Expanding settlements, eroding trust
Apr 12th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
At a meeting in Texas, George Bush has told Ariel Sharon that Israel must stop expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank while withdrawing from Gaza. The chiding comes at a time of high tensions between Israelis and Palestinians—and within Israel itself
GEORGE BUSH extended his highest honour to Ariel Sharon on Monday April 11th, by having the Israeli prime minister come to talk at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The meeting was cordial—though the two men are rumoured not to like each other, Mr Bush said he looked forward to showing Mr Sharon around the ranch, and Mr Sharon invited the president to see his own farm in Israel. But the talks come at a time of high tension.
Israelis and Palestinians are once again bristling at one another, despite a notional ceasefire. On Saturday, Israeli troops killed three Palestinian teenagers (who were retrieving a lost football or smuggling weapons, depending on the account). In retaliation, Palestinians lobbed rockets at Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip and into Israel proper. Mr Sharon will no doubt have told Mr Bush that if Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, cannot or will not crack down on militants, Israel would be forced to do so.
Concerned that the moves towards peace since the death of Yasser Arafat might come to nothing, Mr Bush seems eager to project the image of an honest broker. He chided Mr Sharon about the growth of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, adding that Israel should do nothing that contravenes the internationally backed but stalled “road map” peace plan. Mr Sharon is planning to remove (forcibly if necessary) all Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip. But he seems to be tightening Israel’s hold on the West Bank.
Though Mr Sharon is evacuating four West Bank settlements, other settlements in the territory are continuing to grow, and the path of Israel’s security barrier leaves large chunks of Palestinian land on the Israeli side. By enraging Palestinians, this weakens Mr Abbas, who needs to show concrete Palestinian gains if he is to have the authority to crack down on militants, as Messrs Bush and Sharon want him to do. So Mr Bush stressed Israel’s “need to work with the Palestinian leadership to improve the daily lives of Palestinians”.
Mr Sharon promised only to remove “unauthorised outposts”. These are often set up without government permission by small groups of ideological Zionists on hilltops. But it is the growth of authorised settlements, especially in the areas around East Jerusalem thickly populated with Palestinians, that are troubling Mr Bush. The road map foresees East Jerusalem as the capital of any future Palestinian state. But the Israeli government has announced plans to expand Maale Adumim, a Jewish settlement nearby, and has proposed routing the security barrier around it, which would virtually cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank. Last year, Mr Bush delighted Mr Sharon and startled the Palestinians by saying that bits of the West Bank would probably have to become part of Israel in any final deal. But now he is telling the Israeli leader that those bits must not grow any bigger.
Enemies without and within
The difficulty for Mr Sharon is that he, like Mr Abbas, is constrained by the extremists among his people. Right-wing and religious Israelis, who insist that none of Gaza or the West Bank be surrendered, rallied on Sunday at the symbolic heart of the conflict: the hill in Jerusalem that Jews revere as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. Israeli authorities tried to stop the rally, saying they would ban both Jewish and Muslim males under 40 from visiting the site. But a few dozen Jews arrived anyway, and clashed with Palestinians who came to “defend” the al-Aqsa mosque located on the site.
A majority of Israelis support Mr Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan. But the minority opposed to it are a determined bunch: on Tuesday, protesters chained shut 167 schools in and around Tel Aviv as part of a campaign to disrupt daily life in the run-up to the pullout later this year. And Mr Sharon has had to browbeat his right-wing Likud party to pass the withdrawal plan through various legislative hurdles, knowing all the while that Binyamin Netanyahu, the finance minister who wants his job, will rarely miss an opportunity to gain ground from him on the right. (On Monday, Mr Netanyahu threatened the Palestinians publicly, saying of Mr Abbas’s failure to crack down on militants: “If he doesn’t, then we will.”) Meanwhile, Mr Sharon must also court the other parties in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as Likud runs a minority government with just 40 of the 120 seats. Thus every stage of the legal process has been fraught with uncertainty.
Of course at any stage, violence from the Palestinians could bring peace moves to a halt. But Mr Sharon sees a threat closer to home. He made headlines by telling America’s NBC News that the atmosphere in Israel “looks like on the eve of a civil war”. Israeli security forces are taking seriously the threats made on his life—on Tuesday, they placed a leading ultranationalist under house arrest, on the grounds that he might pose a security risk—and Mr Sharon said in that same interview: “All my life I was defending the life of Jews. Now, for the first time, security steps are taken to protect me from Jews.” Yet he was optimistic about the Palestinians, saying that while Arafat would never have been able to achieve peace, a settlement may now be possible. Taken together, the two statements suggest that with Mr Sharon’s old foe now dead, the prime minister thinks his most formidable enemies may be among his fellow Jews.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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