Chapter 23: The Settlements - Judea and Samaria - Bricks and Stones

Chapter 23: The Settlements - Judea and Samaria

- “Israeli settlements are illegal.”
- “Settlements are an obstacle to peace.”
- “The Geneva Convention prohibits the construction of Jewish settlements in occupied territories.”
- “The size of the Jewish population in the West Bank precludes any territorial compromise.”
- “At Camp David, Begin promised to halt the construction of settlements for five years.”
- “Israel must dismantle all the settlements or peace is impossible.”
- “If Israel annexes the settlement blocs, a Palestinian state will not be contiguous.”

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MYTH

“Israeli settlements are illegal.”

FACT

Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—since ancient times. The only time Jews have been prohibited from living in the territories in recent decades was during Jordan’s rule from 1948 to 1967.

Numerous legal authorities dispute the charge that settlements are “illegal.” Stephen Schwebel, formerly President of the International Court of Justice, notes that a country acting in self-defense may seize and occupy territory when necessary to protect itself. Schwebel also observes that a state may require, as a condition for its withdrawal, security measures designed to ensure its citizens are not menaced again from that territory. ¹

According to Eugene Rostow, a former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Johnson Administration, Resolution 242 gives Israel a legal right to be in the West Bank. The resolution, Rostow noted, “Israel is entitled to administer the territories” it won in 1967 until ‘‘a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’’ is achieved. ² Though critical of Israeli policy, the United States does not consider settlements illegal.

MYTH

“Settlements are an obstacle to peace.”

FACT

Settlements have never been an obstacle to peace.

• From 1949–67, when Jews were forbidden to live on the West Bank, the Arabs refused to make peace with Israel.
• From 1967–77, the Labor Party established only a few strategic settlements in the territories, yet the Arabs were unwilling to negotiate peace with Israel.
• In 1977, months after a Likud government committed to greater settlement activity took power, Egyptian President Sadat went to Jerusalem and later signed a peace treaty with Israel. Incidentally, Israeli settlements existed in the Sinai and those were removed as part of the agreement with Egypt.
• One year later, Israel froze settlement building for three months, hoping the gesture would entice other Arabs to join the Camp David peace process, but none would.
• In 1994, Jordan signed a peace agreement with Israel and settlements were not an issue; if anything, the number of Jews living in the territories was growing.
• Between June 1992 and June 1996, under Labor-led governments, the Jewish population in the territories grew by approximately 50 percent. This rapid growth did not prevent the Palestinians from signing the Oslo accords in September 1993 or the Oslo 2 agreement in September 1995.
• In 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to dismantle dozens of settlements, but the Palestinians still would not agree to end the conflict.
• In August 2005, Israel evacuated all of the settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in Northern Samaria, but terror attacks continued.
• In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to withdraw from approximately 94 percent of the West Bank, but the deal was rejected.
• In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu froze settlement construction for 10 months and the Palestinians refused to engage in negotiations until the period was nearly over. After agreeing to talk, they walked out when Netanyahu refused to prolong the freeze.

Settlement activity may be a stimulus to peace because it forced the Palestinians and other Arabs to reconsider the view that time is on their side. References are frequently made in Arabic writings to how long it took to expel the Crusaders and how it might take a similar length of time to do the same to the Zionists. The growth in the Jewish population in the territories forced the Arabs to question this tenet. “The Palestinians now realize,” said Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij, “that time is now on the side of Israel, which can build settlements and create facts, and that the only way out of this dilemma is face-to-face negotiations.” ³

Even though settlements are not an obstacle to peace, many Israelis still have concerns about the expansion of settlements. Some consider them provocative, others worry that the settlers are particularly vulnerable, and note they have been targets of repeated Palestinian terrorist attacks. To defend them, large numbers of soldiers are deployed who would otherwise be training and preparing for a possible future conflict with an Arab army. Some Israelis also object to the amount of money that goes to communities beyond the Green Line, and special subsidies that have been provided to make housing there more affordable. Still others feel the settlers are providing a first line of defense and developing land that rightfully belongs to Israel.

