Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently warned that if negotiations with the Palestinians do not yield results soon, Israel might consider "unilateral measures" in the occupied West Bank. He didn't specify what those might be, but several others have suggested that Israel create “temporary” or “provisional” unilaterally-imposed new borders in the territory. This idea is simple, superficially appealing and profoundly dangerous. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is correct in warning that unilateralism runs counter to the whole framework of a negotiated agreement. Rather than calming the situation on the ground, this could greatly inflame an already tense situation. Whatever the professed or real intentions behind such a move, Palestinians and other Arabs will assume that what is enacted as “temporary” will be at least semi-permanent (if not, indeed, permanent). They will believe that Israel is imposing unilaterally, by force and fiat, what it could not get Palestinians to accept at the negotiating table. Many intelligent and informed observers appear to labor under the illusion that because Palestinians and Israelis have made significant progress at certain stages of negotiations on borders (not including Jerusalem), there is a general consensus on “what the final borders will look like.” This is incorrect on two major counts. First, there is no agreement on the percentage of West Bank territory to be included in a land swap. During the last major negotiations on the issue, former prime minister Ehud Olmert reportedly suggested Israel retain something like 6.9% of the area with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas proposing 1.9%. Secondly, many of the areas the sides cannot agree upon are strategically located. For example, the Israeli settlement of Efrata, an outlying area of the "Etzion Bloc," cuts directly across Route 60, a crucial West Bank North-South artery. Anything the present Israeli government imposes unilaterally on questions like these will be understood by Palestinians not as constructive or helpful, but instead as a unilateral land grab that prejudices one of the most important final status issues: borders. There are unilateral steps both sides could take that are constructive, just not those that seem to prejudice the outcome of key issues. The Palestinian institution-building program, for instance, led by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad does not seek Israeli permission but does involve cooperation with Israeli security forces to reduce violence and ensure law and order. That’s constructive unilateralism. Any Israeli unilateral moves to dismantle “unauthorized” settlement outposts, curb settler violence, halt or slow settlement expansion, increase access and mobility for Palestinians, or similar measures would also be constructive. Such moves would ease tensions on the ground and enhance the prospects for resuming negotiations. Anything that brings us closer to a two-state solution is welcome. But such a solution must be negotiated, not imposed. When Israel has negotiated agreements with Egypt, Jordan and, indeed, the Palestinians, both sides have had a clear interest in making them work. When Israel has acted unilaterally, such as in Gaza or southern Lebanon, no one on the other side has had a vested interest in ensuring a constructive outcome, with predictable consequences. The lessons of this history are clear. Unilateral Israeli territorial actions in the West Bank are unlikely to promote peace; rather, they would almost certainly undermine both realities on the ground and the prospects for a real, negotiated agreement.
Read More...
By: Amira Hass
Date: 27/05/2013
×
Slain Bedouin girls' mother, a victim of Israeli-Palestinian bureaucracy
Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them. In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B. The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories). In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long. The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.
By: Phoebe Greenwood
Date: 27/05/2013
×
John Kerry unveils plan to boost Palestinian economy
John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector. The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace. Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago. Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid. Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority". Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations. "Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."
