| August 2009 |
| Why Freezing the Settlements is the Key to Middle East Peace Initially, Israel thought it could keep a good part of these territories after forcing hundreds of thousands of their rightful owners to flee. It, hence, tried to change the demographic and geographic status of the captured land. Israel’s plans proved to be illusionary. Following the Camp David Accords of 1978, Israel evacuated 10,000 settlers from the Sinai Peninsula, returning the 70,000-square-kilometre desert to Egypt. After the war of attrition in 1974, Israel was also forced to give back a small portion of the Golan Heights to Syria. In 2005, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip, evacuating another 4,000 settlers. The rest of the occupied territories remained in Israeli hands. Since the US was and remains Israel’s main backer, the Arab world has relied on Washington to retrieve the occupied territories. The US, however, which has considered Israel to be a “strategic asset” since its 1967 victory, has shown no real interest in pursuing peace in the Middle East. Throughout the Cold War era, the US was single-mindedly preoccupied with the “Communist threat” and subsequently pursued a policy of containment, rather than resolution, of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The end of the Cold War presented a golden opportunity to resolve the generations-old conflict. The Bush Sr. administration pressured Israel to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991. The right-wing Yitzhak Shamir government, dragging its feet to the conference, declared Israel was happy to negotiate for decades towards no real outcome. Fearing further US pressure to implement UN Resolutions 242 and 338, Israel accelerated the building of settlements. Israel’s main objectives were to create new facts on the ground, allowing it to permanently annex more Arab land, keeping Palestinian territories divided and surrounded by Israeli settlements. Indeed, according to UN, Palestinian and Israeli sources, Israel built more settlements in the occupied territories between October 1991 (Madrid Peace Conference) and 2000 (when the peace process collapsed following the Camp David summit between Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton) than in the previous years since 1967. Throughout the last two decades, Israel’s policy has been to eat up more Palestinian land while simultaneously carrying out negotiations. This strategy goes against the very logic of the Oslo Accords of 1993. According to Oslo, Palestinians agreed to defer all difficult issues, including settlements, refugees, water resources and the final status of Jerusalem to a later stage in exchange for an Israeli commitment to freeze the building of new settlements and preserve the territorial integrity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. To this day, Israel violates its commitments Having lost the moral high ground that it once enjoyed in the Arab world, the US under President Barack Obama has moved to revive Middle East peace talks. Both Palestinians and Syrians hold that there will not be peace talks unless Israel freezes its settlement activities in the occupied territories. Clearly, the more land confiscated by Israel, the more distant a peaceful solution to the conflict becomes. The fear that by the time Israel realises that peace is the only way it will ever live in a secure environment, there will be no more land left to achieve a settlement, grows by the day. |
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