The disposition of settlements is a matter for the final status negotiations. The question of where the final border will be between Israel and a Palestinian entity will likely be influenced by the distribution of these Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria (the border with Gaza was unofficially defined following Israel’s withdrawal). Israel wants to incorporate as many settlers as possible within its borders while the Palestinians want to expel all Jews from the territory they control.

If Israel withdraws toward the 1949 armistice line unilaterally, or as part of a political settlement, many settlers will face one or more options: remain in the territories (the disengagement from Gaza suggests this may not be possible), expulsion from their homes, or voluntary resettlement in Israel (with financial compensation).

The impediment to peace is not the existence of Jewish communities in the disputed territories, it is the Palestinians’ unwillingness to accept a state next to Israel instead of one replacing Israel.

MYTH

“The Geneva Convention prohibits the construction of Jewish settlements in occupied territories.”

FACT

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the forcible transfer of people of one state to the territory of another state that it has occupied as a result of a war. The intention was to insure that local populations who came under occupation would not be forced to move. This is in no way relevant to the settlement issue. Jews are not being forced to go to the West Bank; on the contrary, they are voluntarily moving back to places where they, or their ancestors, once lived before being expelled by others.

In addition, those territories never legally belonged to either Jordan or Egypt, and certainly not to the Palestinians, who were never the sovereign authority in any part of Palestine. “The Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there,” according to Professor Eugene Rostow, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. ⁴

As a matter of policy, moreover, Israel does not requisition private land for the establishment of settlements. Housing construction is allowed on private land only after determining that no private rights will be violated. The settlements also do not displace Arabs living in the territories. The media sometimes gives the impression that for every Jew who moves to the West Bank, several hundred Palestinians are forced to leave. The truth is that the vast majority of settlements have been built in uninhabited areas and even the handful established in or near Arab towns did not force any Palestinians to leave.

MYTH

“The size of the Jewish population in the West Bank precludes any territorial compromise.”

FACT

Altogether, built-up settlement area is less than two percent of the disputed territories. An estimated 70 percent of the settlers live in what are in effect suburbs of major Israeli cities such as Jerusalem. These are areas that virtually the entire Jewish population believes Israel must retain to ensure its security, and presidents Clinton and Bush anticipated would remain under permanent Israeli sovereignty. ⁵

Strategic concerns have led both Labor and Likud governments to establish settlements. The objective is to secure a Jewish majority in key strategic regions of the West Bank, such as the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, the scene of heavy fighting in several Arab-Israeli wars. Still, when Arab-Israeli peace talks began in late 1991, more than 80 percent of the West Bank contained no settlements or only sparsely populated ones. ⁶

Today, approximately 500,000 Jews live in 192 communities in the West Bank. The overwhelming majority of these settlements have fewer than 1,000 citizens, 40 percent have fewer than 500 and several have only a few dozen residents. Contrary to Palestinian-inspired hysteria about settlement expansion, the truth is only five settlements have been built since 1990. ⁷ Analysts have noted that 70–80 percent of the Jews could be brought within Israel’s borders with minor modifications of the “Green Line.”

Ironically, while Palestinians complain about settlements, an estimated 35,000 work in them and support a population of more than 200,000. ⁸

MYTH

“At Camp David, Begin promised to halt the construction of settlements for five years.”

FACT

The five-year period agreed to at Camp David was the time allotted to Palestinian self-government in the territories. The Israeli moratorium on West Bank settlements agreed to by Prime Minister Menachem Begin was only for three months.

Israel’s position on the matter received support from an unexpected source: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who said: “We agreed to put a freeze on the establishment of settlements for the coming three months, the time necessary in our estimation for signing the peace treaty.” ⁹

The Palestinians rejected the Camp David Accords and therefore the provisions related to them were never implemented. Had they accepted the terms offered by Begin, it is very likely the self-governing authority would have developed long before now into an independent Palestinian state.

“If settlement-building is now concentrated in areas that the Palestinians themselves acknowledge will remain part of Israel in any future peace agreement, why the obsessive focus on settlements as an ‘obstacle to peace?’ ” — Yossi Klein Halevi 10

MYTH

“Israel must dismantle all the settlements or peace is impossible.”

