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THE guns have been virtually silent in Palestine and Israel since the ceasefire that took effect in February. The Palestinian Authority (P.A.), under the new "moderate" leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, had promised the United States and the Israeli government at the Sharm al-Sheikh summit that it would end all "acts of violence" against Israel. Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon on his part undertook that his government would end all "military activity" against the Palestinians.
Abbas, in his long career as a leader of the Palestinian Resistance, has been flexible in his dealings with Israel. Since the early 1990s, Palestinians have been making most of the concessions anyway. Abbas was one of the chief architects of the 1994 Oslo agreement, which, so far, has proved to be disastrous for the Palestinians. The Israeli government had promised a viable Palestinian state under the agreement. However, after it was signed, successive Israeli governments, both Labour and Likud, have done their utmost to undermine Palestinian statehood by accelerating settlement activity on Palestinian territory.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the concessions at Sharm al-Sheikh again came from the Palestinian side. Israeli actions in the occupied territory were described as routine "military activity" while legitimate Palestinian resistance was characterised as "acts of violence".
After Ariel Sharon took over the Prime Minister's job, the pace of settlement activity has been speeded up further in the West Bank. Under the guise of constructing a security wall, which Sharon started building last year, there has also been a brazen attempt to grab prime West Bank land. The International Court of Justice has ruled the wall "illegal". One reason why Sharon shook Abbas's hand so warmly at Sharm al-Sheikh was his eagerness to withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian resistance has made it militarily very costly for the Israelis to hold on to their settlements in the Strip. The Israeli settler population in the Occupied Territories has more than doubled since the signing of the Oslo agreement. Today, Palestinians have effective control of only 18 per cent of the West Bank. From available evidence, that is how Sharon wants things to stay. Under United Nations resolutions and international law, Israel has to withdraw from all Palestinian territories it occupied after the 1967 war. Even according to the Bush administration's "road map for peace", Israel is supposed to stop all construction of settlements while the P.A. is to restrain militant groups.
It was, therefore, no surprise that as soon as Sharon got the Israeli Parliament's green signal for the removal of the settlers in Gaza, plans were announced for the expansion of the largest Jewish settlement of Maa'leh Adumin in the West Bank in early March. The Israeli government has revived plans to build 35,000 new housing units around this settlement. The settlement, which is 5 km away from East Jerusalem, already houses more than 30,000 settlers. Once the new habitations are built, this Jewish settlement will effectively encircle Arab East Jerusalem. But, the Palestinians have made it known that they will not settle for any place but East Jerusalem as the capital for the state of Palestine.
The Israeli government was no doubt encouraged to announce its controversial decision by the contradictory signals emanating from the U.S. administration. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have on various occasions implied that Israel's security concerns have to be taken into consideration while demarcating the borders of the Palestinian state. However, after the announcement by the Israeli government that it planned to go ahead with its illegal settlement activities, the Bush administration issued a mild warning in early March to Israel that its failure to remove all outposts constructed in the West Bank since 2001 would harm bilateral relations and could have an adverse impact on U.S. aid to the country. The European Union (E.U.) has taken a tougher position on the issue. The E.U.'s foreign policy coordinator Javier Solana told Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom that the evacuation of the illegal outposts was a vital step towards a renewal of negotiations between Israel and Palestine. He warned that any more attempts to delay the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Occupied Territories would harm E.U.-Israeli relations.
In the second week of March, an official report said that the Israeli government had been conniving actively and secretly with Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to construct settlements in violation of both domestic and international law. The report by Talia Sasson, a former state Prosecutor, indicts the Israeli government for helping to create more than 100 "unauthorised" outposts on land seized from the Palestinians after the 1967 war. The report, commissioned by the Israeli Prime Minister, reveals the clandestine role of the Israeli governments since the signing of the Oslo Accord of 1993 in the expansion of the Israeli settlements.
The report further revealed that around half of the settlements were on privately owned Palestinian land. Many of these settlements were directly financed by the Israeli Housing Ministry, which spent more than $16 million for the purpose during 2001-2004. Sharon has been the Prime Minster during the past four years. While in the Opposition he used to encourage settlers loudly to keep on expanding the settlements and to seize the strategic heights in the Occupied Territories. The report also confirmed that the Israeli Defence Ministry was actively involved in aiding and abetting the settler activity.
The Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported recently that an aerial photography survey commissioned by the Defence Ministry revealed that existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank had expanded as a result of hectic building activity last year. This was in contravention of the "road map for peace". Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said in late March that the "contradictory" stance of the Israeli government would destroy the peace process. He went on to add that Israel was not serious about the creation of a viable Palestinian state. "As far as the Israeli government is concerned, the line seems to be settlements and their kind of peace. It is obvious now what they want - it is Gaza plus 50-60 per cent of the West Bank, without contiguity."
Unfortunately, it is Sharon's decision to withdraw from Gaza and a few Palestinian towns that has received more international attention, not his continuing annexation of strategically important West Bank territory. Sharon has shown that he will not allow Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine or grant Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. He has not compromised on his "separation" plan, which is to grab as much Palestinian land as possible after purging it off its inhabitants. One of the architects of Sharon's annexation plan in the West Bank, the geographer Arnon Soffer, told The Jerusalem Post that the settlements in the West Bank were "to guarantee a Jewish-Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews". He pointed out that after the state of Israel was created in 1948, more than 400,000 Palestinians had left the West Bank voluntarily. A Palestinian state pock-marked with Jewish settlements, criss-crossed by bypass roads and cut off from Israel proper could induce many Palestinians to leave for neighbouring countries. At least, that is the hope of the Likud Party stalwarts currently in government.
Sharon, in a statement published in the last week of March, vowed to maintain the Israeli settlement in the West Bank. "Large Israeli settlement blocks will remain in Israeli hands in any future settlement with the Palestinians," the statement quoted Sharon as telling his weekly Cabinet meeting. According to the statement, Sharon also claimed that he had the "unprecedented backing of the entire American government". Sharon knows that he can trust the Bush administration to back him when it comes to the crunch. After issuing warnings to the Israeli government of dire consequences if it continues with its policies in the West Bank, the Bush administration has again changed tack.
On March 27, Condoleezza Rice reiterated the Bush administration's position that any peace deal would have to take into account the biggest Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian lands.
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