The Obama administration seems to have significantly stepped up its demands on Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu. This at least is the takeaway from a story in Ha’aretz, a moderately dovish Israeli newspaper. The more conservative Jerusalem Post is basically saying the same thing; Washington is pressing Netanyahu for answers by Saturday to a list of demands that includes a ban on construction in East Jerusalem as well as an extension of the freeze on building settlements in the West Bank after its currently projected expiration in September.
It’s a high stakes gamble. Earlier in the week I congratulated the administration on winning a quick and decisive victory in this dispute. Either the Israelis backed away from the concessions they appeared to be offering over last weekend or the White House decided to push for more. Either way, the dispute is turning into something that will be hard to settle, and the more public the White House is about its demands the more the White House needs to be seen to win.
This will not be an easy fight. The steady expansion of Israeli settlements into the occupied territories is one of Israel’s most hated policies internationally — and one of its least understood. The general view is that the settlement movement is simply the product of religious and nationalist zealots: people who want to expand Israel’s boundaries to the very expansive limits set forth in the Book of Joshua in the Bible. (Basically, from the Sinai to the Euphrates including, for starters, both the West Bank and Jordan.) Israeli politicians who support or at least tolerate the expansion of the settlements are condemned in the West as pandering to the crazies.
Having visited some of these settlements myself, and especially the ones in and around Hebron, I can testify that the people there hold some pretty extreme views. I’ve been shown maps of Israel’s ‘true’ Biblical borders that would make me a little nervous if I were an Iraqi, for example. And I’ve been told that whatever human politicians do, the miraculous process of Jewish resettlement in the lands of the Bible will continue. Dieu le veult, as the Crusaders used to say: God wills it.
However, I think people miss the strategic argument for the settlements; they don’t just represent a land grab. They also represent part of Israel’s strategy for peace.
Before the lynch mobs get organized, please everybody understand that I myself don’t think that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are a good idea. I’ve been on record against them ever since my first book was criticized for what The New York Times reviewer called my “reflexive anti-Zionism.” The settlements undercut Israel’s security; that has been my view since I first wrote on the subject in the 1980s and it is still my view today.
But there is a serious case to be made that the settlements in the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) are an important element of Israel’s diplomatic strategy. While I think that other considerations ultimately outweigh this case, it is a solid and thoughtful one. Without understanding it, one can’t understand why both left- and right-wing Israeli governments have supported settlements, and why Israelis so stubbornly resist international pressure to halt the settlement activity in the occupied territories.
As I wrote yesterday, the core diplomatic problem from the Israeli point of view is that the Palestinians still don’t accept the results of the 1948 war.From that day to this, the demand that Palestinian refugees (and their heirs and descendants) be allowed to return to their former homes has been the core of the Palestinian position. While some Palestinians will say (almost always in small groups and almost always in English) that the right of return can be symbolic and is negotiable, no Palestinian with political ambitions can make that admission up front and in public. No Palestinian leader has ever been willing (or perhaps able) to accept an agreement that limits the right of return.
The return of millions of Palestinian refugees — or anything more than a symbolic number — is a complete non-starter for virtually all Jewish Israelis. It would mean the end of the Jewish character of the Israeli state. The Israeli position is and always has been that the refugees — like the millions of other refugees in the upheavals stretching from India to Germany in the years after 1945, and like the hundreds of thousands of present day Israelis who fled from Arab countries — cannot go home.
Essentially, the strategic and diplomatic case for the settlements is that only the threat of further land losses will bring the Palestinians to the bargaining table. In 1947 the Palestinians rejected a partition plan that included much more territory than they retained after the 1948 war. The 1967 boundaries that Palestinians now criticize Israelis for violating were considered illegitimate until the Six Day War made them obsolete.
Only by creating new facts on the ground, many (though by no means all) Israelis believe, can they ever get the Palestinians to accept something like the the 1967 boundaries.