FACT

When serious negotiations begin over the final status of the West Bank, battle lines will be drawn over which settlements should be incorporated into Israel, and which must be evacuated. In August 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acknowledged that “not all the settlements that are today in Judea and Samaria will remain Israeli” while leaked Palestinian negotiating documents indicate the Palestinians are prepared to accept that some settlements will be incorporated into Israel. ¹¹

In Gaza, Israel’s intent was to withdraw completely, and no settlements were viewed as vital to Israel for economic, security, or demographic reasons. The situation in the West Bank is completely different because Jews have strong historic and religious connections to the area stretching back centuries. Moreover, the West Bank is an area with strategic significance because of its proximity to Israel’s heartland and the fact that roughly one-quarter of Israel’s water resources are located there.

The disengagement from Gaza involved only 21 settlements and approximately 8,500 Jews; more than 100 settlements with a population of roughly 300,000 are located in Judea and Samaria. Any new evacuation from the West Bank will involve another gut-wrenching decision that most settlers and their supporters will oppose with even greater ferocity than the Gaza disengagement. Most Israelis, however, favor withdrawing from all but the largest communities.

Over two-thirds of the Jews in the West Bank live in five settlement “blocs” that are all near the 1967 border. Most Israelis believe these blocs should become part of Israel when final borders are drawn. The table below lists the “consensus” settlements:

Bloc	No. of  Communities	Population	Approximate. Area (sq. miles)
Ma’ale Adumim	8	70,210	28
Modiin Illit	9	151,773	4
Ariel	22	81,720	47
Gush Etzion	18	174,939	24
Givat Ze’ev	5	22,916	5
Total	62	501,558	108

As the table shows, these are large communities with thousands of residents. Evacuating them would be the equivalent of dismantling major American cities such as Annapolis, Maryland, Olympia, Washington, or Carson City, Nevada.

Ma’ale Adumim is a suburb of Israel’s capital, barely three miles outside Jerusalem’s city limits, a ten-minute drive away. Ma’ale Adumim is not a recently constructed outpost on a hilltop; it is a 35-year-old community that is popular because it is clean, safe, and close to where many residents work. It is also the third-largest Jewish city in the territories, with a population of 34,324. Approximately 6,000 people live in surrounding settlements that are included in the Ma’ale bloc. Israel has long planned to fill in the empty gap between Jerusalem and this bedroom community (referred to as the E1 project). The corridor is approximately 3,250 acres and does not have any inhabitants, so no Palestinians would be displaced. According to the Clinton plan, Ma’ale was to be part of Israel.

The Gush Etzion Bloc consists of 18 communities with a population of nearly 55,000 just 10 minutes from Jerusalem. Jews lived in this area prior to 1948, but the Jordanian Legion destroyed the settlements and killed 240 women and children during Israel’s War of Independence. After Israel recaptured the area in 1967, descendants of those early settlers reestablished the community. The largest of the settlements is the city of Betar Illit with nearly 35,000 residents.

The Givat Ze’ev bloc includes five communities just northwest of Jerusalem. Givat Ze’ev, with a population of just under 11,000, is the largest.

Modiin Illit is a bloc with four communities. The city of Modiin Illit is the largest in all the disputed territories, with nearly 46,000 people situated just over the Green Line, about 23 miles northwest of Jerusalem and the same distance east of Tel Aviv.

Ariel is now the heart of the third most populous bloc of settlements. The city is located just 25 miles east of Tel Aviv and 31 miles north of Jerusalem. Ariel and the surrounding communities expand Israel’s narrow waist (which was just 9 miles wide prior to 1967) and ensure that Israel has a land route to the Jordan Valley in case Israel needs to fight a land war to the east. It is more controversial than the other consensus settlements because it is the furthest from the 1949 Armistice Line, extending approximately 12 miles into the West Bank. Nevertheless, Barak’s proposal at Camp David included Ariel among the settlement blocs to be annexed to Israel; the Clinton plan also envisioned incorporating Ariel within the new borders of Israel.

