by Steven J Rosen for Foreign Policy
U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The belief seems to be that meeting this issue head-on will accelerate progress toward an agreement ending a conflict that has festered for generations. The historical record suggests a different conclusion.
The assumption that a faceoff over construction in Jerusalem will advance negotiations has not been subjected to much scrutiny. But the last two decades show that progress has occurred not when this issue was put first, but when it was finessed and left for the final status negotiations on Jerusalem.
Consider this: If, 17 years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton or Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem, before Arafat would sit down with Rabin, there would have been no Oslo agreements. By Rabin's own account, in comments before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he had to fudge the issue.
"I explained to the president of the United States," he said,"that I wouldn't forbid Jews from building privately in the area of Judea and Samaria... I am sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive."
The same year as the famous handshake on the White House lawn, 1993, the Rabin government completed the construction of more than 6,000 units in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of East Jerusalem, out of a total of 13,000 units that were in various stages of completion in areas of the city that had been outside Israeli lines before 1967.
So Arafat did sit down with Rabin, even while Israel's construction in Jerusalem continued. And, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Oslo peace accord was signed -- by the same Mahmoud Abbas who refuses to sit down today. And on October 14, 1994, Rabin, who built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Altogether, Israel completed 30,000 dwelling units in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the four years of Rabin's government. Even the Jan. 9, 1995, announcement of a plan to build 15,000 additional apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders (especially Pisgat Zeev, Neve Yaacov, Gilo, and Har Homa) did not stop negotiations, which resulted in the Oslo II accord of September 28, 1995. Israeli construction continued while Abbas and Rabin signed an historic accord.
And what was the American policy toward Rabin's construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem? Mild annoyance.
On Jan. 3, 1995, the State Department spokesman said mildly, in response to the Rabin government's announcement of expanded construction, "The parties themselves... have to judge whether it presents any kind of a problem in their own dialogue. The important thing is to continue to meet." The spokesman added on Jan. 10, 1995, "We admit that settlements are a problem, but we... enjoin the parties to deal with these issues in their negotiations."
Clinton's Middle East peace advisor, Martin Indyk, told the U.S. Senate on Feb. 2, 1995, that Rabin's government had recently "given approval for something like 4,000 to 5,000 new housing units to go up in settlements around the Jerusalem area." But, he said, Clinton had decided to stay out of it. "To take action now that would in one way or another... would be very explosive in the negotiations, and frankly, would put us out of business as a facilitator of those negotiations." Had Clinton taken Obama's approach, it might well have exploded the negotiations and brought the Oslo process to a halt.
Nor was this example of construction in Jerusalem while diplomacy made progress an isolated exception. Two years after Oslo II, in January 1997, Abbas and Arafat sat down with another Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, to sign the Hebron Protocol, which provided for the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from 80 percent of the very sensitive area of Hebron in the West Bank. Arafat and Abbas had no illusions that Netanyahu intended to freeze Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. In fact, Netanyahu had announced that he would proceed with the building of Har Homa, a controversial Israeli suburb conceived by Rabin. Nor, another 18 months later, did the Palestinians' fierce objections to Har Homa stop them from joining the Wye Plantation negotiations from October 15-23, 1998. These talks led to an agreement known as the Wye River Memorandum, in which Netanyahu, under considerable pressure from President Clinton, agreed to pull the Israel Defense Forces out of an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. This move was fiercely opposed by Netanyahu's right flank, and it led to his downfall in January 1999 when the hard-liners in his coalition defected.
Had Clinton demanded Netanyahu freeze construction in Jerusalem and Arafat made it a precondition for negotiations, neither the Hebron nor Wye agreements would have been signed.
The Labor government that was elected in the wake of Netanyahu's ouster continued the pattern of building in Jerusalem while moving forward in negotiations with the Palestinians. At the Camp David Summit (July 11-25, 2000), then Prime Minister Ehud Barak went past Israel's past "red lines" and the Palestinians most of the West Bank and a capital in Jerusalem, along with land swaps. But, at the same time that he was taking these unprecedented steps, Barak was accelerating the construction of Har Homa and other Jerusalem communities across the pre-1967 line. While the talks accelerated, Barak also moved ahead with the Ras al-Amud neighborhood on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. President Clinton said he " would have preferred that this decision was not taken." But Clinton added that the United States "cannot prevent Israel from building in Har-Homa." Haim Ramon, Rabin's minister for Jerusalem affairs, said "I would like to make it clear that the government has no intention of stopping the building at Har Homa."
