The deep irony of the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" first struck me in
1996 as I was driving through the West Bank from Hebron to Jerusalem. I had
turned off the potholed main road that passed through Palestinian villages and
refugee camps and headed west into Kiryat Arba.
In that Israeli settlement, admirers had erected a graveside monument to Baruch
Goldstein, the settler from Brooklyn who, in 1994, gunned down 29 Palestinians
in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs. From the settlement's creepy candlelit
shrine I cut north, and soon found myself on a quiet, smooth-as-glass "bypass"
road. The road, I would learn, was one of many under
construction by Israel, alongside new and expanding settlements, that would
allow settlers to travel easily from their West Bank islands to the "mainland"
of the Jewish state.
How strange, I thought naively, as I traveled that lonely road toward Jerusalem
on a gray winter afternoon: Isn't this part of the land that Palestinians would
need for their state? Why, then, in the middle of the Oslo peace process -
barely three years after the famous handshake between former Israeli prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin and the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader
Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn - would Israeli officials authorize
construction that was visibly cementing the settlers' presence into Palestinian
land?
These post-Oslo "facts on the ground" have 12 years later all but doomed the
traditional path to peace. The two-state solution, the central focus of efforts
to end the tragedy of Israel and Palestine since 1967, has been undermined by
the thickening reality of red-roofed Israeli settlements, military outposts,
surveillance towers, and the web of settlers-only roads that whisk Israelis
from their West Bank dwellings to prayer in Jerusalem's Old City, or to
shopping and the beach in Tel Aviv. So dense has the Israeli West Bank presence
become by 2009, so fragmented is Palestinian life - both physically and
politically - that it now requires death-defying mental gymnastics to imagine
how a two-state solution could ever be implemented.
Five questions for an Israeli-Palestinian future
Former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, President Barack Obama's
respected, fair-minded Middle East envoy, will bring his considerable skills to
bear on this ever-more daunting problem. It is Mitchell's widely acknowledged
fairness that has prompted jaw-dropping comments from some hardline pro-Israeli
lobbyists and Christian Zionists who became accustomed, under the George W Bush
administration, to getting whatever they wanted. This in itself is a signal
that Obama's approach to the region may represent a genuine break from the
past.
To an honest witness like Mitchell, for whom the facts and the aspirations of
both peoples seem to actually matter, it may become quickly evident that the
traditional two-state solution is now on life support. Seeing that, he would do
well to keep an open mind and be prepared to ask some hard questions. Among
them might be:
1. What does the unending march of Israeli construction actually mean for a
"viable, contiguous" Palestine?
The only way anyone can viscerally understand the thousand cuts inflicted on
the two-state solution is by driving through the West Bank. I've crisscrossed
this landscape a hundred times since 1994, and never has the hardware of
settlements and Israeli military control been so dense. Since the beginning of
the Oslo "peace process" in 1993, the West Bank Jewish settler population has
jumped from 109,000 to 275,000 - and this doesn't include the Jewish "suburbs"
in East Jerusalem, which bring the total settler population to nearly half a
million. Some 230 settlements and strategically placed "outposts" are now
strung along hilltops across the West Bank, towering above whitewashed
Palestinian villages.
The ragtag outposts, technically forbidden under Israeli law but encouraged by
some within the government, are meant to connect with larger settlements to
form an everlasting Jewish presence on Palestinian land. It's no longer
possible to drive any significant stretch of the West Bank without encountering
a settlement, military post, settler road, surveillance tower, roadblock,
stationary checkpoint or "flying" checkpoint. The number of West Bank barriers
(roadblocks, checkpoints, and other obstacles) has increased nearly 70% in the
past three years, and now exceeds 625 - this in a land about the size of
Delaware.
How all this could be removed in order to create a "viable, contiguous"
Palestinian state seems, increasingly, a question without an answer. During the
Camp David talks in 2000, and in more recent discussions between Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas, there was much talk of large, consolidated "settlement blocs" and land
swaps to facilitate a contiguous Palestine.