“Clearly, in the permanent agreement we will have to give up some of the Jewish settlements.” — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon 12

Most peace plans, including Clinton’s, assumed that Israel would annex sufficient territory to incorporate 75–80% of the Jews currently living in the West Bank. Using the figures in the table above, however, it appears that Israel would fall short of that demographic goal even if these five blocs were annexed. The total population of these communities is approximately 202,000, which is roughly 66% of the estimated 304,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria. The expectation, however, is that roughly one-third of the Jews living in other settlements will move into these blocs, which would bring the total close to 80%, but still require Israel to evacuate more than 60,000 people.

At Camp David, Israel insisted that 80 percent of the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria would be in settlement blocs under Israeli sovereignty. President Clinton agreed and proposed that Israel annex 4–6 percent of the West Bank for three settlement blocs to accomplish this demographic objective and swap some territory within Israel in exchange.

Recognizing the demographics of the area, President Bush acknowledged the inevitability of some Israeli towns in the West Bank being annexed to Israel in his 2004 letter to Prime Minister Sharon. In his meeting a year later with Palestinian Authority President Abbas, however, he seemed to hedge his support by saying that any such decision would have to be mutually agreed to by Israelis and Palestinians. Nevertheless, the future border is likely to approximate the route of the security fence, given the Israeli prerequisite (with U.S. approval) of incorporating most settlers within Israel.

Ultimately, Israel may decide to unilaterally disengage from the West Bank and determine which settlements it will incorporate within the borders it delineates. Israel would prefer, however, to negotiate a peace treaty with the Palestinians that would specify which Jewish communities will remain intact within the mutually agreed border of Israel, and which will need to be evacuated. Israel will undoubtedly insist that some or all of the “consensus” blocs become part of Israel.

MYTH

“If Israel annexes the settlement blocs, a Palestinian state will not be contiguous.” 

FACT

As the map to the right indicates, it is possible to create a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank even if Israel incorporates the major settlement blocs. The total area of these communities is only about 1.5 percent of the West Bank. A kidney-shaped state linked to the Gaza Strip by a secure passage would be contiguous. Some argue that the E1 project linking Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem would cutoff east Jerusalem, but even that is not necessarily true as Israel has proposed constructing a four-lane underpass to guarantee free passage between the West Bank and the Arab sections ofJerusalem.

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Sources:
¹ American Journal of International Law, (April, 1970), pp. 345–46.
² New Republic, (October 21, 1991), p. 14.
³ Washington Post, (November 1, 1991).
⁴ Eugene Rostow, “Bricks and Stones: Settling for Leverage,” The New Republic, (April 23, 1990).
⁵ Haaretz, (September 13, 2001); President George W. Bush’s Letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, (April 14, 2004).
⁶ Jerusalem Post, (October 22, 1991).
⁷ Tovah Lazaroff, “Frontlines: Is settlement growth booming?” Jerusalem Post, (December 30, 2010).
⁸ Avi Issacharoff, “PA lightens ban on working in settlements to ease Palestinian unemployment,” Haaretz,(December 28, 2010).
⁹ Middle East News Agency, (September 20, 1978).
¹⁰ Los Angeles Times, (June 20, 2001).
¹¹ Greg Myre, “Middle East: Sharon Sees More West Bank Pullouts,” New York Times, (August 30, 2005).
¹² Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Address to the Likud Central Committee, (January 5, 2004).

Bricks and Stones: Settling for Leverage; Palestinian Autonomy

By Professor Eugene V. Rostow

April 23, 1990

Over the past several weeks the long-standing American objection to further Israeli settlements in the West Bank has been pressed by the Bush administration with new vehemence. The outcome of this argument is crucial. It will affect the substance, fairness, and durability of any peace that may emerge.