By: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
Date: 27/05/2013
×
Isolation Devastates East Jerusalem Economy
Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops. “All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive. Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him. “I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.” Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay. “It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.” He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?” Illegal annexation Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect. “After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote. Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation. Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. Extreme poverty Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower. While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line. “How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”. “Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked. “You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS. Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities. Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn. Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent. “Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found. Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population. To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones. It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services. “Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER). Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”
By the Same Author
Date: 06/11/2012
×
Abbas Stays Put On Refugees
In a recent interview with Israeli television, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbasreaffirmed that Palestinians have no claims on the territory that became the state of Israel following the 1948 war, and that he does not believe he has either the right or the interest in returning to live in his home village, Safed, which is in Israel. The comments were angrily attacked by Hamas and small, far left-wing Palestinian groups, and derided as irrelevant by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But most engaged Israelis and Palestinians are well aware that Abbas was merely reiterating things that he had said many times in the past and wasn't breaking any new policy ground. Outside of the Middle East, however, Abbas's remarks appear to have created a great deal of confusion, as have clarifying statements issued both by him and otherPalestine Liberation Organization officials explaining that the Palestinian position on the refugee issue has not, in fact, changed. Here's a basic summary of where the Palestinians stand on the refugee issue and peace with Israel. The fundamental Palestinian position is that the refugee issue is one of the four final status issues identified by the parties in the Oslo agreements of 1993. They are therefore to be determined by negotiation, and not by unilateral acts or statements by either party. This is the American position, and that of the Middle East Quartet (the U.S., E.U., U.N. and Russia). It is also, importantly, the official Israeli position, even though Israel has been seeking end-runs around it such as demanding Palestinians recognize the "Jewish character" of the Israeli state, or raising the issue of Jewish refugees and migrants from Arab states. Obviously the Palestinians and Israelis have very different opinions about how the Palestinian refugee question should be resolved in final status talks. But they are formally committed to dealing with them in that context. Legally speaking, the Palestinians have a powerful case under international law for the right of return not only of refugees that were expelled or fled and prevented from returning in 1948 or 1967, but also their descendents. However, from the outset of the talks, serious negotiators, including the late President Yasser Arafat, understood that there was no possibility of compelling Israel to accept any agreement that allowed millions of Palestinians the option of potentially returning to the Israeli state and eliminating or greatly undermining the Jewish majority within Israel's internationally recognized boundaries. The fundamental principle of all negotiations between the parties since Oslo has been that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. There have therefore been many different conversations and trial balloons floated between Abbas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Palestinians and Israelis have wrangled over the numbers of Palestinians who might be allowed the option of returning, with Israel seeking to keep the sum to a minimum and package it under an alternative rubric such as "family reunification," and Palestinians seeking a higher number but not one that would alter the essential demographic structure of Israeli society. The problem facing the Palestinian leadership is that refugee issues are one of the few articles of real leverage they have left in dealing with Israel. But they are also a shibboleth of the Palestinian national narrative and a very politically costly, albeit necessary, compromise if there is to be a peace agreement. They therefore cannot afford to "give up" the issue in advance of an agreement with Israel, particularly if they are going to have any hope of getting an Israeli compromise on their own most difficult concession, an agreement regarding Jerusalem. On the other hand, Palestinian leaders clearly need to do more to prepare their people for the necessary and inevitable compromise on return, just as he Israeli leadership needs to prepare its people for a compromise on Jerusalem (which Olmert was indeed discussing with Abbas). It looks like dissembling and confusion, and sometimes there is an element of that in Palestinian rhetoric about refugees and Israeli rhetoric about Jerusalem. But there is also the real conundrum of not giving anything away in advance for nothing, versus preparing your public for a painful and politically difficult compromise. Abbas's remarks on Israeli television should be understood as a useful step forward in psychological preparation, which is why he was so savagely attacked by anti-peace factions. On the other hand, the backtracking and clarifications obviously undermined that. What's needed is bold, consistent, farsighted leadership from Israeli and Palestinian politicians alike, telling their people in no uncertain terms that they will have to compromise on cherished aspects of their national narratives. Israelis will have to compromise on Jerusalem. Palestinians will have to compromise on refugees. Nobody should expect either of them to make concessions gratis, but everyone should insist that, when the time comes, they do compromise.
