Israeli Peace Offer Would Maintain 230,000 West Bank Settlers

[ProgressiveMuslim]

The Israeli government has admitted its most recent peace offer to Palestinian negotiators would still leave more than 200,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The offer was made in talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. In meetings with US envoy George Mitchell, both Olmert and Abbas confirmed the Israeli offer would remove just 60,000 settlers of the 290,000 in the West Bank. The remaining 230,000 settlers would stay in the large settlement blocs that nearly cut the West Bank in half. Not a single Palestinian refugee would be granted the right to return to their former home in Israel. Palestinians were offered an equal amount of Israeli land in return and shared sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem. But the settlements are widely considered illegal under international law and a non-starter for many Palestinians. Palestinian negotiators reportedly refused a demand to sign off on the deal that would then be handled by the winner of the upcoming Israeli elections.

Israeli FM Promises “Maximum Settlers” on Palestinian Land
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading polls and has rejected any territorial concession to the Palestinians. And even though the offer would still ensure Israeli control over key settlement blocs, Netanyahu’s opponent, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, has distanced herself from the proposal as being too generous. Livni said, “I will advance only an agreement that represents our interests. Maintaining maximum settlers and places that we hold dear such as Jerusalem—not a single refugee will enter.” Meanwhile, Mitchell continued his Mideast tour with meetings in the occupied West Bank. On Thursday, Mitchell sat down with Abbas in Ramallah.

more...
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/30/headlines#7

[ProgressiveMuslim]

1. For anyone who wonders why...

Palestinians are calling for one state?
Some Palestinians are calling for armed resistance?
Others call for international boycotts, sanctions and divestment, along with cultural and academic boycotts...

[oberliner]

4. "Palestinians were offered an equal amount of Israeli land in return"

Do you have any comment on that part of the piece you posted?

[ProgressiveMuslim]

8. What in the world will the WB look like with the settler sysem intact?

You can't possibly be serious, Oberliner.

[oberliner]

12. Have a look at this

Posted this in response to another poster, but you may find this interesting as well:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/01/land_swaps_for_peace/

[ProgressiveMuslim]

16. 230,000 settlers live in those tiny blocs?

How will Palestinians ever get to their capital in East Jerusalem?

Looks like Egypt is giving up more land than anyone!

[oberliner]

18. Yeah, it's not a very realistic proposal

I just think that folks might have to get a little creative.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

21. But the reality is that those settlers, with their IDF protectors, bypass roads, etc. DOMINATE

the landscape. There can be no viable, independent Palestinian state with them in place.

It's a non-starter, and its' the "generous" offer!

Bibi is clear about never conceding an inch of land.

All I'm saying is: you want to know why Palestinians believed in armed resistance? They see the writing on the wall. I believe it's going to take force as well, but I think the effective force will be in the form of international pressure and shunning.

The 60 Minutes video laid out the reality of Israel's predicament clearly: one-state, apartheid (which is really already the de facto situation) or 2-states with the very real risk of civil war.... or of course maintain the status quo and suck up a few rockets.

[oberliner]

28. All that existed in Gaza and was eliminated literally in a matter of weeks

Please recall that everything you describe about the settlement enterprise in the West Bank also existed in Gaza (albeit to a lesser extent) and was dismantled in spite of much hue and cry in Israel without any civil war breaking out.

People who swore they would never leave the settlements - people just like that woman on the 60 Minutes show - were forcibly removed from the homes against their will by the Israeli government, and a Sharon government at that.

I think that if Israelis and Palestinians can agree on some kind of land swap and some kind of agreement about Jerusalem, then there is hope for a two-state solution that will not lead to any kind of civil war, but will instead lead to peaceful coexistence.

President Obama and George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton and whoever else we can send to get involved can lead the way to make this happen regardless of who is elected.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

29. Gaza is not the WB. Not by a long shot. Tiny percentage of settlers, without the emotional attach-

ments. You know that.

[oberliner]

30. Without the emotional attachment?

You've got to be kidding!

In the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim, settlers used makeshift barricades and their bodies to impede an operation that paves the way for Israel's first uprooting of settlements on land Palestinians want for a state.

Bearded men stood at the main entrance praying for divine intervention. Settlers with loudspeakers urged soldiers to refuse orders. Protesters set fire to tyres, sending up clouds of dark smoke.

In the Morag enclave, a woman with a toddler in her arms pleaded tearfully with an army officer: "Don't do this to us".