With varying degrees of seriousness, all American administrations since 1967 have
objected to Israeli settlements in the West Bank on the ground that they would
make it more difficult to persuade the Arabs to make peace. President Carter
decreed that the settlements were "illegal" as well as tactically unwise. President
Reagan said that the settlements were legal but that they did make negotiations
less likely. The strength of the argument is hardly self-evident. Jordan occupied the
West Bank for nineteen years, allowed no Jewish settlements, and showed no sign
of wanting to make peace. Yet if the West Bank were 98 or 100 percent Arab when
the parties finally reached the bargaining table, the impulse to accept a peace that
ceded the whole of the West Bank to an Arab state would be tempting to
Americans and Europeans, and even to some weary Israelis. The growing reality of
Israeli settlements in the area, on the other hand, should be a catalyst for peace, by
imposing a price on the Arabs for their refusal to negotiate. But the American
government keeps reciting the old formula.

Secretary of State James Baker has gone beyond previous American positions by
threatening to cut aid if the Israelis build more settlements in the West Bank. He
spoke after Arab protests against the possibility of large numbers of Soviet Jews
settling in Israel, particularly in the West Bank. Wouldn't it have been more useful
if Baker had told his Arab interlocutors that if they want any parts of the West
Bank to become Arab territory, they should persuade Jordan and the Arabs living
in the occupied territories to make peace with Israel as rapidly as possible? Since
1949 the U.N. Security Council has repeatedly urged and occasionally commanded
the Arab states to make peace, most recently in Resolutions 242 and 338. Thus far,
with the exception of Egypt in 1977, they have simply refused to comply. But Baker
yielded to the Arab outcry, and is trying to maneuver Israel into a position that no
Israeli majority can accept: to renounce the right of settlement "of the Jewish
people"-in the words of the Mandate-in any part of the West Bank.

The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same
provisions of the Mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and
Jerusalem before the State of Israel was created. The Mandate for Palestine differs
in one important respect from the other League of Nations mandates, which were
trusts for the benefit of the indigenous population. The Palestine Mandate,
recognizing "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the
grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country," is dedicated to
"the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being
clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil
and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

The Mandate qualifies the Jewish right of settlement and political development in Palestine in only one respect. Article 25 gave Great Britain and the League Council discretion to "postpone" or "withhold" the Jewish people's right of settlement in the TransJordanian province of Palestine-now the Kingdom of Jordan-if they decided that local conditions made such action desirable. With the divided support of the council, the British took that step in 1922.

The Mandate does not, however, permit even a temporary suspension of the
Jewish right of settlement in the parts of the Mandate west of the Jordan River. The
Armistice Lines of 1949, which are part of the West Bank boundary, represent
nothing but the position of the contending armies when the final cease-fire was
achieved in the War of Independence. And the Armistice Agreements specifically
provide, except in the case of Lebanon, that the demarcation lines can be changed
by agreement when the parties move from armistice to peace. Resolution 242 is
based on that provision of the Armistice Agreements and states certain criteria
that would justify changes in the demarcation lines when the parties make peace.

Many believe that the Palestine Mandate was somehow terminated in 1947, when
the British government resigned as the mandatory power. This is incorrect. A trust
never terminates when a trustee dies, resigns, embezzles the trust property, or is
dismissed. The authority responsible for the trust appoints a new trustee, or
otherwise arranges for the fulfillment of its purpose. Thus in the case of the
Mandate for German South West Africa, the International Court of justice found
the South African government to be derelict in its duties as the mandatory power,
and it was deemed to have resigned. Decades of struggle and diplomacy then
resulted in the creation of the new state of Namibia, which has just come into
being. In Palestine the British Mandate ceased to be operative as to the territories
of Israel and Jordan when those states were created and recognized by the
international community. But its rules apply still to the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip, which have not yet been allocated either to Israel or to Jordan or become an
independent state. Jordan attempted to annex the West Bank in 1951, but that
annexation was never generally recognized, even by the Arab states, and now
Jordan has abandoned all its claims to the territory.

The State Department has never denied that under the Mandate "the Jewish
people" have the right to settle in the area. Instead, it said that Jewish settlements
in the West Bank violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949,
which deals with the protection of civilians in wartime. Where the territory of one
contracting party is occupied by another contracting party, the Convention
prohibits many of the inhumane practices of the Nazis and the Soviets before and
during the Second World War-the mass transfer of people into or out of occupied
territories for purposes of extermination, slave labor, or colonization, for example.

