http://63.104.165.4/thu/opinion/opinion3.htm
'Fraud in the name of natural growth'
By Michael Jansen, Jordan Times, 05/17/2001
ISRAEL HAS rejected the Mitchell Commission report on the outbreak of Al Aqsa
Intifada. The news emerged Tuesday night in low key reports from Washington.
What do the Arabs have to say? What is the reaction of the international
community? If the rejectionists had been the Palestinians, the US and Europe
would have promptly condemned them for obstructing efforts to resurrect the
moribund peace process. But there is not condemnation, or even criticism, when
the rejectionist is Israel. And to make matters worse, Israel's primary reason
for rejecting the package is fraudulent.
Israel's rejection of the Mitchell Commission's package is based mainly on four
objections:
- to the commission's refusal to accept Israel's definition of the conflict in
the territories as "armed conflict short of war" rather than civil disorder;
- to the commission's contention that the Intifada was not planned by the
Palestine National Authority, as Israel claims;
- to the commission's criticism of Israel for its use of excessive force and
live ammunition against civilians;
- and, above all, to the commission's call for a total settlement freeze.
The last point, of course, is the most serious for it calls for a halt to the
main activity of the Zionist enterprise to gain possession of the whole of
Palestine (plus, ultimately, the Syrian Golan, southern Lebanon and the East
Bank of the Jordan River).
The objections to the suggestion of a settlement freeze are so strong as to be
hysterical. Indeed, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said, in an interview
published in Haaretz on May 15, that Israel is now fighting a "battle for its
existence. The problems are existential, and in all my days I have never known
their like". Since Peres has been on the Israeli political scene since the
founding of the state, this involves a great many "days". In the past, Menachem
Begin used to say: "We fight, therefore we exist." Today the motto of the
Israeli politico-military establishment seems to be: "We settle, therefore we
exist."
The fact that the de facto Labour leader Peres, Israel's, alleged, chief
peacenik, is in the forefront of defending the pro-settlement policy of Likud
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shows that there is no fundamental difference
between the two ruling parties on this issue.
However, the Israeli political establishment's atavistic - yea hysterical -
reaction to a settlement freeze is completely fraudulent. There is absolutely
no need to build housing in the settlements already planted in Gaza and the
West Bank because there are thousands of empty housing units. Peace Now
estimates that there are more than 3,500 empty houses and flats and at least
6,500 under construction. American intelligence sources cite the figure of
20,000 unoccupied units!
Nevertheless, the Sharon government insists that it must continue building to
account for "natural increase", i.e., children born to existing settlers. Since
"natural increase" should be at the rate of about 2 per cent per year, the rate
of increase for "Israel proper", existing units should cover this increase for
two and a half years - if one takes the Peace Now figure of 10,000 units empty
or under construction - or five years - if one accepts the US figure.
Shimon Peres has even come up with a "non-territorial formula" to provide for
"natural growth". According to this formula, which he has been touting in
Europe and the US, there would be no construction outside established
settlements or expansion of Israel's land holdings in the West Bank and Gaza.
He has, however, said nothing about halting the flow of Israelis moving from
across the Green Line into the settlements - which during the last year
increased the overall settler population at the rate of 8 per cent.
There is nothing "natural" about such growth. And he has said nothing about the
building of roads serving the settlements - or the Jerusalem bypass highway
approved by the government, in spite of the fact that it will eat up thousands
of hectares of Palestinian land and require the bulldozing of many Palestinian
homes.
Nor did Peres admit to the outflow of settlers from exposed settlements due to
the Intifada. Daniel Ben Simon, writing in Haaretz on the Day of Al Nakba,
described the true situation in the settlements. He said that in the past few
months he had conducted an intensive survey of the settlements and "observed at
first hand the distress in which the settlers find themselves.... Anxiety and
depression plague parents... fear and stress stalk children who have been
evacuated from classrooms at which mortars have been fired. When they leave
their homes, the settlers can never know for certain whether they will return
in one piece."
If this is true, then the situation of the 200,000 Gaza and West Bank settlers
(and perhaps of some of the 250,000 Jerusalem settlers) mirrors that of the 3.2
million Palestinians who are struggling for an end to settlement expansion and
self determination. If this is true, there is some sort of equivalence of
anxiety.
Ben Simon writes of the settler "émigrés" who are either leaving permanently or
relocating "until things blow over". He is specific about the settlements of
the northern Gaza Strip: nearly half the 15 houses in Dugit are empty; a new
neighbourhood in Nisanit is a "ghost town"; 15 families live in the 100 houses
built in Pe'at Sadeh and some of them plan to depart.
In the bitterly contested Kfar Darom settlement next to Deir Al Balah, at the
centre of the Strip, only 10 of the 30 families remain. In Morag, in the
southern part of Gush Katif, near Rafah, construction continues on a synagogue
for which there may not be enough male residents to constitute the necessary
quorum to hold prayer services. And in the "ideological settlement" of Neveh
Dekalim, the target of many a Palestinian mortar, families are registering
their children in schools in Ashkelon and Ashdod ahead of making the move back
across the "Green Line".
While this correspondent was driving along the road beside the southern bloc of
settlements recently, my companion, a Westerner working for a UN agency,
remarked that many of the settlers do not remain in their homes at night but
are evacuated in military convoys and return only during the day. They already
have alternative accommodation in "safe" Israel and are, literally, "employed"
to squat in daytime peril in exposed settlements.
Ben Simon says that the "situation is just as bad" in the settlements of the
Jordan Valley. He observes: "Considering the freeze the security situation has
already imposed on the settlements, it is hard not to lose your temper when you
hear all the nonsensical talk about the danger of a freeze on settlements. Not
only are the settlements `frozen', they have already lost many of their
inhabitants."
Hopefully, Ben Simon's article has been read by Western diplomats based in
Israel and neighbouring Arab capitals and by some of the 58 per cent of Jewish
Israelis who, when polled this week, favoured the settlement freeze proposed in
both the Mitchell report and the Jordanian-Egyptian peace plan. If this
happens, perhaps, just perhaps, influential people might wake up to and remark
on the fraud the Israeli government is still trying to perpetrate - in the name
of "natural growth" - on its own populace and the world.