Date: 16/08/2012
×
What Edward Really Said
Few contemporary thinkers have been more revered and reviled than the late Palestinian-American professor Edward Said. But even his most ardent critics can hardly deny that Said was one of the most significant public intellectuals of our time. And while he is probably best remembered for his political activism, it was as a major literary theorist that he produced his most important work. Said was widely misread and misunderstood by friend and foe alike, and while reams of articles, journal papers and books have been published about his work since his untimely death in 2003, little of it has added to any deep understanding of his intellectual legacy. But a new book by a leading critical theorist, R. Radhakrishnan, A Said Dictionary (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), illuminates much of what is most important, and also problematic, about Said's work. Radhakrishnan's book is called a "dictionary," but in fact it's a series of short essays built on key terms Said relied on in his writings. Radhakrishnan explicates and engages with these difficult, often elusive concepts as Said deployed them, such as his notions of “democratic criticism,” “secular criticism,” “Traveling Theory,” “worldliness,” and “professionalism.” But Radhakrishnan's book is not merely a guide, a hagiography or a tribute. It involves a robust and often contentious engagement with Said's most provocative and, at times, problematic ideas. Most specifically, Radhakrishnan dwells on “Said's way of being worldly.” Said was a prolific and profound thinker, but not a particularly methodical or philosophically rigorous one, engaging in what Radhakrishnan aptly describes as “freewheeling relationships and affinities with a number of theories, theorists and schools of thought.” For example, in his best-known book, Orientalism (1978), Said attempted to forge an uneasy methodological marriage between Michel Foucault's poststructuralist and anti-humanist systems of genealogy with his own deep-seated high humanist orientation. The book was a sensation, for many reasons, but this combination simply couldn't be sustained, and Said quickly fell back on his humanist commitments. Said engaged in numerous noteworthy debates and exchanges with both allies and antagonists, perhaps most notably another redoubtable champion of Enlightenment rationality, Ernest Gellner. But while Gellner sought to pit critical rationalism against critical theory, Said engaged theory and contributed heavily to it, but often by critiquing its excesses. Early on in his book, Radhakrishnan confesses to often finding Said to “not be a philosophic enough figure as he addresses the crises and problems of humanism and essentialism.” For Radhakrishnan, Said sometimes ducks or simply dismisses some of the more difficult philosophical questions raised by his own work. For example, he finds in Said's crucial notion of “contrapuntal criticism,” an ethical imperative in which “no one history… can be thought of in isolation from other histories.” Summing up Said's position perfectly, Radhakrishnan writes, “To be truly secular is to forfeit the privileges of essentialism and/or nativism, as well as the false premise of doing one's own history within one's own protected enclave.” But, he notes, this ethic raises important dilemmas that Said never fully grappled with. “Can the counterpoint degenerate into a posture of easy accommodation?” Radhakrishnan asks, noting, “Said could be faulted for aestheticizing the political a little too felicitously.” Radhakrishnan's own work has increasingly turned away from the normative structural and post-structural methodologies in critical theory towards a re-embrace of phenomenology. His new book suggests that he finds in Said an analogous spirit: “[I]n Said's case it is the political and historical that validate theory and epistemology, and not the other way around.” In his phenomenological turn, Radhakrishnan writes, Said poses a “direct and candid question to Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and the rest… What are you for, and what are you against?” No concept was more central to Said's thought than that of agency and intentionality. In championing secularism as an ethical model for intellectual activity, Said was emphasizing agency and the essential question of intention and affiliation. Intellectuals must not be detached "professionals," hiding behind academic method and intellectual rigor to avoid responsibility and decline solidarity with constituencies that shape the world in which we live. As Radhakrishnan notes, “Said's retrieval of individual consciousness also heralds a phenomenological return to 'perspectivism'… The critic becomes an actor again: he is no longer a correct functionary whose function is no more than professional maintenance and repetition of a dogma.” But Radhakrishnan teases out numerous unanswered questions raised by these and other aspects of Said's thought and asks, rhetorically, “Whether it is possible to exorcise the philosophical dimension of reality by just not thinking about it…” Radhakrishnan clearly doesn't think it is. Anyone remotely interested in Said's thought needs to read Radhakrishnan's book. He has managed to make difficult and sometimes abstruse ideas and arguments accessible to a general audience and simultaneously engaging to specialists. It is without question the most important contribution to understanding Said's complex legacy yet written.