If an unbroken Palestine was ever possible - and there was much
behind-the-scenes debate about this, even among American negotiators at Camp
David all the way back in 2000 - the facts on the ground, placed there
deliberately by Israel, have by now made the issue virtually moot. Maps of many
would-be "solutions" show the West Bank fractured into pieces, cut up by walls,
settlements, military posts and "security zones." Far from the two-state
solution envisioned in the wake of the 1967 war, today's maps tend to look like
advertisements for a sci-fi movie entitled The Incredible Shrinking Palestine.
2. How can a viable Palestinian state exist when a city of 20,000 Israelis sits
in the middle of it?
In 1978, Ariel, the city of Jewish settlers, was founded, over US and
international objections, in the heart of the West Bank district of Salfit.
Fully one-third of it juts onto Palestinian land. Israel's "security barrier"
(known as the "apartheid wall" to Palestinians), which ostensibly follows
Israel's border with the West Bank, in fact doesn't; at Ariel it veers east 17
kilometers to enfold the full settlement in its embrace. For this reason,
Ariel's leaders say confidently that their settlement, essentially a bedroom
community for Tel Aviv with its own university and industrial park, is "here to
stay".
Indeed, the removal of Ariel - a red line for the Palestinians - has been
mandated in almost none of the peace plans going back to Camp David, including
the 2001 informal Geneva peace plan much heralded by the Israeli and American
peace camps. That is why Ariel's city fathers feel comfortable in sending its
young "director of community aliyah [Jewish emigration to Israel]", Avi
Zimmerman, raised in West Orange, New Jersey, across the US to recruit more
American Jews to move to the settlement. "It's the ingathering of exiles,"
Zimmerman told me, standing on a hilltop above Ariel. "You have to make sure
there's a constant flow of people."
For Palestinians who live nearby, the existence of Ariel and other settlements
makes traveling anywhere a nightmare. Osama Odeh, born in the village of Bidya
(which means "olive grinding stone" in Arabic), told me that if he wants to
visit friends in a village eight kilometers away, he must drive east, then
south, then west, crossing multiple Israeli military checkpoints where he will
have to show documents, open his car's trunk, and face questions about his
intentions and past whereabouts. The journey could take an hour. Or two, or
three. "It becomes 40 kilometers, instead of three or four," he points out.
"It's ridiculous. In the name of security, they can turn your life to hell."
For the many villagers without a car, the trip simply becomes impractical,
encouraging political and social disconnection. "They are expanding all the
time," Odeh says of the settlements. "You feel trapped. Villages that have been
there for hundreds of years, now they feel like they are fragmented." According
to United Nations maps, Palestinians are restricted from entering some 40% of
the West Bank, while the major Palestinian cities now essentially function as
isolated cantons.
Some Israeli negotiators, including Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Otniel
Schneller, a longtime leader of the settlers' movement, have called on Israeli
engineers to design workarounds. Their answer: a network of tunnels, "flyover"
ramps, and bridges to ferry Palestinians under and around the settlements. For
Schneller, these concrete fixes would keep a prominent Jewish presence in
"Judea and Samaria", while allowing Palestinians ostensible "freedom of
movement" through tightly controlled funnels: Not exactly what Palestinians had
in mind during the decades of their liberation struggle.
3. What kind of Palestinian state would have its capital in a village far from
Jerusalem's Old City and virtually sealed off from huge portions of the West
Bank?
Palestinians have always insisted on having East Jerusalem, including portions
of the Old City which encompass the Muslim holy sites, as their capital. At
Camp David in 2000, Arafat refused an American-Israeli offer of a "sovereign
presidential compound" beside the Muslim holy sites. He derided it as "a small
island surrounded by Israeli soldiers". More recently, Israeli negotiators have
reiterated their intention to hold onto the Old City and its holy sites. They
have suggested that the actual Palestinian capital should be located in some of
East Jerusalem's Arab "neighborhoods" - actually, small villages never
considered part of Jerusalem by Palestinians, but now incorporated into greater
Jerusalem, thanks to the redrawn administrative boundaries of Israeli city
planners.
Even were the Palestinian capital to be located in the Old City, its ability to
govern the rest of Palestine would still be hamstrung. Since Israel's capture
of East Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government has built a ring of Jewish
"suburbs" around Arab East
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