Elliot Abrams On "The Settlement Obsession"

In a book review, Elliot Abrams writes about The Settlement Obsession: Both Israel and the United States Miss the Obstacles to Peace.

To summarize some of the points he makes in this long article, Abrams begins with a point that is well established: Obama's mistake in being the first to make the freezing of Israeli settlements a precondition to peace talks:

On taking office in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama put Israeli settlements at the center of U.S. policy in the Middle East. In Washington's view, a complete construction freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem became not only desirable but also a prerequisite to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Previous U.S. administrations of both parties had never taken such a stance, and in fact, there had been years of negotiations (not least at Camp David in 2000 and after the Annapolis meeting in 2007) while Israeli settlement activity continued. But the Obama administration stuck to its demand, and when Israel refused to freeze construction, 2009 and much of 2010 went by without negotiations. This only changed in November 2010, when the White House abandoned the entire approach and began to search for a new one.


This single-minded focus on a construction freeze was clearly a mistake in the sense that it failed: the Israeli government did not agree to a freeze in East Jerusalem. Nor could any earlier Israeli governments have accepted such a demand, even if they, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had been open to partial or time-limited freezes in the West Bank. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed the situation well when he said in April 2011, "I was opposed to the prolonged effort on the settlements in a public way because I never thought it would work and, in fact, we have wasted a year and a half on something that for a number of reasons was not achievable." What is more, the Obama administration's demand had the effect of cornering Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who could not ask for less than Washington; if the U.S. president thought a total freeze was a prerequisite to negotiations, Abbas would have to think so, too. As a weary Abbas told Newsweek in April, the Obama administration led him up a tree and then "removed the ladder."

But the tactic also was a mistake in a deeper sense: current construction in the settlements is not a critical issue, and the expansion of construction into additional lands has been minimal. At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap. So it is clear that settlement expansion has not significantly eaten away at the territory of an eventual Palestinian state. The far more serious issues are wholly outside the short-term question of a freeze: namely, the future of the settlements if and when a Palestinian state is created, their impact on the maneuvering that will advance or impede that objective, and the conflict between the settlers' ideology and that of mainstream Zionism.

But this is a book review of Gil Taub's The Settlers: And the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism. However, before discussing The Settlers, Abrams takes a look another book: Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies 2000-2010, by the group Breaking the Silence.

Abrams writes:

In this book, Breaking the Silence advances two conclusions. The first relates to the morals of Israel's army and, by extension, Israel itself: "Soldiers who serve in the Territories witness and participate in military actions which change them immensely," the organization explains. "Cases of abuse towards Palestinians, looting, and destruction of property have been the norm for years, but are still explained as extreme and unique cases. Our testimonies portray a different, and much grimmer picture in which deterioration of moral standards finds expression in the character of orders and the rules of engagement, and are justified in the name of Israel's security." The second conclusion is that the presence of Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers in the West Bank is laying waste to the area, reducing it to misery.

The problem, however, is that Breaking The Silence appears to have written their book in a time warp:

Some of the testimonies are deeply affecting, and there is no doubt that occupation duty brings out the worst in some soldiers: violence, bullying, vandalism, and theft. Official accounts of the U.S. occupation of Germany after World War II, for example, make clear that there is no such thing as an immaculate occupation. But in this book, Breaking the Silence appears less interested in the current impact of the settlements and the backdrop to the IDF's actions in the West Bank than in advancing particular ideological and political points. For one thing, why produce a volume in 2010 that has so many testimonies about Gaza, from which all Israeli forces withdrew in the summer of 2005? Why include so many interviews from 2000-2002, the years when the second intifada was at its height, rather than interviews from more recent years? In the section on the methods the IDF uses to prevent terrorism, for example, there are 67 interviews, but only five are from 2008 or later; similarly, a section on how the IDF carries out a "policy of control, dispossession, and annexation of territory" contains 44 interviews, of which just six are from 2007 or later.[emphasis added]

A logical inference from this data would be that the IDF's conduct is improving, but Breaking the Silence does not discuss this possibility. Nor does it discuss what the IDF was attempting between 2000 and 2002, namely, trying to stop terrorist acts that were maiming and killing thousands of Israelis. There is just one sentence about terrorism in this entire volume, acknowledging that "it is true that the Israeli security apparatus has had to deal with concrete threats in the past decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens."

Moreover, the descriptions of life in the West Bank presented here are inaccurate or at best outdated. A soldier interviewed in the book describes the West Bank city of Nablus as "sealed hermetically." But just last November, The New York Times described Nablus as follows: "The city is open to visitors from all over the West Bank, as well as to Arabs from Israel. In the streets, new cars, including sport utility vehicles, point to growing prosperity." Put simply, the book's description of a West Bank living in deliberately inflicted misery does not comport with reality.

