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Friday January 24, 1997

Do Jewish settlements promise peace or ensure war?-Settlers posing obstacle to solution and security

Thomas Smerling

"When you say settlements, you've said war." Who issued this recent warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Yasser Arafat? Some Israel-basher?

No, it came from Israel's top anti-terrorist, Gen. Ami Ayalon, current head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency. Ayalon was warning his boss about the dangers of expanding West Bank settlements.

Ayalon is known as a steely, no-nonsense soldier. He knows the Palestinians, and he understands how settlement expansion mocks Palestinian hope for even a truncated future state.

Keeping the Palestinians' dream alive has kept the Oslo process going until now. The Palestinians accepted meager initial gains and worsening economic conditions for hope of a better future. Ayalon knows that when this hope dies, only despair and its violent offspring will remain. And once the violence begins, nobody can predict where it will end.

Most Israeli generals and intelligence chiefs share Ayalon's concern. They too are alarmed by plummeting peace prospects accompanied by brash announcements on settlements.

If the peace process collapses, the void will be filled by intifada terrorism or war. Rising risk of war prompted the Israel Defense Force to recently request $1.1 billion for "war preparedness."

The goal of West Bank settlements is simple. They are intended to foreclose the option of trading "land for peace with security arrangements," by making it nearly impossible to form a contiguous Palestinian entity in most of the West Bank.

Yet virtually no expert on the Palestinians believes peace is possible without such a deal. "Land for peace" has formed the basis for every successful Arab-Israeli agreement.

How do settlements block "land for peace"?

Once a settlement is established, political reality in Israel makes it difficult for any Israeli government to uproot it and relocate settlers. Settling the land was the essence of pioneering Zionism. Today, the idea of reversing this process by dismantling settlements bothers Israelis, evoking pre-state fears of Jewish weakness and expulsion.

This taboo prevented prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres from dislodging one settler. Even after Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron, Rabin dared not evacuate 400 Hebron settlers.

Though the settlement movement made settlements tenacious, they faced another dilemma. The pool of zealots for "Greater Israel" was too small to fill the West Bank. They needed to induce nonideological Israelis to move there.

Their solution? Get the government to offer ordinary Israelis a bonanza of government subsidies and tax breaks for moving into commuter settlements near Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Economic self-interest was thus harnessed to the cart of "Greater Israel." Perhaps 90 percent of today's 145,000 settlers moved to the West Bank simply to improve their living standards.

Government subsidies are still the mother's milk of settlement expansion. The settlers went ballistic when Rabin took them off the dole in 1992. In recent weeks they won reinstatement of their subsidies in exchange for acquiescence to Hebron redeployment. They can live with a moratorium on new settlements -- there are already 140 scattered throughout the West Bank -- so long as the money keeps flowing and more settlers keep arriving to bolster the smaller communities. Every new household increases the political and financial costs of relocation.

Since few Israelis, and far fewer outsiders, share the settlers' vision of "Greater Israel," settlement expansion has always been conducted surreptitiously or marketed under other labels.

At one time settlements were sold as the first line of defense against invading Arab armies. This myth was punctured in October 1973, when the emergency evacuation of Golan settlers delayed the IDF counterattack against Syria. Instead of protecting Israel, precious military resources were spent protecting the settlements.

Today, one more often hears emotional allusions to the Holocaust ("You want the West Bank to be Judenrein?") and to fear of housing discrimination ("Why shouldn't Jews be allowed to live anywhere?"). These slogans conjure up a fog of painful memories of European anti-Semitism to obscure today's West Bank realities.

Some advocates of settlement expansion, such as Moshe Arens, are more honest. As defense minister in the late '80s, Arens acknowledged that the settlements have no significant security value in themselves. Their value lies in preventing any Israeli government from ever returning the West Bank to Arab rule. Without Israeli sovereignty, Arens argues, demilitarization and strategic depth cannot be assured.

This gets to the nub of the argument. All Israeli defense planners agree that the West Bank must remain demilitarized and the IDF must control the Jordan River Valley. The question is whether political sovereignty -- flying the Israeli flag -- over the whole West Bank is essential to these military goals.

If you believe it is, then returning land to Arab sovereignty poses a danger against which settlements provide political protection.

If, however, you share the conviction of the late Rabin and most of Israel's military establishment that the IDF is strong enough to control the West Bank indirectly -- especially since the Palestinian zone will be surrounded; that ruling over the Palestinians weakens Israel and corrodes its values; that completing a "circle of peace" with Israel's neighbors will help contain the growing threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism and non-conventional weapons; and that peace is impossible without trading "land for peace," with enforceable security arrangements -- then settlements are indeed a major obstacle to both peace and long-term security.

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