Date: 12/07/2012
×
The Anti-Balfour Declaration
Wonder what it feels like to have inadvertently put yourself between a rock and a hard place? Just ask Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Monday the Levy Committee, which he appointed last January, issued its report that was supposed to examine the question of Israeli “state lands” in the occupied Palestinian territories, but has far exceeded its mandate. The most significant aspect of the report is its blunt assertion that Israel is not “the occupying power” in the occupied territories. Its consequent outrageous legal recommendations all reflect that logic; it recommends that all Israeli settlements, including “unauthorized” outposts built on private Palestinian land, and every promise ever made by any official to any settlers, should be formalized. Here’s Netanyahu’s quandary: Israel either is, or is not, occupying the occupied territories–and the report could well force him to take a clearer stand on that issue. If he accepts its recommendations in full, even if they are not fully implemented, he will in effect be accepting the notion that there is no occupation in the occupied territories. This would reflect rhetoric from his own Foreign Ministry, particularly Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, not to mention many Israeli policies that have treated the occupied territories as part of the Israeli state when convenient to its purposes. However, Netanyahu can’t make the decision solely based on Israel's policies, because they do not reflect a clear view of the territories' legal status. In fact, many policies have carefully fudged the question and cultivated an atmosphere of ambiguity about the occupation. A large body of Israeli laws, court rulings, policies and, above all, treaties (including those with Egypt, Jordan and the PLO) all either explicitly or implicitly recognize the territories as occupied. So, of course, does a veritable mountain of international law including UN Security Council resolutions and the ruling of the International Court of Justice on Israel's West Bank separation barrier. And, as David Kretzmer, a noted Israeli legal scholar, observed, "If Israel is not an occupying force, it must immediately relinquish ownership of all private lands seized over the years for military use, taken with authority as the occupying force in an occupied territory, and restore the lands to previous owners.” Finally, there is the obvious corollary to any formal acceptance that the occupied territories are not, in fact, occupied: that Israel views them as de facto and de jure part of its state. Full acceptance of the recommendations of the report would amount to announcing the de facto annexation of the occupied territories. That, too, has its own obvious corollary: Israel is already neither demographically Jewish nor democratic in character. Rather than administering a temporary occupation, it is presiding over a separate and unequal system that discriminates between Jews and Arabs in huge parts of its territory. In this sense, the report might be seen as an anti-Balfour Declaration: a political statement, which, if implemented as written, would ensure that Israel can no longer continue in a meaningful sense to be a “Jewish state,” except by systematic ethnic discrimination against large parts of its population. There's a word for such a system: Apartheid. Only by distinguishing between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel proper can Israel sustain its objections to any application of this term to its polity. Accepting the Levy Committee's report would, in effect, dissolve any such distinction and render Israel practically defenseless against the indictment that it is an apartheid state. The long-term legal, political and diplomatic ramifications for Israel are incalculable. When systematic ethnic discrimination is intended to be maintained rather than temporary, it is a crime under international law. Although Israel is not a signatory to the treaty, this is how the Statute of Rome, which outlines the work of the International Criminal Court, defines Apartheid. More importantly, such a formalized system would be regarded as indefensible not only by the international community but by huge numbers of Jews around the world, particularly in the United States. Long-term support for such an Israeli apartheid state by Jewish communities overseas would likely be placed in significant jeopardy. On the other hand, if Netanyahu does not accept the Committee's report or implements it only partially, he will come under fire from significant sections of the Israeli right and the settler movement for implicitly recognizing that Israel is indeed an occupying power in the territories. That, too, has important implications, since settlement activity in occupied territories is strictly prohibited under international law, most importantly Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Levy Committee attempted to bypss these prohibitions by denying that the territories are occupied at all. But it also accepted spurious assertions that Article 49 only prohibits “forced transfers” of civilians against their will into occupied territories. Such arguments are, almost unanimously, rejected by international legal scholars because in other sections the Convention already prohibits forced population transfers. Article 49, however, explicitly prohibits all “transfer" of civilians into an occupied territory, because it is meant to protect the rights of people living under occupation not to be colonized by settlers from the occupying power. Defenses of the settlement project therefore invariably reject the idea that Israel is the occupying power, in spite of the unanimous global consensus that it is. Until now, Israel has been able to finesse the question of whether or not it is the occupying power in the territories, and therefore keep the legal status of the settlements similarly ambigous. The new report threatens to place Netanyahu in the extremely precarious position of clarifying whether or not Israel sees itself as an occupying power, with extremely dangerous political, legal and diplomatic consequences for any decision he might take. No wonder he has already referred it to his also recently-created "Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs."
