[There was a thread once on how The Economist has often employed an in-house intelligent leftist, like Isaac Deutscher or Daniel Singer. At the moment it's Graham Usher, who does their reports from Palestine, the best thing in the magazine these days. He also reports for MEI and Al-Ahram. There is nothing revelatory in this particular dispatch. It's just solider judgments and more germane facts than you get most other places.]
Israeli settlements and the Palestinian uprising
Apr 26th 2001 | EAST JERUSALEM
>From The Economist print edition
The Palestinians' precondition for a ceasefire is a freeze on settlements
DESPITE being written off as stillborn, the peace plan presented last week by Egypt and Jordan, and approved by Yasser Arafat, still flickers with vestiges of life. Ariel Sharon's instinct was to dismiss it out of hand but on April 22nd, perhaps chastened by his ticking off from America for sending tanks into Gaza, Israel's prime minister described the plan as "important" -- so long as its content were "changed somewhat". Shimon Peres, his foreign minister, is to discuss such changes with both Egypt and Jordan.
The plan calls for a series of confidence-building measures, including the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian security co-operation and the lifting of the siege in the West Bank and Gaza. All this is designed to beat a path back to political negotiations. But, for Palestinians, the most important confidence-builder in the plan is its call for a "total and immediate freeze on all settlement activities, including those in East Jerusalem". This is also, presumably, one of the clauses that Mr Sharon will try to get changed. But if there was one thing above all others that undermined the Palestinians' trust in the Oslo peace process, it was Israel's policy of building and expanding settlements.
During Oslo's seven-year era, the number of settler houses and flats grew by 52%, swelling the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza from 115,000 in 1993 to 200,000 in 2000. These figures do not include the 180,000 settlers who live in occupied East Jerusalem. "With the removal of the army from cities, settlements became the Palestinians' first-hand experience of the occupation," says Menachem Klein, an Israeli political scientist who served as an adviser to Ehud Barak's government. "And what they saw was their expansion on every hill-top."
Thus, when the Oslo accords were engulfed by the flames of the intifada, the firing line was in or near the settlements. In the seven months of the latest uprising, Palestinians have launched mortar attacks on the settlements in Gaza, have fired machineguns at settlements, such as Gilo, in East Jerusalem, and have ambushed vehicles on settler roads in the West Bank. Of the 43 Israeli civilians who have been killed since October, about half have been settlers.
Palestinian militants justify these attacks as a way of "deterring" ordinary Israelis from settling on the land that the Palestinians see as their future state. By that measure, the Palestinians can claim that their strategy seems to be working. In September 2000, Har Homa, a new settlement on the southern end of East Jerusalem, had been partly built, with 2,300 apartments on the market. But by April 2001, only 650 of these flats had been sold, a downturn in demand that corresponds to the upsurge in armed revolt.
But though fighting may deter buyers, it does not stop construction. According to Israel's Peace Now movement, there are now 6,000 housing units being built in the occupied territories. In March, Israel's Jerusalem municipality approved the construction of another 2,832 new houses at Har Homa, despite the vacancies in its existing stock. In April, Israel's Housing Ministry tendered 496 houses at the mammoth settlement of Maale Adumim, despite the 1,610 units still unsold there. Both Har Homa and Maale Adumim are settlements with strong political underpinning, whose status remained stubbornly unresolved in the "final-status" talks with Mr Barak.
Palestinians have more immediate reasons for wanting a freeze. In the first week of April, the Israeli army demolished 25 Palestinian houses in the West Bank, and issued orders for the razing of 19 in East Jerusalem. In all these instances, says the army, the houses were built without permission.
But the Palestinians argue that the houses in the West Bank were removed because they were preventing a widening of existing Israeli settlements, and that at least some of the houses in East Jerusalem were marked for destruction because they lay athwart plans for yet another new ring road round the city. These roads are designed to lock Israeli settlements in an urban grid, and to sever Palestinian villages in the municipality from their West Bank hinterland.
If only there could be a settlement freeze, say thoughtful Palestinians, Mr Arafat could sell a ceasefire to his people without incurring the charge that the intifada, and the 400 Palestinian lives it has so far claimed, have been in vain. "We can have negotiations," says Marwan Barghouti, one of Fatah's foremost West Bank leaders, "but we cannot have a situation where we negotiate on the one hand and Israel builds settlements on the other. Those days are over." Without a freeze, nationalists and Islamists seem determined to fight on. But the refusal of Islamists to distinguish cities inside Israel from settlements outside risks turning a national conflict into ethnic-religious carnage.
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com