The clock ran out this week on hopes for a Middle East peace brokered by the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton has left office, and the Israelis and Palestinians are still trying to find a way to agree how not to disagree so they can get back on the negotiating track.
Hoping for an eleventh-hour settlement of the conflict and a different legacy, Clinton offered “bridging proposals,” but the Palestinians rejected them as being too vague. The sticking points were said to be Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram ash-Sharif/Temple Mount and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. But even if mutually acceptable compromise could be reached on these difficult, important issues, they alone would not produce the ultimate objective of a viable independent Palestinian state.
Noted Palestinian scholar Edward Said has lamented that maps have been virtually nonexistent in the media coverage, “an absence of geography in this most geographical of conflicts.” Indeed, Clinton’s proposals did not include maps, and exactly how the territory Israel has offered in recent talks would lead to a Palestinian state is far from clear.
Not since May, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in the run-up to the Camp David summit, has Israel presented a map of its intentions for relinquishing West Bank territory. It should be viewed as an initial proposal in a negotiating process, although it has not yet been replaced by a new map. Published in the largest mass-circulation Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, at the time with the caption “final-status map presented by Israel to the Palestinian Authority,” the detailed map is now making its way into academic literature.
Although it has not been part of public discourse in the United States, the map is nonetheless a powerful testament to an inherent contradiction in the peace process, one of the main reasons the Clinton administration failed to broker an agreement after seven years: While seeking a “just” solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, Israel has continued to colonize the very lands upon which a Palestinian state is to be established.
The map divides the West Bank–home to 2 million Palestinians (who constitute two-thirds of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) and 190,000 Israeli colonists–into three areas of Palestinian sovereignty. But these three areas are cut off from each other by territory containing settlements that would be annexed to Israel, and 80 percent of the settlers would remain.
Further, each Palestinian area is crisscrossed by a spaghetti network of bypass roads built around Arab towns and villages to ensure the colonists safe passage. The roads effectively dice up the three chunks of the West Bank that would be ceded to the Palestinians into literally dozens of small fragments.
The map also belies the fuzzy math behind the U.S.-backed Israeli offer to relinquish between 90 and 95 percent of the West Bank.
Israel intends to retain the Shomron settlement cluster, which separates the northern region of the West Bank from the central region; and the Jerusalem settlement cluster, which separates the central region of the West Bank from the southern region. Further, Israel has said it will maintain “temporary” control of the Jordan Valley settlement cluster, which separates the West Bank from the eastern part of the Arab world.
Together, these clusters cover at least 25 percent of West Bank territory. The bypass roads for the settlements that would remain within the areas to be ceded to the Palestinians amount to 5 percent more. Thus Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his negotiators know that the starting point for relinquishing West Bank territory is 90 to 95 percent of the remaining 70 percent. Under this scenario, then, the Palestinians would end up with pieces of not more than 65 percent of total West Bank land area.
Were Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to agree to such a map, he would be signing for a package wrapped with a ribbon of Palestinian independence but containing the makings of capitulation and years, if not decades, of conflict.
With the “independent” Palestine chopped up into dozens of non-contiguous pieces, prospects for developing a viable Palestinian economy would be virtually non-existent. Israel would continue to enjoy the same captive Palestinian low-wage labor and consumer markets it has exploited since 1967, when it captured the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War.
The superficial trappings of peace, stability and normalized relations with the Palestinians would bring Israel more of the international investment and profit from the global economy that have transformed its economy since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, strengthening even further its position as the economic hegemonist in the region.
Beyond expanded global markets, one indication of just some of the economic value that Israel extracts from its ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory is illustrated by the two water aquifers under West Bank territory that Israel would keep in its envisioned settlement of the conflict. Palestinian Finance Minister Muhammad Nashashibi has estimated that the value of the water that Israel has pumped out of these aquifers since 1967–not only for Israeli use but also for sale back to the Palestinians–exceeds $100 billion.
Thus the settlements and their inhabitants are not merely political “facts on the ground”; they are the means to perpetuate Palestinian economic dependence on Israel. As such, the colonies have been continually expanded since Oslo, with the number of Israeli colonists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip almost doubling from 110,000 to nearly 200,000 today.
Citing Central Bureau of Statistics figures, the Israeli leftist group Peace Now has reported that Israel increased the number of settler homes by 50 percent since Oslo, building 32,750 new units–2,830 of them since July 1999 under the Barak government. Peace Now also reported that the government earmarked about $300 million for the settlements this year, a figure equal to one-tenth of the annual U.S. aid package to Israel.
Completely off the negotiating table, for Israel, is the issue of “greater Jerusalem.” Since 1967 Israel has illegally built, populated and annexed nearly a dozen “neighborhoods” around the northern, eastern and southern perimeters of the city, among the latter Gilo, which has come under fire from Palestinian militiamen in recent months. These so-called neighborhoods, all built on occupied territory, are tantamount to colonies that are populated by an additional 200,000 Israeli Jews. Israel considers them to be Jerusalem residents, but the Palestinians view them as colonists.
These realities are lost neither on Palestinian negotiators nor on the Palestinian street, where anger over 33 years of occupation and seven years of process but no peace has yielded the will to dig in for the long battle that the current intifada has become.
Starting fresh, perhaps the new Bush administration will address a second underlying contradiction of the peace process by recognizing that the U.S. cannot be an honest broker in the peace process while continuing to support the terms expressed by the map.
U.S. policy must also somehow square the circle on two other points regarding the settlements: they are illegal under the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, which prohibits change to or settlement on occupied territory and to which the U.S. is a signatory; and they directly contravene a guiding principle of the U.S.-brokered Oslo accords, United Nations Resolution 242, which emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”
The Barak government began talking about a policy of “separation” shortly after the current round of violence began nearly four months ago. This would amount to Israel’s unilaterally imposing borders along the lines of its final-status map of the West Bank, and in the last two weeks the Israeli press has carried many reports that the separation process is already under way.
The newspaper Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli army is establishing five new military checkpoints in the West Bank just over the Green Line near major Palestinian towns to further control the movement of goods and people. The paper also reported that the army has “encircled” West Bank towns and villages by blockading their entrances with mounds of bulldozed earth to inhibit movement between Arab locales, even in cases of medical emergency.
What may emerge under a right-wing government headed by Ariel Sharon, who is ahead of Barak in the polls leading up to the Israeli election on Feb. 6, could be even more Draconian.
Among the little that is clear amid this climate of contradiction and uncertainty is that the peace process will remain at war with itself as long as its chief premise is a map that is not a starting point for resolving the conflict, much less an ending one.