Date: 02/06/2012
×
Why Unilateralism Won't Work
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently warned that if negotiations with the Palestinians do not yield results soon, Israel might consider "unilateral measures" in the occupied West Bank. He didn't specify what those might be, but several others have suggested that Israel create “temporary” or “provisional” unilaterally-imposed new borders in the territory. This idea is simple, superficially appealing and profoundly dangerous. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is correct in warning that unilateralism runs counter to the whole framework of a negotiated agreement. Rather than calming the situation on the ground, this could greatly inflame an already tense situation. Whatever the professed or real intentions behind such a move, Palestinians and other Arabs will assume that what is enacted as “temporary” will be at least semi-permanent (if not, indeed, permanent). They will believe that Israel is imposing unilaterally, by force and fiat, what it could not get Palestinians to accept at the negotiating table. Many intelligent and informed observers appear to labor under the illusion that because Palestinians and Israelis have made significant progress at certain stages of negotiations on borders (not including Jerusalem), there is a general consensus on “what the final borders will look like.” This is incorrect on two major counts. First, there is no agreement on the percentage of West Bank territory to be included in a land swap. During the last major negotiations on the issue, former prime minister Ehud Olmert reportedly suggested Israel retain something like 6.9% of the area with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas proposing 1.9%. Secondly, many of the areas the sides cannot agree upon are strategically located. For example, the Israeli settlement of Efrata, an outlying area of the "Etzion Bloc," cuts directly across Route 60, a crucial West Bank North-South artery. Anything the present Israeli government imposes unilaterally on questions like these will be understood by Palestinians not as constructive or helpful, but instead as a unilateral land grab that prejudices one of the most important final status issues: borders. There are unilateral steps both sides could take that are constructive, just not those that seem to prejudice the outcome of key issues. The Palestinian institution-building program, for instance, led by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad does not seek Israeli permission but does involve cooperation with Israeli security forces to reduce violence and ensure law and order. That’s constructive unilateralism. Any Israeli unilateral moves to dismantle “unauthorized” settlement outposts, curb settler violence, halt or slow settlement expansion, increase access and mobility for Palestinians, or similar measures would also be constructive. Such moves would ease tensions on the ground and enhance the prospects for resuming negotiations. Anything that brings us closer to a two-state solution is welcome. But such a solution must be negotiated, not imposed. When Israel has negotiated agreements with Egypt, Jordan and, indeed, the Palestinians, both sides have had a clear interest in making them work. When Israel has acted unilaterally, such as in Gaza or southern Lebanon, no one on the other side has had a vested interest in ensuring a constructive outcome, with predictable consequences. The lessons of this history are clear. Unilateral Israeli territorial actions in the West Bank are unlikely to promote peace; rather, they would almost certainly undermine both realities on the ground and the prospects for a real, negotiated agreement.
Contact us
Rimawi Bldg, 3rd floor
14 Emil Touma Street, Al Massayef, Ramallah Postalcode P6058131
Mailing address:
P.O.Box 69647 Jerusalem
Palestine
972-2-298 9490/1 972-2-298 9492 info@miftah.org
All Rights Reserved © Copyright,MIFTAH 2023
Subscribe to MIFTAH's mailing list
|