...Denying such progress, ignoring the withdrawal from Gaza, and relying on interviews from a decade ago suggest that Breaking the Silence is pursuing its own political goals in Occupation of the Territories rather than offering a fair and current documentary account of the occupation. It should come as no surprise, then, that the group is highly controversial in Israel. Amos Harel, a veteran journalist at Haaretz, is typical of the critics, writing that Breaking the Silence "has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classed as a 'human rights organization.'"

Abrams does, however, concede one point to Breaking The Silence:

Breaking the Silence gets closer to the truth in suggesting that the occupation has more and more become the only prism through which Palestinians see Israelis. With the flow of businesspeople and workers into Israel drastically reduced, few Palestinians now deal with Israelis as employers or have a chance to experience normal life in Israel. Settlers and soldiers are the only Israelis they see, and Israelis no longer deal daily with West Bank Palestinians working in construction or other sectors in Israel. This separation has had a predictably dire impact on relations between Israelis and Palestinians and on the way they see each other, but it is not the product of the occupation per se, nor of the settlements. It is the result of terrorism and the steps taken by Israel to prevent it. The IDF will stay in the West Bank even after the settlers withdraw, because the task of protecting Israel from terrorism launched from the West Bank will remain: the army was there first and in all probability will be there last.

In the context of the ideological agenda of Breaking The Silence, Abrams writes about Taub's book The Settlers, which he describes as "a profound and fascinating account of the practical and ideological challenges posed by the settler movement." Taub offers a critical eye of the historical goal of the settlements and the increasing divisions they have caused within Israeli society as the focus in Israel turned from a narrow view of land as a source of security to its use to negotiate peace.

So what were the conditions after 1967 when there were no settlers to protect from terrorists and the aim was just to control the land conquered during the 1967 war?

In the 20 years before the first intifada started in 1987, the line between Israel and the West Bank was an open border. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crossed it each day to work in Israel. Even after the first intifada, a casino opened in Jericho in 1998 to attract Israeli -- both Arab and Jewish -- gamblers, and several thousand typically showed up each weekend, until the second intifada began in 2000. The most common estimate is that just prior to the outbreak of the second intifada, 115,000 Palestinians -- one-fourth of the Palestinian work force -- traveled to Israel each day for work.

And what does the future hold in store?

Taub is more concerned about how this story will end within Israel than about the future of the settlements after Israel withdraws from them. He believes the religious settlers are divided now, realize they will lose the battle in the end, and are bitter at and frustrated with the state that would crush their work and remove them from their homes. Taub hopes to see the settlers persuaded rather than defeated, to see settler leaders and rabbis come forward to endorse mamlachtiyut (a word that comes from mamlacha, Hebrew for "state"), which can be translated as "statism" but is better rendered as "seeing statehood and sovereignty as high civic values." Taub wants them to understand that "the mitzvah [commandment] to settle the land is important, and the right of Jews to the whole land is eternal, but the polity -- the Jewish democratic state -- is still the greatest achievement of the Jews in our time, politically and religiously, and must take precedence above all considerations."

Abrams also sees the relinquishment of much of the settlements as the inevitable key to peace, once a final-status agreement is reached:

In the end, Israel will withdraw from most of the West Bank and remain only in the major blocs where hundreds of thousands of Israelis now live. Israelis will live in a democratic state where Jews are the majority, and Palestinians will live in a state -- democratic, one hopes -- with an Arab Muslim majority. The remaining questions are how quickly or slowly that end will be reached and how to get there with minimal violence. Despite the view adopted by the Obama administration that all settlements are illegitimate and that construction activity in the settlements is the main obstacle to a peace deal, the facts are otherwise. The contours of a territorial compromise are visible; the settlements beyond Israel's security barrier obviously have no future. Far more difficult complications exist as to Jerusalem, the status of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and workable security arrangements -- all problems that exist independently of the settlements and would be murderously complex even if no single settlement had ever been built.

However:

In the absence of a final-status agreement, Israel can and should continue the process begun when it removed the settlements from Gaza and built the West Bank security fence. The Israeli government should offer settlers beyond that fence compensation (as it did the settlers in Gaza) to assist them in moving west; it should simultaneously assist efforts to build a decent and successful Palestinian state in every way possible.

Read the whole thing.

The issue of the settlements is much more intricate than the Obama administration appreciates, which is why the simplistic expectation that freezing those settlements will be a key to successful negotiations has been responsible, in part, for the current stalemate. But according to Abrams, that does not mean that the current settlements are forever.


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