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| Mac Deford: On the Ground: Settlements, Roadblocks, Demolitions, and Obama | | 11/12/2009 9:49:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | This is part 2 of a 4-part series in which Mac Deford, who just returned from the Middle East, reports on the Palestinian-Israeli quagmire in light of his most recent travels around Israel and the occupied West Bank.
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by Thomas McAdams Deford
"The two-state solution is suicide.
It would be the same as Hitler's final solution."
- extremist Israeli settler in Hebron
A lot can happen in 32 years. And in the 32 years since I was last in Israel and the West Bank, a lot did happen: the long-delayed recognition of the secular PLO which, under Yasir Arafat, dominated the Palestinian arena for over three decades; the growth of the Islamist group Hamas, ironically with significant Israeli support; the first Intifada; the Madrid talks; face-to-face negotiations between Arafat and Rabin resulting in the Oslo Accords; Rabin's assassination; the looming success and then ultimate failure of Clinton's Camp David talks; the second Intifada; the wall; and throughout it all, the non-stop expansion of Israeli settlements.
And on the periphery, there was even more of a sea change: the Lebanese civil war; the Sadat-led peace treaty with Israel followed by his assassination; the Israeli invasion of Lebanon which, ironically again, spurred the growth of the Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah; the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan; the near miss between Israel and Syria. And further afield still - but perhaps most significant of all - the overthrow of the Shah and the birth of a radical theocracy in Iran intent on developing a nuclear capability.
Some good news; but here in the center of the Palestinian conflict, more bad. When President Obama chose last spring to put the issue of settlement growth front and center, it was, it appeared, as much a symbolic message to both sides as it was a practical step: first, a warning to Netanyahu, as his hard right-wing government emerged, that Obama was no Bush and that the Israelis could no longer expect the blank check they had received for the past eight years. And the flip side of the same message to the Palestinians: expect the new US government to revert to the even-handed approach, the unbiased facilitator, of the Clinton years.
Here, on the ground, what you understand - and it now appears that Obama himself didn't - was that the settlement-focused approach is not at all symbolic; it's overwhelmingly pragmatic. Israeli settlements cover the landscape; they pervade the West Bank; permitting continued growth dooms a future Palestinian state.
As you drive out of Jerusalem on the ancient route to Bethlehem, the Israeli hilltop settlements, far inside the pre-'67 international border, are easily distinguishable from the older Palestinian villages squeezed into the valleys below. At night, from the top of the hotel in Bethlehem, the contrast is even more stark: a few scattered, dim lights marking Palestinian houses, and, above, the bright street lights twinkling from the Israeli settlements far across the horizon.
But what really shocks the eye is the massive, in-your-face 20-foot-high wall snaking across the landscape, ostensibly to protect pre-'67 Israel. The reality is, it protects and gobbles up Palestinian land for the settlements. Turn any corner, and there it is: Israel's version of the Berlin Wall, a particularly ironic reminder on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's destruction, cutting off Hebron from Bethlehem, Jerusalem from Jericho and the north, Palestinian farmland from Palestinian villages.
And, of course, the checkpoints on the Palestinian roads (there's a whole separate network of wide, well-paved roads reserved for Israelis only in the West Bank). For a tourist, checkpoints aren't a problem - you get to ride on the settlers' roads. For Palestinians, a 20-minute trip from an outer suburb of Jerusalem to the city center takes over an hour. An Arab-American I met, being driven by her Palestinian cousin, counted 11 checkpoints on a 35-mile stretch of road. The Israeli soldiers dawdle and talk amongst themselves as the Palestinians wait at the barrier, so that even when there's no traffic, it can be a time-consuming process. Worse, though, is the constant humiliation: the 50-year-old Palestinian driving through a land that has been his for centuries is stopped and questioned by blond 18-year-old Russians or dark Ethiopian kids born far away.
Checkpoints have little to do these days with security, Israelis I talked to agreed: it's a purposeful creation of anxiety and pressure, designed to wear down the Palestinians with the hope they'll leave. In Dheishe refugee camp, a remnant of the '48 war - and now a solid, if crowded village of concrete-block houses on the edge of Bethlehem - Israeli soldiers drive their armed jeeps through town two or three times a week in the middle of the night, randomly rousing families, checking identities, asking pointless questions amid half-hearted searches before moving on.
