Moshe Ya’alon, the Strategic Affairs Minister of Israel told Meet the Press last Saturday that his country will not follow American dictates and will not halt construction in the settlements. He was referring to the American demand that Israel halt all settlement activity, voiced by U.S. President Barack Obama to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during their meeting two weeks ago.
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A Palestinian laborer prays at a construction site in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat, May 27, 2009. On a hillside neighborhood in Efrat, workers construct a foundation that will expand a building towards a nearby playground. Such construction, which Israel terms “natural growth” to meet the needs of growing Jewish settler families, threatens to cloud relations with its main ally, the United States, whose president, Barack Obama, is to address the Muslim world in a speech in Egypt on June 4. REUTERS/Ammar Awad |
Despite this, Ya’alon challenges the U.S. Is this what we have in the way of leadership in Israel today? Politicians who shoot their mouths off without thinking?
We certainly know now where the main obstacle to peace is (if we happened to be comatose about the Middle East before.) Israel, or the Israeli settler movement that no Israeli government has ever bucked and usually enables as best it can, is the force that is blocking all reasonable efforts for peace. It’s the settlements that prevent any dialogue, any sensible movement towards compromise, sanity, and peace.
These settlements have created a reality that is undemocratic and against the true Zionist vision. Somebody needs to get Sharon out of his coma to explain to Ya’alon that Israel needs to get out of most of the West Bank or else the one state solution will become the only option left with either Jews ruling over Arabs or Palestinians destroying Israel through one man one vote. Sooner than you can believe the Jewish majority will end. As with the old South Africa, an apartheid regime will not survive. It is only a matter of time.
This provocative attitude of continuing settlement construction in the Occupied Territories is suicidal. You can’t anger your neighbors forever without disastrous consequences. Even though in Israeli terminology Palestine equals Gaza; in the U.N. vocabulary Palestine is also anything east of the Green Line; and any Israeli settlement there since 1967 is illegal. That may make the original Gush Etzion negotiable since it was settled even before there was a State of Israel. But any subsequent expansion and all other settlements are illegal by international law including both banks of the Jordan River, the central third of the Golan Heights, and all that territory from east of Jerusalem south to and beyond Jericho.
How can Israel continue building settlements for Jews while demographically speaking Israel is becoming less Jewish every year? Israel continues to abide by an untenable status quo with regard to the settlements in the West Bank; you cannot claim land for your own citizens if you do not believe the land is in your country, and, if you believe that Judea and Samaria are part of Israel, then you must give the people who live there the basic rights of citizenship.
If Israel does not stop taking Palestinian land, it will be digging its own grave. Israel is not just challenging the U.S., but the entire world, and modernity itself. Religious ideology cannot be the basis for domestic policy, and the West Bank settlements are anathema to the entire world.
The establishment of the settlements over recent years has been the most piecemeal, insensitive, chaotic process that must be turned around now. Only then will there even be a chance to deal with the real issue of territorial compromise and land swap that might create options of preserving some settlement blocs and, evacuating others.
A fair one state solution has always been available, but Israel has rejected integration. Modern Israel has no moral basis for rejecting integration with Palestinians in a one state solution. The only alternative is a fair two state solution, whose parameters, whose borders, have long been known: the 1967 Green line.
There is always a choice. Israel can go along with what the U.S. sees as essential for peace in the Middle East or it can say goodbye to our diplomatic and financial aid. Obama’s approval rating would certainly go up if he took the few billion dollars we give Israel and used it to build schools, roads and other infrastructure. It would be an immediate boost to the economy and employment.
President Obama has too much at stake in the Middle East. This “special relationship” is a one-way street to disaster. We have far greater concerns: Russia, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Latin America, and the European Union. Israel is nowhere near as important to our national interests as these countries are.
Most Americans don’t yet realize that Israel is not a democracy as we define democracy in this century, because Palestinians do not have equal rights in their own land. Israel practices segregation and institutionalized discrimination, and that discrimination perpetuates the cycle of violence. If you don’t recognize people as your equals, you will continue to breed anger and rebellion.
Binyamin Netanyahu and his 30 ministers can form their very own little island of ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and meanness. Ya’alon’s comment brings the world closer to the Palestinians and the Arab world. Comments like this are really a reason to believe that the U.S is changing and going to the right side. Only the total isolation of Israel, with no friends, no allies at all in the international community, will make the peace process advance.
The writer is professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio.
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