Jewish World Review Nov. 20, 2001 / 5 Kislev, 5762
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak proved that the settlements are among the least intractable of the bitter issues
dividing Israelis and Palestinians. At Camp David in July 2000, Barak offered to withdraw from about 90 percent of the
territories, dismantle a majority of settlements and concentrate those remaining into three blocs - whose existence, in principle,
the Palestinians accepted. Six months later, during negotiations at Taba, Barak offered to withdraw from 95 percent of the
territories and compensate the Palestinians for at least part of the remaining five percent with Israeli territory. If settlements
were the problem, why did the Palestinians reject the solution?
Astonishingly, the actual built areas of the settlements - as opposed to imaginary development lines on the map -
occupy no more than 1.5 percent of the territories. Barak's former chief negotiator, Gilad Sher, notes that settlements weren't
even among the five main issues preventing a deal. Instead, the real obstacles were the Temple Mount and Palestinian
insistence on return of Arab refugees not only to Palestine but to Israel - threatening the Jewish state's continued viability.
Critics of settlement-building, including the Israeli leftwing movement, Peace Now, note that some 6,000 West Bank
housing units, whose construction was begun under previous Israeli governments, are now at various stages of completion. Yet
according to Peace Now's own "Settlement Watch," about 80 percent of those units are being built within the three settlement
blocs that the Palestinians accepted at Camp David and Taba. In a recent interview I conducted with Dennis Ross, the former
Middle East negotiator acknowledged that construction within areas slated as future settlement blocs should now be
considered legitimate - provided that building doesn't expand the borders of those blocs. So far, the Sharon government is
adhering to that principle.
The final absurdity of exaggerating the centrality of settlements in the Mid-East impasse is that those communities have
never been less attractive destinations for Israelis, who are hardly rushing to move their families into territories that have
become a war zone. Many of the 6,000 units under construction are unlikely to be completed in the foreseeable future, and of
those that will be finished, many will almost certainly remain empty.
If the Palestinians rejected the peace agreement that would have solved the settlement problem, and if
settlement-building is now concentrated in areas which the Palestinians themselves acknowledge will remain part of Israel in any
future agreement, why the obsessive focus on settlements as an "obstacle to peace"?
Because, quite simply, the Palestinians need an excuse for having spurned the most realistic Middle East compromise
since they rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. The nine-month Palestinian terror tantrum was initially blamed on Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount - which Palestinian militia leader Marwan Barguthi recently acknowledged
was merely a pretext for pre-planned violence. Now the Palestinians want the world to believe that the violence is a result of
their frustration over settlements.
In fact, Palestinian leaders initiated the current violence to divert world attention from their own rejectionism. And as
the Mitchell Report proves, the tactic has been stunningly successful. Once again, the international community has signaled to
Yasser Arafat that he wont't be held accountable for aggression and that terrorism pays. The argument that Arafat needs an
Israeli concession to reign in the gunmen
only encourages Palestinian rejectionism and insures further Palestinian violence whenever disagreements arise during
negotiations. Until the Palestinians understand that there is no reward for terrorism, they won't become responsible peace
partners. And that is the ultimate tragedy of accepting the Palestinian lie that equates building apartments with blowing up
teenagers in a
JWR contributor Yossi Klein Halevi is the Israel correspondent for the New Republic and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report. His
latest book is "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for G-d with Christians and Muslims in the Holy
Land." Comment by clicking here.
Good try, Mr. Powell, but Mitchell Report is fundamentally flawed
By Yossi Klein Halevi
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
CONVENTIONAL wisdom on the Middle East insists that two obstacles are delaying resumption of peace talks:
Palestinian violence and Israeli settlement-building. The Mitchell Report, endorsed by Secretary of State Collin Powell,
demands that the Palestinians stop shooting and bombing and the Israelis stop building. To many observers, that formulation
seems both practical and fair. The only drawback is that it is based on a lie.