At the Oslo summit in October 1999, Ehud Barak rejected Yasser
Arafat's demand to freeze Jewish settlement during the final-status
negotiations. Though Yasser Arafat has declared himself "happy"
with the implementation of the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, he added
that the peace process would lose momentum if settlement activity
and the confiscation of land do not come to a complete stop.
The fate of the land (in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) is
the main bone of contention between Israelis and Palestinians even
before they start tackling complex issues such as Jerusalem, the
Palestinian refugees or final borders. In Palestinian eyes, all
Jewish settlements in the occupied territories which have been
under Israeli rule since 1967 are illegal: the Fourth Geneva
Convention (1948) explicitly forbids the settling of citizens of an
occupying power on occupied land. This view is shared by the
international community, but has been rejected by Israel for the
last 33 years. Israeli governments have invented a juridical
gimmick of "administered" instead of "occupied" territories. This
enabled them to have the best of both worlds: on the one hand they
ignore the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and feel free
to settle the West Bank and Gaza at will; on the other hand, Israel
refrained from formally annexing the West Bank and Gaza, thus
depriving the Palestinian population of the normal protection that
a government owes its citizens against land confiscation and other
arbitrary measures.
Ehud Barak is upholding this juridical fiction. According to him,
if the 42 embryonic settlements put up on various hilltops in the
West Bank were authorized by Binyamin Netanyahu's defense minister,
they can be considered legal. An interministerial committee,
briefed by military experts, concluded that out of the 42 hilltop
settlements only eight were legally established. However, in spite
of his own repeated statements about his determination to "uphold
the law," Mr. Barak chose to dismantle a mere ten settlements, six
of which were in any case unpopulated. It appears that Barak's
decision was based not upon legal finesse, but upon political
considerations. On the one hand, by dismantling a few embryonic
settlements, Israel's prime minister intends to show the
Palestinians - and world opinion - that he is intent upon pursuing
the peace process; on the other hand, by reaching a compromise with
the settler leadership on the dismantling of only ten illegal
settlements, he hopes to be able to postpone the confrontation with
the settlers (and Israel's nationalist-religious camp in general)
until a final-status agreement is reached with the Palestinians,
and the evacuation of many more settlements becomes
inevitable.
The question is: will Mr. Barak succeed in having his cake and
eating it? The Palestinian leadership demands that all settlement
expansion be stopped. It views the recent tenders for the
construction of thousands of new apartments in and around various
settlements as incompatible with the resumption of final-status
negotiations where the future of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories is to be decided. Inside Israel, the
religious-nationalist camp is mobilizing against Mr. Barak's
policies of "surrender" to Mr. Arafat. As during the months
preceding Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, nationalist rabbis are
again publishing religious decrees condemning the "handing over of
any parcel of the land of Eretz Yisrael to foreigners." (Those
"foreigners" are the Palestinians who have been living in the West
Bank and Gaza for generations.) The rabbis compare this "mutilation
of the Land of Israel" to the "shedding of Jewish blood."
These rabbinical judgments sound the more ominous as they coincide
with increased rumblings of extreme nationalist feelings. A recent
opinion poll shows that 2.5 percent of the adult Jewish population
in Israel, or some 90,000 people, approve the use of arms in order
to prevent an Israeli leader from handing over the territories to
the Palestinians. Sixty-five percent of Israeli Jews believe there
will be another political assassination.
In Israel's deeply divided society, for many religious and
nationalist Jews, the West Bank and Gaza, conquered by Israel's
armies in the 1967 six-day war (six days - a sure sign of the
Lord's purpose) were not occupied territories, eventually to be
exchanged for peace, but liberated parts of Eretz Yisrael, the Land
promised to the Jewish people by the Almighty. The Labor
governments of Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir in the 1960s and the
1970s, though rejecting the messianic visions of a God-sent
victory, reinforced those messianic beliefs by refusing to treat
the conquered lands as occupied territories. They officially shed
the name "West Bank" in favor of "Judea and Samaria," as they are
called in the Bible, and permitted Jewish settlement in the
occupied territories.
The 1993 Oslo agreement and the negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians, initiated by Yitzhak Rabin and now resumed by Ehud
Barak, were based on mutual recognition and "land for peace." These
principles are anathema in the eyes of many Israeli Jews. Israeli
security forces have warned that Ehud Barak's life is at risk and
have tightened up protective measures around him. Thus the Shin Bet
(security forces) recently objected to Barak's public appearance at
a mass meeting in Tel Aviv on the fourth anniversary of Yitzhak
Rabin's assassination. In the increasingly tense political climate,
Israel's prime minister will face a host of dangers and
difficulties in building a national consensus around his peace
initiative.