Here again, had Clinton taken Obama's position and issued an ultimatum demanding that all construction in Jerusalem stop, and had Arafat made that American demand a precondition to begin negotiations, the Camp David Summit of 2000 and the Taba talks in January 2001 would not have occurred.
The next Israeli government, headed by retired general Ariel Sharon, did not seek any breakthroughs in negotiations with the Palestinians. But Sharon ordered the most dramatic territorial concession in Israel's history since 1967: the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers from every square inch of Gaza along with the abandonment of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank, in the "unilateral disengagement" of August-December 2005. Sharon pulled 8,000 Israeli settlers from their homes against fierce opposition from his right flank.
President George W. Bush played a key role in making Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza possible by softening U.S. policy on the settlement issue. To offset the concession that Sharon was making, and counter opposition to it from Israel's right, he wrote a letter to Sharon on April 14, 2004, acknowledging that, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.... It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." One implication of the letter was that the United States would treat Israeli construction in communities that all parties knew will remain part of Israel in any future two-state agreement, like the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, differently from settlement activity on controversial areas in the interior of the West Bank.
Elliott Abrams, the White House advisor who negotiated the Bush administration's compromises on the natural growth of settlement, explained the significance of the step Bush took last June in the Wall Street Journal: "There were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.... The prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation... the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza.... There was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to... confront his former allies on Israel's right by abandoning the 'Greater Israel' position.... He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze."
There were expressions of unhappiness by Palestinian leaders and European diplomats about the Bush policy of giving a green light to limited construction in Jerusalem and certain settlement blocs. But the Bush administration defended it as a realistic policy that moved the peace process forward.
Four months after the disengagement from Gaza, on Jan. 4, 2006, Sharon went into a coma. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister. Olmert sought a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. Following the Annapolis Summit in November 2007, Abbas, who had taken over as president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the PLO after Arafat's death in November 2004, agreed to begin intensive negotiations with Olmert. While Abbas expressed his unhappiness with continued Israeli construction in East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs, he did not make cancelation of these projects a precondition for talks. In fact, Olmert said, "It was clear from day one to Abbas... that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter.... Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Zeev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem... areas [that] will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."
These negotiations produced significant results: on Sept. 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas 93 percent of the West Bank, partition of Jerusalem, and a land swap. Abbas's deputy Saeb Erekat boasted to a Jordanian newspaper that he and Abbas had achieved considerable progress with the Olmert government between the November 2007 Annapolis talks and the end of 2008 in as many as 288 negotiation sessions by 12 committees -- all while Israeli construction continued.
The record is clear and consistent: The United States has never liked Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, and frequently stated that it complicated the peace process. But until Obama, no U.S. president had made its cancelation a precondition for negotiations, and until Obama, Palestinian leaders including Abbas did not make it a precondition either. For 19 years -- from the Madrid conference of October 1991 through the Olmert/Abbas negotiations that ended in 2008, negotiations moved forward while Jerusalem construction continued. Madrid, Oslo I, Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, Camp David, Taba, the disengagement from Gaza, and the Olmert offer to Abbas -- all these events over the course of two decades were made possible by a continuing agreement to disagree about Israeli construction of Jewish homes in Jewish neighborhoods outside the pre-1967 line in East Jerusalem.
Today, for the first time in 19 years, we have an aministration unable to produce Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Abbas is following Obama's lead in demanding an unprecedented precondition that Israel cannot satisfy. This is the same Abbas who negotiated with seven previous Israeli prime ministers -- Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu (in his first term), Barak, Sharon, and Olmert, without the precondition that he now demands of Netanyahu. We have a crisis. Netanyahu is doing something that every past Israeli prime minister of the left and right has done, but Obama is doing something that past American leaders considered unwise. It is the U.S. behavior that has changed.
At this moment, Obama's decision to confront Netanyahu about construction in Jerusalem wins wide praise. Whether Obama's policy will still look good in six months, when people realize he has mired the negotiations in quicksand, remains to be seen.
Obama would do better to take the advice of his own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, who wisely told PBS host Charlie Rose, "For the Israelis, what they're building in is in part of Israel. Now, the others don't see it that way. So you have these widely divergent perspectives on the subject. Our view is, let's get into negotiations, let's deal with the issues and come up with a solution to all of them including Jerusalem.... The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in or construction in East Jerusalem.... There are disputed legal issues.... And we could spend the next 14 years arguing over disputed legal issues or we can try to get a negotiation to resolve them in a manner that meets the aspirations of both societies."
Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum.
See the original article in Foreign Policy
See this and more articles at Israel Behind the News
Showing posts with label Ariel Sharon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ariel Sharon. Show all posts
Monday, April 5, 2010
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Shocking Conclusions From Inquiry Over Gaza Expulsions
by David Bedein
An Israeli soldier keeps watch at a machine gun post atop a guard tower overlooking the Jewish settlement of Netzarim and surrounding Palestinian lands inside a small army base contiguous with the settlement, several kilometers inside the Gaza Strip on Oct. 26, 2003. An Israeli government commission has released a report criticizing the government for its handling of the last pullout of settlements from Gaza. (Brennan Linsley/Associated Press)
JERUSALEM - Four years and two months have passed since Israel expelled Jews from their homes in the Katif district of Gaza and from Jewish communities in Northern Samaria, after which the government bulldozed their homes and property, an official Israel state commission of investigation nto the Israeli government's handing of these deported Jews has issued its interim report.
The Israeli government investigation commission has concluded that the Israeli prime minister must take all practical steps for immediate and decisive action. “The state’s handling of the evacuees was tainted with failures. The obligation and stated purposes of the Israeli government was not implemented, and not enough was done for the majority of the evacuees,” states the interim report, that was filed so to allow the government to meet its obligations. According to the commission, headed by retired Israeli justice Eliyahu Matza, the treatment of the evacuees ought to have been made a national undertaking. “The treatment of the evacuees ought to be again placed at the top our national priorities, in action and not merely in declarations. This is the duty of the state, that in an effort to advance political and defensive aims has harmed a wide public. The state must hasten, it is a matter of human rights, of common human decency, of Jewish ethics.”
According to the summary report, only 250 families have begun building their permanent home, of the 926 plots that were allocated to the expelled families. The report states that some of the evacuees cannot begin building “because they lack the ability to fund the construction, since their money has been spend on their daily outlays, due to having failed to find employment. This problem concerns between 100 and 250 families that are undergoing severe economic difficulties, and it is worsening as long as they continue to reside in transient housing facilities.”
The commission also noted the worsening employment levels: whereas before the evacuation unemployment was nearly nonexistent, unemployment today stands at 16.2 percent - twice the national level. “The evacuation has directly brought about the high unemployment levels. The state must intensify its efforts to solve the employment problem, and if need be also resort to unconventional solutions,” the commission stated. Former judge Matza added that the interim report does not note those responsible for the failure and that this would be undertaken in the final report: “the report concerns an ongoing event, not merely something of the past, and it is therefore very compact and pragmatic.”
Israeli Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said at the event of the report’s release that “beyond all disputes, those who have been paying the price so far are those who have been removed from their homes, and most of them have not yet found permanent housing.”
The context of this report is that the government of Israel did everything in its power in the initial stage of the expulsion process to reassure public opinion that the Jews who were expelled from their homes were being taken care of - despite the petition to the Israel High Court of Justice by a bipartisan group of sociologists who brought overwhelming date to the court that the government of Israel had no real plan for resettlement of people from 26 communities that were being decimated.
The Israeli government at the time, under the leadership of then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hired a top flight PR agency that blared a commercial, every hour on the hour, that "there is a solution for everyone being relocated."
On August 20, 2005, in the midst of the expulsions. Sharon's top advisor, Dov Weisglass and then Housing Minister Yitzhak Hertzog made presentations to the Conference of Major American Jewish organizations, in which these Israeli officials assured that the people being expelled would all have homes waiting for them, with ample funds to support them. Following these reassurances, a number of American Jewish groups spread the word that every family expelled from Katif was going to receive a grant of $400,000. In addition, Israeli government minister Shimon Peres assured Israeli public opinion that the American government was granting $2 billion to cover the expulsion and resettlement costs.
The investigation has put to rest any notions spread by Weisglass and Hertzog that people expelled by Israel were taken care of, while Peres's assurance of $2 billion coming from the U.S. government never came to fruition.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
An Israeli soldier keeps watch at a machine gun post atop a guard tower overlooking the Jewish settlement of Netzarim and surrounding Palestinian lands inside a small army base contiguous with the settlement, several kilometers inside the Gaza Strip on Oct. 26, 2003. An Israeli government commission has released a report criticizing the government for its handling of the last pullout of settlements from Gaza. (Brennan Linsley/Associated Press)
JERUSALEM - Four years and two months have passed since Israel expelled Jews from their homes in the Katif district of Gaza and from Jewish communities in Northern Samaria, after which the government bulldozed their homes and property, an official Israel state commission of investigation nto the Israeli government's handing of these deported Jews has issued its interim report.
