, and must not allow radicals of either the Left or the Right to pull her off course or into knee jerk responses. Israel must remain strong and of good courage, and with the help of those who love and support her, and with God’s help, she’ll weather all that she has before her. As I have said so often before, she doesn’t really have much of a choice, does she?