The situation in Hebron is much worse: some 400 or 500 ultra-orthodox, extremist Israelis have taken over the center of town, near the mosque built, according to Muslim and Jewish true-believers, over the cave Abraham bought for his burial site. Streets near the old suq, abutting the Jewish settlements, have been closed off, and the shops, over 500 of them, permanently closed. There are checkpoints entering the old city for its Palestinian inhabitants, who are mocked and humiliated by the young Israeli conscripts. The day I was there, a middle-aged Palestinian was trying to sell his trinkets to tourists. One Israeli soldier called him over, and pointing his gun at a piece of paper on the ground, ordered the Palestinian to pick it up - "and that one over there too." The Palestinian hurried to comply while the Israeli soldier and his buddy at the checkpoint laughed.
A meeting with the spokesman for the Israeli settlers in Hebron, an American as many are, was an even more chilling experience: "The two-state solution is suicide. It would be the same as Hitler's final solution." His views represent a small portion of public opinion, but unfortunately because of the hold the right-wing religious parties have in Israel - without their support, Netanyahu's government would fall - extremist settlers and their wacky, apocalyptic views are given undue weight. In what must be an embarrassing parallel, for mainstream Israelis, to the Islamic fundamentalists' celebration of their martyrs, the gravesite of the American-born extremist who slaughtered 29 Muslims in the Hebron mosque during Friday prayers 15 years ago is a flower-covered shrine visited every anniversary of the massacre by his followers.
Another tool the Israeli government uses to create maximum insecurity and anxiety is the demolition of Palestinian homes, particularly in East Jerusalem. (But not only: the house of a Palestinian family we visited in Sakhnin, far to the north, has had a demolition notice posted on it for some years, despite the fact that the land on which it is built has been in the family for generations.) In Jerusalem, the thousands of houses on the demolition list are invariably cited for building without a permit, though in a fine example of Catch-22, virtually no permits are ever issued for Palestinians with East Jerusalem I.D. cards. Netanyahu has been vociferous in his defense of "natural growth" in the settlements; natural growth for East Jerusalem Palestinians is, however, beyond the pale.
Thus, when the bulldozers roll out one morning, it's anybody's guess as to which houses will be targeted. The day I met with ICAHD (the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition), the Israeli woman I talked to mentioned that five Palestinian houses in five separate areas of East Jerusalem had been bulldozed the day before, but even the left-wing Hebrew-language press had ignored it, so common are demolitions.
She speculated, as this was only a few days after a stone-throwing confrontation between Palestinian teenagers and Israeli police atop the Dome of the Rock complex, that Israeli actions often seem timed to provoke a Palestinian reaction.
Perhaps. But the bottom line is a two-fold strategic one. First, the Israeli government, in a continuation of the "facts on the ground" policy going back to Moshe Dayan and the 1970s, is focusing on ringing Jerusalem with a series of ultimately contiguous settlements so that future discussion of Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of any Palestinian state simply becomes moot. The second, and related, goal is to make daily life so difficult and traumatic for Palestinians that they will leave the West Bank altogether.
Obama, in focusing on the settlements in his opening foray into the Palestinian-Israeli quagmire, indeed hit on the key issue: without a halt in settlement expansion, a viable two-state solution will shortly become impossible. Indeed, many believe it already is.
So why has he backtracked now, in the face of Netanyahu's intransigence? Is it possible he was actually surprised by Netanyahu's rebuff? Did Obama's rhetoric outrun his tactical planning? Who knows, but he's learned firsthand an old lesson: if you want the Israelis to do something they don't want to do, you must be prepared to use pressure. Otherwise, you end up with the worst of all worlds: Obama discredited in the eyes of the Arab World, Palestinian head Abu Mazen apparently serious about refusing to stay on as president, a bad situation, in short, made worse by Obama.
The irony is that if the two-state solution ultimately proves impossible, how does Israel benefit? It's no coincidence that J Street, the new liberal Israeli lobby in Washington, has emerged over the past year. Its slogan, "pro-Israel, pro-peace," refers to the necessity - for the longterm stability of Israel - of the creation of a viable, independent Palestinian state.
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