Article 49 provides that the occupying power "shall not deport or transfer part of
its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." But the Jewish settlers in
the West Bank are volunteers. They have not been "deported" or "transferred" by
the government of Israel, and their movement involves none of the atrocious
purposes or harmful effects on the existing population the Geneva Convention was
designed to prevent. Furthermore, the Convention applies only to acts by one
signatory "carried out on the territory of another." The West Bank is not the
territory of a signatory power, but an unallocated part of the British Mandate. It is
hard,  therefore,  to  see  how  even  the  most  literal-minded  reading  of  the
Convention could make it apply to Jewish settlement in territories of the British
Mandate west of the Jordan River. Even if the Convention could be construed to
prevent settlements during the period of occupation, however, it could do no more
than suspend, not terminate, the rights conferred by the Mandate. Those rights
can be ended only by the establishment and recognition of a new state or the
incorporation of the territories into an old one.

As claimants to the territory, the Israelis have denied that they are required to
comply with the Geneva Convention but announced that they will do so as a
matter of grace. The Israeli courts apply the Convention routinely, sometimes
deciding against the Israeli government. Assuming for the moment the general
applicability of the Convention, it could well be considered a violation if the
Israelis deported convicts to the area or encouraged the settlement of people who
had no right to live there (Americans, for example). But how can the Convention
be deemed to apply to Jews who have a right to settle in the territories under
international law: a legal right assured by treaty and specifically protected by
Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, which provides that nothing in the Charter shall be
construed "to alter in any manner" rights conferred by existing international
instruments" like the Mandate. The Jewish right of settlement in the area is
equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live
there.

Another principle of international law may affect the problem of the Jewish
settlements. Under international law, an occupying power is supposed to apply the
prevailing law of the occupied territory at the municipal level unless it interferes
with the necessities of security or administration or is "repugnant to elementary
conceptions of justice." From 1949 to 1967, when Jordan was the military occupant
of the West Bank, it applied its own laws to prevent any Jews from living in the

territory. To suggest that Israel as occupant is required to enforce such Jordanian laws-a necessary implication of applying the Convention-is simply absurd. When the Allies occupied Germany after the Second World War, the abrogation of the Nuremberg Laws was among their first acts.

The general expectation of international law is that military occupations last a
short time, and are succeeded by a state of peace established by treaty or
otherwise. In the case of the West Bank, the territory was occupied by Jordan
between 1949 and 1967, and has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Security
Council Resolutions 242 and 338 rule that the Arab states and Israel must make
peace, and that when "a just and lasting peace" is reached in the Middle East, Israel
should withdraw from some but not all of the territory it occupied in the course of
the 1967 war. The Resolutions leave it to the parties to agree on the terms of peace.

The controversy about Jewish settlements in the West Bank is not, therefore, about
legal rights but about the political will to override legal rights. Is the United States
prepared to use all its influence in Israel to award the whole of the West Bank to
Jordan or to a new Arab state, and force Israel back to its 1967  borders?

Throughout Israel's occupation, the Arab countries, helped by the United States,
have pushed to keep Jews out of the territories, so that at a convenient moment, or
in a peace negotiation, the claim that the West Bank is "Arab" territory could be
made more plausible. Some in Israel favor the settlements for the obverse reason:
to reinforce Israel's claim for the fulfillment of the Mandate and of Resolution 242
in a peace treaty that would at least divide the territory. For the international
community, the issue is much deeper and more difficult: whether the purposes of
the Mandate can be considered satisfied if the Jews finally receive only the parts of
Palestine behind the Armistice Lines-less than 17.5 percent of the land promised
them  after  the  First  World  War.  The  extraordinary  recent  changes  in  the
international environment have brought with them new diplomatic opportunities
for the United States and its allies, not least in the Middle East. Soviet military aid
apparently is no longer available to the Arabs for the purpose of making another
war against Israel. The intifada has failed, and the Arabs' bargaining position is
weakening. It now may be possible to take long steps toward peace. But to do so,
the participants in the Middle East negotiations-the United States, Israel, Egypt,
and the PLO-will have to look beyond the territories.