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-359308/Defiant-settlers-resist-Gaza-evacuation.html

[ProgressiveMuslim]

31. Those (bastard) settlers were attached of course, but much less so the nation.

Daniela Weiss claims there would be a mutiny in the IDF if they were ordered to remove WB settlers. That was clearly not the case in Gaza... there was not the same sort of emotional attachment on the part of the nation.

[oberliner]

32. I would respectfully disagree with your assessment

Jerusalem is a different story, however.

[azurnoir]

33. Has the number of Orthodox in IDF increased

since 2005? Could it be that some "precautions" have been taken taken to try to insure that the removal of settlers will not go to well this time and of course there will be the cries of look what happened in Gaza.

[shira]

34. so the million dollar question is....

if it were up to you as Palestinian PM or President, yes or no, would you accept this deal or go another 8-10 years of the same old? Conflict over forever, world would pitch in billions to see that it works.

Your call.

[Idealism]

35. Problem there is the people would rise up against a patently unfair agreement

[shaayecanaan]

40. I'd knock it back...

In 20 years...

The US will either have gone broke or scaled back its military ambitions.

India or China will be the effective security guarantors for the region.

Iran will either have been invaded and occupied at a prohibitive cost by the West, or will have developed nuclear weapons, or will have accepted Chinese military installations on its soil, in which case it would be effectively immune from attack anyway.

The Arab population inside Israel will be 30% to 35%, effectively forcing one of the Jewish parties to form a majority with them.

If they can stay in the game for another ten-fifteen years, their position can only improve.

[IndianaGreen]

5. A one state solution would eliminate Right of Return as an issue

Everyone would be an equal citizen in what would be a hybrid federal republic. The IDF would be replaced by a republican army, representing all citizens. All religious views will be respected by a new constitution, but none would have preferential treatment, or any influence in what would be a secular state.

The two-state solution is just a fig leaf cover for endless land appropriations by religious extremists. 41 years of occupation have shown that the 2-state solution is an impossibility.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

13. Why not then go back to the original partitioning?

[IndianaGreen]

14. Are you talking of the one proposed by UN in 1948?

Impractical, unjust, and you name it!

[azurnoir]

20. Which "original" partitioning

you have suggested this before but for some reason refuse to be specific why is that?

[Ken Burch]

22. Isn't it possible that a One-State solution might make it harder to get rid of the settlements?

After all, in such a state, couldn't the settlers then argue "well, this is a single state. We're all citizens of this single state. Why, then, SHOULD we leave?"

I'm not sure how you'd overcome such an argument without setting up some sort of internal segregation within the single state. Has anyone addressed this in arguing for a single state?

[ProgressiveMuslim]

27. They wouldn't have to. There would need to be compensation

for expropriated land, I am sure.

[Shaktimaan]

41. 41 years of occupation have shown the 2 state solution to be impossible?

Why? What does one thing really have to do with the other?

The two state solution is only around 20 years old, in terms of its current incarnation as a potential peace plan between Palestinians and Israelis. Prior to then the entire WB was still being claimed by Jordan, and all of the Palestinians living there were Jordanian citizens. So I'd say that you're giving up rather quickly on the one concept that pretty much everyone agrees on as being the most realistic possibility for a long-term peaceful solution.

Especially since your alternative is a real pie-in-the-sky utopian dream that doesn't have any basis in reality. I mean, sure, I can list all of the great characteristics of my own "new society" solution to this conflict too, but that doesn't mean that any of it would be realistic, or even possible.

A single state would be the worse solution for both societies.

Consider what it would be like for Palestinians trying to compete with Israelis, who have the benefit of first world educations, decades of experience in governance and well-established businesses with international infrastructures and billions of shekels of capital at their disposal. There would be little opportunity for any Palestinian entrepreneurs in a market where they had to compete directly with the Israelis. And there's little reason to think that Palestinians would have great success at obtaining the relatively few slots available for higher education at the country's four universities. Competition for those slots is extremely fierce, even among the advantaged, well-educated youth within Israel now.

How would inequity between the two communities play out in the long run? Would the Palestinians be willing to settle for just working for the Israelis forever? Social inequality has always been one of the classic precursors to inter-class warfare. Do you think it would take much time for Palestinian frustration at social inequality to take the form of violent repercussions?

Or, by working with their most mortal enemies of the past 100 years, would the Palestinians be more successful at nation-building than they have been so far amongst themselves? It did not take much for Palestine to devolve into a de-facto civil war... basically, once they had enough autonomy it occurred almost automatically. Do you think adding the Israelis to the mix would somehow offer greater political stability?

On that note, what language do you envision them using in their new Parliament anyway? I know, it sounds so trivial. But remember, it was the political battle over Pakistan's language laws that ultimately led to its civil war and subsequent split into separate countries. These things can be trickier than they look.

