http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=56854&mador=4
Sunday, September 26, 1999
Pursuing Their Agenda
By Gideon Levy
If you want to see Israeli injustice, if you want
confirmation of the fact that on a host of subjects
there is no difference between the Likud and the
Labor Party, and if you want a concrete
manifestation of the fact that Labor has forgotten
nothing and learned nothing - then consider the way
Ehud Barak's new "government of change" is dealing
with the illegal hilltop outposts established by
the settlers in the territories.Again we confront
the settlers' caprices and their obsessions. To
their credit, it should be said they are continuing
to pursue their agenda even though they are by now
isolated within Israeli society, which is becoming
increasingly indifferent to their fate and future.
But why complain to them: From the start, their
declared goal was to thwart any possibility of
achieving a peace settlement with the Palestinians,
and they have not swerved from that objective.
Hilltop outposts or settlements, mobile homes or
new neighborhoods - the goal is clear and success
is guaranteed. The resolution of the tangled
historical conflict with the Palestinians would be
a far simpler matter if the bone of the settlements
was not stuck in the throat of everyone involved:
It can't be swallowed and it can't be spit out.
Only when you visit the West Bank and see how a
Jewish settlement strangles a Palestinian village
can you understand the scale of the disaster that
the settlers have visited on both nations.
Intoxicated with success and lusting for land, the
settlers could never be satiated. Now we have the
hilltop outposts, their "appropriate Jewish
response" to the Wye accords that were signed by a
right-wing government that they helped bring to
power. Another outpost and another hilltop,
crushing another possibility of achieving a fair
settlement. Now it turns out that when some of them
calculated that Ehud Barak was to be preferred over
Benjamin Netanyahu in last May's elections, they
knew exactly what they were doing: Barak does not
dare touch what they have wrought.
Since 1996 they have set up no fewer than 42 new
hilltop outposts (according to the figures of Peace
Now). Such an outpost might take the form of a lone
trailer home on an isolated hilltop where one armed
settler terrorizes anyone who tries to infringe on
his turf, or it might be a group of houses at the
edge of an existing settlement - but in every case
it spells danger for all outsiders.
The overwhelming majority of these outposts were
established illegally. So what? The Defense
Ministry has already "laundered" - legitimized -
most of them. This story, then, is also another
chapter in the annals of Israeli injustice. It's
not that the Israeli authorities are incapable of
reacting swiftly when someone breaks the law: the
house of Yusuf Atrash and his 10 children was
demolished three times; the house of Ata Jaaber was
demolished twice; and similar justice was meted out
to the family of Hajj Yusuf with its 16 children,
to the tent camp of the Al Kabash family which was
home to 30 souls, to the hut of the Al Halsa
family, to the extra story added to his home by the
aged Ahmed Hamadan, and to the houses of young
couples from the Abu Yaakub family at Kafl Kharth
and of the Shwamareh family at Anata. The
bulldozers of the Civil Administration rolled in at
dawn, determined to uphold the law, which they did
by crushing and destroying everything in their path
and leaving thousands of people homeless, and
sowing ever more seeds of burning hate.
Unlike the settlers, most of these Palestinians
have no place to live apart from the house they
built on their private land; unlike the settlers,
they have no prospect of obtaining a building
permit or of their houses being legitimized after
the fact; unlike the settlers, they did not build
their homes as a defiant demonstration but in order
to solve serious housing distress; unlike the
settlers, they did not intend to dispossess anyone
of their land; and, in stark contrast to the
settlers, Israel did not "launder" their houses, it
razed them to the ground.
Three months have gone by since the new
Labor-Meretz government was installed, yet not one
discussion has been held about the hilltop
settlements. Evacuating them is out of the question
at this time. "The prime minister has no interest
in another confrontation with the settlers on an
issue which is not perceived as acute at this
time," sources in the defense establishment and at
the political level explain (as Amos Harel reported
in Ha'aretz). Not an acute issue? Is there any
issue that is more acute? Recall that Moshe Dayan,
Yigal Allon, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon
Peres and Israel Galili - the true forefathers of
the settlers - also found no acute need to
dismantle the illegal settlements that popped up in
the dark of night in their time. The rest is
blood-drenched history.
On the Golan Heights ministers of the Barak
government are dedicating new neighborhoods, and
the prime minister, who has asked the members of
his cabinet not to make political statements, has
not seen fit to reprimand ministers who are
displaying defiance in the form of actions and not
only words. In the West Bank, 42 new settlements
remain intact. And with these unclean hands the
government is about to enter into the negotiations
on the permanent settlement. Just because the
Palestinians are not protesting vigorously against
the unilateral facts they are being confronted with
is no reason not to remove these festering new
sores: after all, not only the Palestinians will be
affected by the land-grabs.
The hilltop outposts will quickly become permanent
facts, exactly as the settlers wish: Mitzpeh Hagit
and Givat Hadagan will remain where they are for
all time, exactly like their predecessors, which
also had identical beginnings. Then will come the
fashionable talk by broad Israeli circles about
recognizing the Palestinians' right to a state, but
none of the speakers will take an interest in
where, exactly, that state will be located -
between Gidonim and Givat Olam? Or perhaps between
Conflagration Estate and the Hill of Covetousness
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