Let Us Stay

What to Do With the Settlements is an article written by Hillel Halkin who is American-born, an author and translator who has lived in Israel for the past 40 years. He has wavered from left-of-center to right-of-cent to center over the years and a review of his essays in Commentary is recommended.

In this latest in the WSJ, he suggest something we have bee saying for decades.

Some excerpts and my comments in [ ] :

There is one obvious solution for Israel's West Bank settlements that has been all but completely overlooked: Let the settlers continue living where they are, but in the state of Palestine.

As a conception, it's stunningly simple. Its very obviousness has rendered it invisible...[for] if over one million Palestinian Arabs can live as they do in towns and villages all over Israel, why cannot a few hundred thousand Israeli Jews live, symmetrically, in a West Bank Palestinian state?

The West Bank settlers have not only been a major obstacle to the success of peace negotiations in the past [not true! Camp David I and the Autonomy; Egypt-Israel Peace; Jordan Peace; all signed] they have now turned into an obstacle to negotiations taking place at all....if the settlers could live under Palestinian sovereignty, what need would there be for a freeze at all? And why wrangle endlessly over where a tortuous border between Israel and Palestine should run so that a maximum of settlers ends up on the Israeli side and a minimum gets evicted from the Palestinian side if there is no inherent necessity for any to be on the Israeli side or for any to be evicted?

Because, you may say, the settlers have no right to be on Palestinian land to begin with. Or because they would not tolerate living under Palestinian rule. Or because the Palestinians would not tolerate them. Or because they and the Palestinians could never get along even with the best of intentions.

...there are settlers, roughly 225,000, who live on the "Israeli" side of the anti-terror West Bank security fence and settlers, about 75,000, who live on its "Palestinian" side. (Another 200,000 Israelis living in parts of former Jordanian Jerusalem that were annexed by Israel in 1967 are not listed by Israeli statistics as settlers at all.) Approximately 1/20th of Israel's Jewish population, the settlers' numbers have grown by over 5% a year, some three times the national average—a figure due to in-migration, mostly of young couples, and a high birth rate.

...In 1977, the year in which the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin, which had reined in settlement activity, was replaced by the pro-settlement Likud government of Menachem Begin, the West Bank's Jewish population was barely 7,000. By 1988, it had grown to 63,000; by 1993, to 100,000; by 2006, to 230,000. And even with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's current freeze on new West Bank building starts, enough pre-freeze units are under construction to ensure that this rate of growth continues through 2010. [we are now 313,000]

...Nor is it true, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, that the settlements are "illegal." The case for this belief rests almost entirely on the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, article 49(6) of which states that an occupying military power "shall not deport or transfer part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Yet not only has Israel "deported" or "transferred" no one to the settlements, whose inhabitants are there of their own free will, it did not come into possession of the West Bank as an occupying power.

This is because, after its 1967 victory, Israel had as good a legal claim on the West Bank as anyone. The Jordanian annexation of the area, while consented to by the same Palestinian leadership that rejected the 1947 United Nations partition resolution which would have created a Palestinian state then, was unrecognized by the rest of the world, and Jordan itself refused to make peace with Israel or accept the 1949 border as permanent. As the sole sovereign state to have emerged from British-Mandate Palestine, Israel, it can be maintained, was the West Bank's legitimate ruler pending final determination of the area's status.

...Even if all the settlers living on the "Israeli" side of the security fence end up in Israel in the land swap that has come to be an assumed part of any peace deal, the 75,000 who would find themselves in a Palestinian state happen to be the very element of the settler population—the ideological and religious militants living deep in Palestinian territory—who are most committed to being where they are. What does one do with them?

The standard answer is: one evacuates them by force, just as was done with the 8,000 settlers forcibly evicted in the summer of 2005 when Israel left the Gaza Strip. Whoever doesn't want to leave the Palestinian state on his own two feet can be carried by his arms and legs.

But this cannot be done—and it cannot be done because of what happened in Gaza...to experience the national trauma of witnessing men, women and children literally dragged from their homes as Jews were in the past only by their persecutors in their countries of exile; to find itself saddled with a bill of billions of dollars for the evictees' relocation and rehabilitation; and today, nearly five years later, to face the reality that many of them have had their lives severely disrupted and still lack permanent homes. If this is what happened with 8,000 settlers who did not resort to violence in the end, what will happen with 10 times that many who almost certainly will?

This is something the Israeli public is not prepared to find out. It is not going to let itself undergo a trauma 10 times greater than that of 2005 and it will not be pushed to, or over, the brink of civil war....

...Were they offered a status analogous, say, to that of French Canadians living in Vermont a short drive from the Quebec border, they might well prefer it to giving up their homes. Needless to say, the Palestinians are not Vermonters and have no love for the settlers. Yet they, too, might agree to such an arrangement if there were substantial benefits in it for them...

...Granted, the settlers living in a Palestinian state would constitute a potential tinderbox that, given the built-in tensions between them and the Palestinian population, could flare up at any time. [and the Arabs in the state of Israel are the most peaceful of minorities???] Preventing this from happening would depend on both them and on the Palestinian government, both of which would have to curb extremist elements [nice term for bloodthirsty terrorists]...

It would be difficult. It would be complicated. It would be risky for both sides. But isn't it at least worth thinking about? Not a conventional two-state solution, and not a disastrous one-state solution, but a Palestinian-Israeli federation with Palestinians in Israel and Israelis in Palestine. It may be the only real solution now left.