The goal of Yitzhak Shamir's election proposal is an interim regime of Arab
autonomy in part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in accordance with the
Camp David Accords; the goal of the PLO is to establish a Palestinian Arab state in
the whole of the territories. It is hard to be sanguine about the possibility of
reconciling  those  positions  through  negotiations.  Establishing  a  cooperative
relationship between Israel and the Arabs who live in the occupied territories is a
crucial part of the Palestine problem, but it is not the whole of it, and surely not an
end in itself. The last thing Israel wants is an Arab Bantustan. If the status of the
occupied territories is viewed in isolation, negotiation will be excruciatingly

difficult, and every item on the agenda will be a tense and suspicious haggle on both sides.

The prospects for peace would be less forbidding if the question were approached
as one element in a plan for achieving a larger goal: a confederation involving at
least Israel, Jordan, and the occupied territories. Membership could perhaps be
open to poor Lebanon as well, or parts of it. Even Syria, behind its ferocious words,
may be preparing to move toward peace. Syria and Israel have congruent interest
in Lebanon and elsewhere, and neither country wants a state dominated by the
PLO as a neighbor.

The idea of a Palestinian confederation has been the recommendation of every
serious study of the Palestine problem for more than fifty years. It was the essence
of the partition proposals of the Peel Commission in 1936, and of the General
Assembly's 1947 partition plan, at least for Israel and the West Bank. With
different boundaries, it was also the basic idea of Israel's 1967 peace offer, which
will always correspond to Israeli public opinion: Palestine divided into a Jewish
and an Arab state, united in a common market, with special arrangements for
Jerusalem and as much political cooperation as the traffic will bear. Before the
intifada  started,  it  was  the  notion  behind  the  de  facto  Israel/Jordanian
condominium for the West Bank, which was both effective and practical.

After the past year's events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, who can say that progress in the Middle East is impossible? 

"Occupation" Myth:
"OCCUPATION". How many times must we hear that again?! This harsh, loaded and damaging term has unfortunately
worked its way into the daily discourse about Israel to the point where people use it automatically and without considering its ramifications. Use of this expression serves the interests of Israel's enemies by not only delegitimizing the Jewish claim to Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. "occupied territories") but by also weakening the Jewish claim to all of Israel, in its entirety. It throws into question the legality and morality of Israeli sovereignty over pre-1967 Israel no less than it denies Israel's right to the "West Bank". More so, actually. Because when you think about it, if the Jewish People have no claim to ancient Biblical Shechem (Nablus), the principal Samarian city intimately linked to Jewish history ever since the time of Abraham, then a fortiori they certainly cannot claim Tel Aviv, a modern day creation of no historical, national or religious significance. From a legal standpoint, both Tel Aviv and Shechem clearly belong to the Jewish People. Yet the moral Jewish claim to Shechem is arguably stronger. This is a subtle but crucial point consistently missed by the Left. By bashing the settlements, the Left is actually shooting itself (and all the rest of us) in the foot. Claiming Tel Aviv while renouncing Shechem, as they do, is illogical, misguided and harmful. In fact, there's no difference between Israel proper and the "West Bank". There never was. Both were recognized, by international agreements subsequently ratified into law, to comprise the Homeland for the Jewish People. Ironically, it is the rest of the world which recognizes this inconsistency, albeit unconsciously. They sense that Israel is not being true to herself. They feel she is not living up to her true potential, not fulfilling her true role in the world. Maybe that's the real reason why Israel is universally held in such low regard.
Bottom line: there is no and never was any "occupation" of "Palestine". This patently false charge has NO BASIS in either fact or law and has been hugely damaging to Israel's morale, self-image, sense of purpose and of course its public image. Here's a direct quote from Stephen Schwebel, former head of the International Court of Justice in the Hague:
"Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully [Jordan's 1948-1967 occupation of Judea and Samaria], the state which subsequently takes that territory [Israel] in the lawful exercise of self-defense [1967 War] has, against that prior holder, better title." - Stephen Schwebel, "What Weight to Conquest," American Journal of International Law, vol. 64 (1970) pp. 345-347
If you do nothing else, be sure to click here:http://www.amisraelchai-eretz.com/occupation.htm

for this required reading.