Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, fresh from a summit meeting with Jordans King Abdullah, has made a gesture towards the closure of remote, sparsely-populated outposts of settlement in the West Bank while carefully avoiding any commitments over the 200,000 settlers now living in around 150 major communities across the territory.
By insisting on delaying any unilateral action on Israeli settlements, because Israelis refuse to reward terror, Sharon is defying the strictures of the Quartets roadmap. The inference to be drawn from his stance is that settlements are either necessary for Israels security or a potentially useful bargaining chip.
In addition, Sharon says that any concessions on settlements will be painful to Israelis. The land of Israel is inherently precious: if Israelis have no rights in Hebron, then what are their rights to Tel Aviv? So President Bush should resist pressing Israel on settlements until the Palestinian Authority has crushed Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Most Israelis are behind him on this, as the last election proves.
Sharon is undoubtedly in command of his government at the moment, but his views seriously misrepresent the direction of Israeli opinion. Israelis certainly do believe that America should not abolish a terror regime in Iraq and then expect Israel merely to finesse terror movements in Palestine. But this does not mean they expect Sharon to have a free hand in extending settlements.
For most, stopping settlement is not a repudiation of historic Zionism, not at all a degrading of Israeli security, not even a concession to Palestinians. Rather, suicide bombing and retaliation have engendered an ultimate cynicism, of which the settlements are now a token. Provide hope, and their logic evaporates.
After all, poll after poll shows that two-thirds of Israeli Jews, and most who do live in Tel Aviv, would trade the whole settlement enterprise for peace. Hardly any think that renouncing the right to settle in historic Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel) casts doubt on their right to Israel itself, though the two extremist parties who make this claim are inside Sharons coalition. Well over half even of Sharons own centrist Likud voters, in contrast, favour a Palestinian state from which most settlements will ultimately be withdrawn; most are from working-class Sephardi families whom the souring economy (owing, in part, to West Bank investment) has hit hardest.
Zionism past and present
Any Israeli will acknowledge that old Zionists, like the new ones, settled in Palestine against the wishes of an Arab majority. But few today would be so obdurate as to deny that the context has changed, or that the record of historic Zionism was more humane than what Sharon is inadvertently implying.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist settlement was carried out under the auspices of an internationally-recognised British Mandate, enforcing impartial property law. It was accelerated under the pressure of murderous Nazi and Stalinist anti-Semitism. It was directed by a Jewish leadership that was only too willing to settle for a partial solution time and again (federation in 1934, partition in 1938, partition again in 1947), and under the strictures of what the Biltmore Program (Zionisms charter of 1942) would call the structure of the new democratic world.
Early Zionist settlers, unlike those today, were ideologically (perhaps naively) committed to Arab equality and modernisation. Their economic activities attracted many more Arabs than they displaced. They occupied no international Islamic holy sites, and threatened to strangle no Palestinian Arab cities.
Testifying to the Peel Commission in 1936, the rightist-Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky compared the Jewish claims in Palestine as the claim of starvation versus the claim of hunger. What would we think of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugos Les Miserables if, after he became Mayor, he continued to steal bread?
The settlements: asset or burden?
Today, most Israelis do not see settlements as a security or diplomatic asset. The chief critics of settlements for example, Amram Mitzna (the ex-Labour leader) and Amy Ayalon are military governors and intelligence chiefs who argue that guarding outposts in the middle of populated Palestinian areas is a catastrophic drain on IDF capabilities and morale. And if settlements are a bargaining chip, continued settlement preempts and discredits the Palestinian moderates whom Israel is counting on to do the bargaining.
Settlement, backed by force of arms, seems proof to Palestinians that a majority of Jews will tolerate a minority intent on driving all but Jews from the land. This mirrors, and undermines, Israeli claims against Palestinian radicals. Besides, there are 200,000 settlers, many armed, outside of greater Jerusalem, and their number is growing; it is widely feared that as many as 10% would fight the IDF if forced evacuation were threatened. Settlers are the best-organised lobby in the Knesset.
Ariel Sharon is right about one thing. In the apocalyptic, polarised atmosphere of todays Israel, curtailing settlements is viewed, if not exactly a reward for terror, then a premature surrender of spite. A terrorist strikes and people say: If they want to get rid of us then to hell with them let the settlers suffocate them. It is this apocalyptic logic, which comes easily to Jews, that must be falsified for it sustains a politics that seems a fight to the death, where settlements are a token of Israels determination to win.
The need for a third force
What Israelis most need is not more freedom to retaliate but a powerful third force to trust without having to trust the Palestinian Authority. Gush Shalom, the peace camp, has been replaced so the current joke goes by Bush Shalom. The absence of a clear, tough message to both sides that American military power will determine the regions fate, that the roadmap will be instituted as written that, in short, America wants both terror and settlement to end now, because both are inconsistent with any conceivable democratic solution allows cynicism to prevail and support for settlements, if anything, to grow.
Settlements, ironically, are not (to use a favourite US administration phrase) a barrier to peace nearly as great as the administrations own temporising about them. There is a roadmap. But is there a driver?