[GoesTo11]

2. Shouldn't Palestinians be interested in how good their lives are, not how few Jews live there?

[Idealism]

7. How could the Palestinians have a viable state

if the best farmland in the West Bank that is rightfully theirs is being stolen from them? How do you expect them to ever come close to self-sufficiency? Agriculture plays such a big role in the economy of the West Bank, it is no wonder that employment has hovered around 30% for years. Some of the only work Palestinians can get in the WB now is day labor jobs working to build illegal settlements on what used to be their houses, so what happens when that venture is halted (if it will ever be...)?

[ProgressiveMuslim]

9. I"m sure their lives would be great with their territory sliced up like swiss cheese.

[Ken Burch]

23. It's not about, and has never been about "how few Jews live there".

It's about not getting pushed off the land your family has lived on for centuries. The Palestinians would be doing the exact same thing if other Arabs or other Muslims were coming in and treating them as the Israelis have with regard to land.

You're making the fatal error of insisting on seeing the Palestinian response as equivalent to the European crime of antisemitism.

[GoesTo11]

24. About land is different, more reasonable, and easier to deal with

To the extent that the settlers are already there, it could well be a dealbreaker for Israel to have to relocate 300,000 people and remove them from their homes, etc. But to the extent that the settlers have been involved in a huge land grab, that can largely be reversed in a peace deal. The 230,000 number would probably include a large number in a few settlements - and to be clear, these large settlements are small cities or suburbs. They are fairly dense. But when they include boundaries that extend 10 miles around the settlement in each direction, then they take large swaths of land. In a peace deal, if some portion of the settlements are dismantled, while others are kept intact but without excess land (and in exchange, with better relations and security with their neighbors), and without checkpoints and barriers and corridors, etc., it would be a lot better for Palestinians than it is now, and it would be more likely to be achievable than a 100% closure of all settlements. Of course in this scenario, people would be very pissed on both sides anyway.

[oberliner]

25. Did this happen during the Egyptian and Jordanian occupation of Gaza and the West Bank?

Was there any attempt to resist those occupiers in a similar fashion to Israel?

[Ken Burch]

36. Well, as far as I know, the Egyptians and Jordanians didn't force Palestinians out of their homes

They didn't deprive them of water, they didn't cut down the olive groves. They had sovereignty, but they basically left people alone.

[oberliner]

38. They certainly did not allow for the creation of an independent Palestinian state

Nasser attempted to eliminate the concept of a Palestinian people completely.

[Ken Burch]

39. An effort at which he failed, utterly.

Nonetheless, there was no comparison with the day-to-day treatment. Egypt and Jordan didn't try to drive Palestinians OUT of Palestine.

If Nasser had thousands of Egyptian citizens to take all the good land in Gaza, if King Abdullah or King Hussein had deprived the West Bank of potable water, then we'd have a valid comparison.

The problem was that the Israelis went too far. They, and they alone, acted as if they had the right to the land and the Palestinian Arabs didn't. This by itself explains the difference in reactions.

Neither the Palestinian Arabs, the Egyptians or the Jordanians were driven by European-style antisemitism. To insist that they were, to insist that the Arab world deserved the sixty years of demonization it received, deserved to be cast as the mustache-twirling villains in the piece, serves no purpose.

Their biggest mistake, the most colossal blunder the Arabs made, was the decision to expel the Mizrahim in retalation for the expulsion of the Palestinians. For which, all the states involved should apologize for the expulsions and offer compensation and the right of return to the Mizrahim.

Both sides made mistakes. But the driving force in the history of the conflict in the forty-one years since the Six Day War, was the hubris and arrogance on the part of the Israeli government, a hubris which was driven by the increasing arrogance and aggressive macho stance of the IDF. The whole direction in Israeli policy since 1967 has been to believe that they could simply impose their will and get their way by creating "facts on the ground". This is what led Ariel Sharon, in the early 70s, to greenlight the fascist settler movement.

The accusations of antisemitism need to be retired. Those who sympathetic to the Palestinian people are, with tiny ugly exceptions, honorable progressive people who are working from an anti-racist and anti-colonialist analysis. The honorable thing is to debate us on the merits of the issue, and refrain from emotional blackmail.

[oberliner]

42. Nothing would please me more than to see antisemitism removed from this debate

Unfortunately, as you might have observed, those "tiny ugly exception" you speak of are not always so tiny and can be extraordinarily ugly.

There needs to be a concerted effort on the part of those honorable progressive people you speak of to reject the mingling of anti-semitic rhetoric and iconography that more than occasionally accompanies criticism of Israel.

