Is the sky really falling?
The answer depends on whether you think the current disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem is just another bump in the road — perhaps a bit more jolting than most, but hardly unprecedented — or an instance of push finally coming to shove, a prospective game-changer.
The best evidence that America’s call for a total freeze on settlement expansion and construction is not some sort of bluff is that weeks ago the president took care to line up congressional support for his startling intervention. While his meetings with key members of Congress were private, they were not secret. The fact that Israel now professes shock that the president seems not to be so much tentatively putting his toe in the water as he is unhesitatingly executing a high-dive indicates how fundamentally Israel’s leadership has misunderstood the gathering sentiment throughout the West — as also President Obama himself.
No great surprise. For decades now, Israel has toyed with the United States, and the United States has indulged Israel’s transgressions while coyly murmuring “you mustn’t.” One example, hardly isolated, will illustrate the pattern: In 1990, with the dramatic increase in immigration to Israel from the Soviet Union, the first President Bush expressed his displeasure with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s insistence that Soviet Jews, like all Israelis, were free to choose to live wherever they wished in Israel — including the West Bank. Shamir’s position sounded quite reasonable. Why, after all, should the Israeli government have restricted Soviet Jews in ways it did not restrict other Israeli citizens?
The prime minister, in a telephone conversation with Bush, sought to reassure the president regarding the impact of the resettlement of Soviet Jews on the peace process. He observed that no special inducements were provided to Soviet Jews to settle in the West Bank, an observation both accurate and misleading. Shamir neglected to note that special inducements — very substantial special inducements, in fact — were available to all Israelis who bought homes in the West Bank. (For example, 65% of the mortgage loan for settlers was interest-free, another 25% at very low interest.) But though Bush knew that Shamir was dissembling, he refrained from public reprimand.
So it was, so it has been for all these years. So it has been as Israel has built (not including East Jerusalem) 58,800 housing units in the West Bank, now home to nearly 300,000 Israeli Jews; even as it has built a fence that at key points snakes through Palestinian land, well beyond the 1967 borders separating Israel and the West Bank; even as it has closed its eyes to the construction of more than 100 illegal settlements and outposts, illegal according to Israeli law; even as its Defense Ministry has approved the construction of 46,500 additional West Bank housing units; even after the Sharon government explicitly agreed to freeze settlement construction as required by the 2003 “road map.”
By now, all the subterfuge has taken on a life of its own, and it may well have become impossible for any Israeli government to call a halt to the expansion, let alone to reverse it.
That said, at the same time that it is unprecedented for an American president to mean precisely what he says to Israel — it really has not happened since the 1956 Suez campaign, when President Eisenhower demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip — it is unprecedented for an Israeli prime minister to stick his thumb in the eye of an American president, which is what Netanyahu has now done by insisting: “We do not intend to build any new settlements, but it wouldn’t be fair to ban construction to meet the needs of natural growth or for there to be an outright construction ban.” In fact, much of the new construction — just now accelerating at a pace not seen since 2003 — is not for natural growth at all, but for newly arrived settlers. Much of it is on Palestinian land. Some of it is east of the separation fence. And Washington is, of course, well aware of all that.
How might this unpleasant disagreement be ended? Obama and Hillary Clinton do not intend the abandonment of Israel; Netanyahu will stop short of punching holes in the American umbrella. But Netanyahu will soon realize that neither Congress nor an aroused American Jewish community is available to defend Israel’s forked-tongue settlement policy. What then? The logical next step would be for Netanyahu to make good on Israel’s commitment to halt all construction except for the settlement blocs that Israel plainly intends to retain, come what may, and promptly to dismantle all the illegal outposts and settlements. While there is so far no evidence that Israel is ready to do either of those quite major things, Netanyahu and his colleagues are bound to realize that their failure to act decisively jeopardizes Israel’s claim to the settlement blocs, subverts the resumption of the peace process and does lasting damage to the indulgent good will of their nation’s historic benefactor.
Yet let there be no mistake: The settlement issue is handy, but hardly decisive. It is more than a sideshow, but even if it is somehow resolved, the center ring remains. The center ring: Neither of the parties to the conflict has any confidence in the pacific intentions of the other, and both are fully entitled to their cruel suspicions. Both parties are so profoundly traumatized that it
It appears that Fein has not listened carefully enough to what Obama and Hillary have actually said. They spoke about a total freeze. I never heard any exceptions for the settlement blocs or Jerusalem. They have basically equated the Jewish Qtr. of the Old City, Gilo, and Ma'aleh Adumim with Yitzhar and other isolated and small communities.
How dare the Obama administration make these demands! If I live in Manhattan, and I want to have 10, maybe 15 children, and I want to build a new building in the parking lot next door to accommodate our natural growth, how dare anyone stop me! Why should I have any fewer rights than the settlers of the West Bank? What, do you really expect me to move to Brooklyn? Brooklyn!? Or, good heavens, White Plains!? Is there no end to your cruelty?
I'm obviously joking. The settlers are being ridiculous. For the first time in modern history, according to some of these settlers, it has apparently become a violation of Zionism to have to move into Israel, to places like Petah Tikva. And fellow Israeli Jews---the soldiers who are tasked with cleaning up the settlers' messes---are cast by the settlers are Nazis.
Herzl would be rolling in his grave.
Well said Matt!
Remember that all the Settlements were always illegal.
The Israeli government knew and acknowledged this in 1967. Right after the war, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal counsel, Theodor Meron, wrote a top-secret memo in which he said that settling the occupied territories was "unequivocally" illegal, and Moshe Dayan agreed. They decided to go ahead and violate the law anyway.
Gershom Gorenberg, the Israeli historian, discovered the memo in the Israeli archives and published it. Meron is now a professor of international law at New York University, and stands by his memo. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/10gorenberg.html
It's as if I were squatting in a building in the Lower East Side, and then refused to leave when the legal owner came back.