The Israeli government investigation commission has concluded that the Israeli prime minister must take all practical steps for immediate and decisive action. “The state’s handling of the evacuees was tainted with failures. The obligation and stated purposes of the Israeli government was not implemented, and not enough was done for the majority of the evacuees,” states the interim report, that was filed so to allow the government to meet its obligations. According to the commission, headed by retired Israeli justice Eliyahu Matza, the treatment of the evacuees ought to have been made a national undertaking. “The treatment of the evacuees ought to be again placed at the top our national priorities, in action and not merely in declarations. This is the duty of the state, that in an effort to advance political and defensive aims has harmed a wide public. The state must hasten, it is a matter of human rights, of common human decency, of Jewish ethics.”
According to the summary report, only 250 families have begun building their permanent home, of the 926 plots that were allocated to the expelled families. The report states that some of the evacuees cannot begin building “because they lack the ability to fund the construction, since their money has been spend on their daily outlays, due to having failed to find employment. This problem concerns between 100 and 250 families that are undergoing severe economic difficulties, and it is worsening as long as they continue to reside in transient housing facilities.”
The commission also noted the worsening employment levels: whereas before the evacuation unemployment was nearly nonexistent, unemployment today stands at 16.2 percent - twice the national level. “The evacuation has directly brought about the high unemployment levels. The state must intensify its efforts to solve the employment problem, and if need be also resort to unconventional solutions,” the commission stated. Former judge Matza added that the interim report does not note those responsible for the failure and that this would be undertaken in the final report: “the report concerns an ongoing event, not merely something of the past, and it is therefore very compact and pragmatic.”
Israeli Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said at the event of the report’s release that “beyond all disputes, those who have been paying the price so far are those who have been removed from their homes, and most of them have not yet found permanent housing.”
The context of this report is that the government of Israel did everything in its power in the initial stage of the expulsion process to reassure public opinion that the Jews who were expelled from their homes were being taken care of - despite the petition to the Israel High Court of Justice by a bipartisan group of sociologists who brought overwhelming date to the court that the government of Israel had no real plan for resettlement of people from 26 communities that were being decimated.
The Israeli government at the time, under the leadership of then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hired a top flight PR agency that blared a commercial, every hour on the hour, that "there is a solution for everyone being relocated."
On August 20, 2005, in the midst of the expulsions. Sharon's top advisor, Dov Weisglass and then Housing Minister Yitzhak Hertzog made presentations to the Conference of Major American Jewish organizations, in which these Israeli officials assured that the people being expelled would all have homes waiting for them, with ample funds to support them. Following these reassurances, a number of American Jewish groups spread the word that every family expelled from Katif was going to receive a grant of $400,000. In addition, Israeli government minister Shimon Peres assured Israeli public opinion that the American government was granting $2 billion to cover the expulsion and resettlement costs.
The investigation has put to rest any notions spread by Weisglass and Hertzog that people expelled by Israel were taken care of, while Peres's assurance of $2 billion coming from the U.S. government never came to fruition.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Special Report: ON THE EVE OF THE SUMMIT AND RAMADAN, THE PALESTINIAN BROADCAST MEDIA: A SURVEY REPORT (The Center for Near East Policy Research)
THE PALESTINIAN BROADCAST MEDIA:
A SURVEY REPORT
by Michael Widlanski
General Summary
On the eve of PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas’s planned visit to
Washington, the broadcast media of the Palestinian Authority (PA)
maintained a generally tough anti-Israeli and sometimes even anti-
American posture, regarding talks with Israel and American actions in
the Arab world.
For example the Fatah newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida published a
cartoon on October 15 condemning America for actions in Iraq and
Syria:
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 15, p 15, reprinting cartoon from Qatari newspaper Al-
Watan, showing defiant Syrian flag being pulled down by balls and chains labeled
“America” and “Iraq.”
Although many Arab newspapers reported that Dr. Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) was set to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Washington, the official media reported (from late September) that such a summit was not a foregone conclusion, and that it depended on Israel meeting Palestinian demands.
View the Full Report:
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