As long as progressive Palestinian supporters are willing to make common cause with those who would embrace such ugliness, there will continue to be accusations of antisemitism when such behavior presents itself.

[Vegasaurus]

26. This post is really ignorant

I'd suggest you read up on the Jordanian occupation of the WB and the Egyptian occupation of Gaza, for the first 20 years of Israel's statehood.

Did the Palestinians shoot off rockets or send in suicide bombers when their occupiers were Arab?

Did they even have a nationalist movement?

No, and no.

[Ken Burch]

37. There actually had been a Palestinian national movement going back to the beginning of the

20th Century. Tom Segev shows this in "One Palestine, Complete".

It hadn't reached the degree of intensity it's at now because the Ottoman, and then the Egyptians and Jordanians, basically left the Palestinian Arab population alone. They didn't demolish homes, they didn't uproot the ancient olive groves, they didn't try to divert the potable water supply, they didn't try to make the Palestinian Arabs leave. Their was nothing equivalent to Deir Yassin or Plan Dalet or Operation Cast Lead in those earlier times.

But the idea of an independent Palestine was always there. The way the population was treated after 1948 and especially after 1967 forced the issue.

But it's a despicable lie to say that it was just that "they didn't want Jews there". What they didn't want was to be driven away. It was the arrogance.

The continued use of the charge of antisemitism is simply emotional blackmail.

[Vegasaurus]

43. Again, I would suggest you do a little bit of reading

to learn about the Arab/Nazi ties, the way Jews were treated in Arab countries before they were all expelled (with their land stolen from them).

There were no efforts to make a Palestinian state during the "other" occupations.

Without the "degree of intensity"?

How about barely a glimmer.

[liberalpragmatist]

3. I think it depends on the land transfers

Yes, the settlements are illegal, but as a practical matter it is going to be near impossible to remove all of them. I think the key - as the Palestinian leadership has generally conceded - is that annexations be as minimal as possible, do not disrupt Palestinian contiguity, and that the compensatory landswap be land that is contiguous with the Palestinian state and of equal quality to the annexed land.

[GoesTo11]

17. If Palestinians had to pay for any uprooted settlers, then they would compromise

in the way you describe.

[Idealism]

6. And just where would the Israeli come from?

Equal amount of land in return sounds like a nice concept, but when you take into consideration the Palestinian land being stolen in the West Bank is the "prime" real estate, more arable land, and close to sources of water- whereas the land Israel would be willing to give in return most likely will be arid, barren, and of little to no economic developmental use.

Am I being cynical when I fear that any land Israel is willing to give up would come exclusively from the Negev?

[oberliner]

11. Have a look at this

Land swaps for peace

In Biger’s plan, parts of the West Bank where there are large Jewish settlement blocs, as well as part of the Jordan Valley, would be annexed to Israel. In exchange, the Palestinians would receive Israeli territory along the Green Line, and Egypt would relinquish territory between al-Arish and Rafah to the Palestinians. Israel would compensate Egypt with territory from Israel in the Paran Desert, as well as a corridor across the lower Negev to Jordan (a proposal revisited last week at MESH).

In the north, Biger also envisions a three-way swap. Israel would keep possession of a part of the Golan Heights. It would give Lebanon territory in the northern Galilee associated with the so-called “seven villages” abandoned in 1948. Lebanon, in turn, would relinquish territory to Syria, to compensate Syria for ceding part of the Golan Heights to Israel.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/01/land_swaps_for_peace/

A map can be found on the site as well.

[Idealism]

15. In a perfect world...

I don't know which would happen first: The End of Days or the Biger Plan :(

It is certainly a pie-in-the-sky outlook; I don't foresee Egypt wanting any part of southern Israeli desert in return for giving up Rafah and the outlying areas, just like I don't see any reason for Syrian interests to be peaked enough to fully cede claims to the Golan Heights that Israel controls currently. The governments in Lebanon and Syria have a mutual disdain for years, and it has only gotten worse under Assad. Syria has been colonizing Lebanese land illegally for some time now, and I doubt a land-swap between the two would go as planned.

The Palestinians would be the least offended by this proposal, when compared to other entities. It hinges too much on a comprehensive cooperation of powers that don't see promoting peace in the region as a common good they should all seek.

[oberliner]

19. I agree with you

I do feel that there are creative solutions that are worth exploring, however.

[safeinOhio]

10. What about this

the best reason for a "one state" solution. I like how the settlers are the most likely not the real Israelis, but the Palestinians may be.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/122810/controversial_bestseller_shakes_the_foundation_of_the_israeli_state/