In 2002 the US State Dept revealed that 78% of the settlement housing units are empty, built at US taxpayer's expense to create only "facts on the ground" for Greater Israel. Then, Sharon called for all Jews to move to Israel by 2020 or "they will lose their Jewish souls." So these settlements are not "naturallly" expanding, they are like Madoff's profits-- expanding fraud. The fact is that the Great Aliyah is in reverse as educated Israelis have had enough and go abroad after getting degrees in Israel. Most of you gung-ho Likudniks are sitting in your Brooklyn apartments with no plans to become olims; yet you talk big to seem like "mensch." Why don't you think of the real sabras? They have no other Diaspora homeland to go to, unlike the Russian and East Euro emigrees who go back home to their businesses and villas. Nor do they have multiple passports like Israeli officials, just in case. The new tough talk Israeli Ambassador to the US has an Israeli passport in one pocket and an American one in the other, according to the NY Star Ledger. No sabras have that and they have nowhere else to go!
So don't load them up with settlements for imaginary olims; don't make them bear the concequences of NY bravado from all talk no action people, many of whom never served in US or IDF combat. The sabras fought for Israel all their lives and deserve to live in a peaceful productive Israel. Pushing phony settlements on them to defend for non-existent settlers will cost them their future and their children's future. Right now Israel is a 60y/o fetal state living off of an American $$$placenta because it is not integrated into its own geographic region. Negotiations between the sabras and the Palestiinans could result in a smaller but better Israel, recognized by all its neighbors, integrated economically, politically and diplomatically into the entire Middle East. Since most of you deem Israel a nice place to visit but obviously don't want to live there because you live here (many retired there only to return claiming that they were robbed blind), why not stay out of the sabras' effort to make a smaller but safer and more successful Israel. Because you all slandered Europe as "Eurabia" and anti-Semitic, there's little chance of Israel getting into NATO or the EU. But if Netanyahu succeeds in integrating the Palestinians into Israel's economy, integration with the Arabs will not be far behind, with Israel leading them out of their banana republic one crop (oil) economies into modernity through Israel's sci/tech education and leadership. The sabras should not pay for your bravado mensch-hood and ghost settlements which you will never move to. Left alone the sabras could come to terms with the Arabs and end Israel's welfare status on an American dole. You can't give Israel any more money and neither can the US-- everyone is broke. So let it do its own thing in its Mideast neighborhood as Israel, not as your Zionist illuison of Greater Israel that will never be. You were all born Diasporic and will die Diasporic; so give the sabaras a chance to have a good life as realIsraelis.
First lets understand Leonard Fein. He has always been the best anti Israel commentator the Arabs have. He is overwhelmed with concern for the Arabs that live in and around Israel. He would devide Jerusalem, stop any legal expansion in Israel Then sit back and wait for a second Jewish holicaust to take place. It's time he retired and went to some Arab country where he would be welcomed with open arms.
Larry, Your characterization of Leonard Fein as anti-Israel and pro-Arab is ridiculous. Your suggestion that he would divide Jerusalem and wait for a second Holocaust is preposterous. And y'know what? You misspelled "divide" and "Holocaust." In addition, you need to know that "holocaust" when referring to the Shoah needs to be capitalized.
what does "freezing settlements" mean? Imo, it means nothing or worse yet it means s'mthing to obama and s'mthing else to judeo-christian bloc. or US/Israel may be as always before in solid agreement about what freezing settling means?
but what? neither US nor the bloc is saying. Note please that US/israel does not even mention needed lebensraum for palestinian natural growth, let alone for settling of the diminishing w. bank.
what is not said is by far more revealing than what was said. This time around US diktat to pals may be worst ever; not, however, that the best wld be much better. diktat it will be; that's a certainty. Which wld be rejected! i think that US/israel will demand all israeli pals leave israel and perhaps all 'settlers' move to israel or elsewhere.
of course, there will be as always before a mass of other vague demands; and only US/israel's interpretation of such demands wld be valid and carried out unilaterally.
one wld have to be naive to think that a peace is not 'jewish' worst nightmare. tnx
The "freezing" of settlements means negotiating EMPTY settlement housing with Palestinians in return for security support-- like NATO enforcement instead of IDF abuse. The only impediment to date has been that several Likud leaders recognized that Palestinians will not run away any more and will stay put creating familes upon their roots in the land-- thus demographically outnumbering the Jews in Israel unless a Palestinian state is created. Arafat had made clear that either a two states solution or a one state solution that makes Jews a minority in Israel where Palestinians will stay and have babies-- something Israelis no longer seem to have a taste for as well as engaging in a reverse aliyah to LA. In response, a very East Euro solution was applied (as Hungarians and Romanians, for example, resolve contested border areas): exterminate the people so that there will be room that luxury housing can be built upon to attract Diaspora Jews WHO NO WAY WANT TO MOVE TO ISRAEL NO MATTER WHAT IS OFFERED BECAUSE THEY ARE CONTENT *FULLY ASSIMILATED* IN THE DIASPORA. These EMPTY houses could be very useful in Netanyahu's plan to PRECEED political solution with economic integration of the Palestinians. The solution is still the same that Rabin payed for with his life. It would be a great monument to his name and would establish Bibbi as NUMBER TWO to Ben Gurion in the Patheon of Israeli heroes.
it is a great relief to see that most of the commenters agree that the best we can do is kiss Greater Israel goodbye. as an israeli, I am sick of the resources squandered beyond the green line. as a teacher, I know where we could be better invested. living in sderot, I know the price we pay for minority control. it's too bad we couldn't do this ourselves - will write to thank obama if and when he forces bibi to freeze the settlements.