http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/show_katava.asp?id=10834&mador=4&datee=12/21/97
Ha'aretz, December 21, 1997
The lie of security settlements
By Nadav Shragai
There is little difference between the
distinction that late Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin made between political settlements and
security settlements, and the distinction that
Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai is making
between the national interests map and the
security interests map.Rabin in his day, and
Mordechai today, are essentially saying that
there are in fact security interests which
must not be touched, and there are national
interests, such as settlement, and perhaps
water, which may be negotiated.
In essence, this is a debate between the
"now-ist" perception represented in the
extreme by Peace Now, which grants little
weight to immutable values on the one hand,
and those who maintain that there are values
that supersede changing needs and that
security must protect those values, on the
other.
Security needs are changing needs. Rabin at
one time believed it unthinkable to leave the
Golan. But when he concluded that security
conditions had changed or would change in the
future, he agreed in principle to hand the
Golan Heights in their entirety over to the
Syrians. Moshe Dayan underwent a similar
metamorphosis concerning Sharm el Sheikh.
Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Yossi
Beilin MK (Labor) changed their positions
about the Jordan Valley.
Mordechai did not need to undergo any
transformation at all. From the start, he was
never considered a member of the Land of
Israel Faithful camp, and he has not become
one today. Politically, Mordechai is a
"now-ist." His refusal to accede to requests
by Jewish settlement leaders who met with him
last week to create a synthesis between the
security interests map and the national
interests map by turning them into one map, is
characteristic of someone who, before the
elections, considered joining the Labor party,
but in the ended chose Likud.
Mordechai, with his two maps, provides
compelling proof that the differences between
the Netanyahu government and that of his
predecessors on the Palestinian issue are
negligible. From an emotional point of view,
the basic attitudes of Likud and Labor have
indeed not changed. Peres and Beilin believed
in a New Middle East, in a peace that would
bring security, and in coexistence with the
Palestinians.
Netanyahu still scoffs at the devotees of the
New Middle East, talks of security that will
bring peace (in that order) and find it very
difficult to become convinced of the sincerity
of the Palestinians. But Netanyahu's ideology
begins and ends here, at the basic point of
departure.
In actual fact, he has taken on the role of
the pragmatist whose policies are dictated
mostly by pressures. Mordechai's security
interests map, which Netanyahu adopted last
week, is the same map (with slight changes)
that Uzi Dayan, as head of the planning
division of the IDF general staff, prepared in
1993 for the Rabin government. The dozens of
settlements left out of that map are more or
less the same ones left out of Israeli
sovereign territory in Beilin's permanent
settlement map.
The fact that Mordechai is differentiating
between the two maps confuses the issue. There
are no "security" settlements and
"non-security" settlements. Settlements never
provided security, not even the settlements
located within the security interests map.
Ma'aleh Adumim, located within the boundaries
of the security interests map, and Kiryat Arba
and Ofrah located outside the security zone
have the same security value - zero.
Settlements in Samaria, just like settlements
in the Galilee, can stop neither tanks nor
missiles. Settlements were established so that
tanks and missiles would protect them.
Settlement in the entire Land of Israel,
whether in Elon Moreh, the Jordan Valley, the
Golan, Jerusalem, the Galilee or the Negev has
always been political (or national, as
Mordechai puts it), but not a matter of
security. Security and peace have always been
important national values. But they have been
merely the tools to attain the main goal: the
resettlement of the Jewish people in the Land
of Israel.
The distinction between political and security
settlements initially made by Rabin, and the
distinction between the map of security
interests and that of national interests drawn
by Mordechai undermines the consensual basis
of the debate over Israel's borders.
It is not surprising that the Likud, too, has
been drawn into it. The Likud long ago swept
its ideological principles under the carpet
concerning the right of the Jewish people to
all of the land of Israel.
Likud ministers and spokespeople have
repeatedly used the security argument as an
excuse for continuing to hold on to Judea and
Samaria. They have turned security, once a
means, into an almost absolute value, while
the true value - the national one which was
once their banner - has been obscured ever
since it stopped bringing in votes.
At first this was a tactical move, but with
time the ideology dimmed and the tactic became
the essence. That is how a man like Mordechai,
who with all due respect to his illustrious
military past has only the weakest of
ideological roots in the Likud, could attain
such a senior position.
It all starts and ends with security, as if
security is not something that can be had in
other parts of the world. Anyone who treats
his flag in this fashion will end up by
folding it up, and that is exactly what has
happened in the Likud. The distinction between
a more insignificant national value and a
paramount security value comes out of the
Beilin-Peres school of thought, and the
differences between them and Netanyahu are
becoming increasingly blurred
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