They have a point. Without the threat of more settlements, it’s not clear what the incentives are for the Palestinians to accept a territorial compromise based on the 1967 frontiers. Why not continue the sixty-year policy of resistance and rejection, alternating between violent and non-violent methods, while hoping for changes in the regional or global balance of power? From an Israeli point of view, the only way to make the 1967 boundaries look attractive to the Palestinians is to threaten them with something significantly worse.
In particular, an Israeli could argue, building settlements in the West Bank increases support for the two state solution among powerful West Bankers. Non-refugee Palestinians who own property and are part of established communities are the ones whose interests are most threatened by the specter of Israeli land grabs. The elite families of East Jerusalem, the traditional source of much Palestinian leadership, are most threatened by Israeli steps to turn East Jerusalem into a Jewish city. By posing a threat to the long term interests of these powerful groups, Israeli settlement policy can put pressure on the Palestinians to accept the two state solution.
I actually think that policy has worked to some degree, and the threat that delay could cost the Palestinians has sometimes strengthened the position of moderates within the Palestinian political process.
There is, of course, another aspect to the settlements. By creating “facts on the ground” Israel is essentially setting out its position in talks over its final boundary with the Palestinians. In Jerusalem, where the two sides will argue house by house and block by block before they agree on the fate of the city, new housing could be decisive. If nothing else, settlements elsewhere in the West Bank are bargaining chips.
On balance, however, I would still argue that the costs of the settlement policy to Israel are greater than the benefits. First, while the threat of settlements may induce some Palestinians to accept compromise proposals, the process of taking more land and building more settlements renews and refreshes the sense of outrage among Palestinians at large. 1948 can’t fade into the past when the story of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli expansion is continually re-enacted.
Second, the costs of the settlement policy to Israel internationally (including in the United States) should not be underestimated. Declining sympathy for Israel among American liberals and among Europeans is due to the settlements more than to any other single factor.
Third, the existence of the settlements compounds Israel’s already difficult security situation and gives terrorists more opportunity to stage attacks. Those attacks are not only destructive in human terms; they can and do interfere with the diplomatic process. They create provocations that force an Israeli response and more than once they have succeeded in derailing useful negotiations.
Finally, the nature of Israeli politics means that settlement policy cannot be used effectively as a policy tool. The expansion of the settlements creates a settlement lobby; it is extremely difficult for Israeli governments to control the settlement movement or to adjust policies to reflect rapidly changing international and regional conditions.
Taking all this into account, I personally think that Israel would be better off without settlements, and especially without the settlements beyond the very limited areas of particular strategic importance closest to the 1967 Green Line. But the strategic case for settlements is real, and to understand the way Israel responds to pressure on this issue it is necessary to take that case into account. That, however, is the opinion of an American gentile who wishes Israel well but lives thousands of miles from its shores.
The depth of Israel’s commitments to settlements — and to expanding the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem, which Israelis (but not Americans) consider to be a completely separate matter — explains just how high the stakes are in the ongoing Netanyahu-Obama dispute. Will President Obama force Prime Minister to back down on an issue that many Israelis regard as strategic, and some believe involves vital national interests? Will Congress, still broadly sympathetic to Israel despite widespread American qualms over the settlement policy, back up the US president if the confrontation drags on? Without congressional support, how much pressure can President Obama put on Israel — and how long can he keep twisting arms? Will the spectacle of American pressure on Israel encourage the Arabs to trust the US more and work hard to settle the dispute — or will it encourage them to toughen their stance in the hope that, isolated from the US, a weakened Israel will have to settle for less? Will Iran be inspired and perhaps even charmed by this display of American sincerity, or will it conclude that with the United States and Israel at odds, it has a freer hand than it thought? Will Israelis rally round their prime minister, denouncing the US as a bully — or will they blame their own government for failing to manage the relationship with their closest ally?
Nobody really knows; we are in uncharted seas.