[Mb-civic] Expanding settlements, eroding trust Apr 12th 2005 From The Economist Global Agenda

Wed Apr 13 16:17:09 PDT 2005

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Expanding settlements, eroding trust
Apr 12th 2005
>From The Economist Global Agenda

At a meeting in Texas, George Bush has told Ariel Sharon that Israel must
stop expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank while withdrawing from
Gaza. The chiding comes at a time of high tensions between Israelis and
Palestinians‹and within Israel itself

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GEORGE BUSH extended his highest honour to Ariel Sharon on Monday April
11th, by having the Israeli prime minister come to talk at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas. The meeting was cordial‹though the two men are rumoured not
to like each other, Mr Bush said he looked forward to showing Mr Sharon
around the ranch, and Mr Sharon invited the president to see his own farm in
Israel. But the talks come at a time of high tension.

Israelis and Palestinians are once again bristling at one another, despite a
notional ceasefire. On Saturday, Israeli troops killed three Palestinian
teenagers (who were retrieving a lost football or smuggling weapons,
depending on the account). In retaliation, Palestinians lobbed rockets at
Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip and into Israel proper. Mr Sharon will
no doubt have told Mr Bush that if Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president,
cannot or will not crack down on militants, Israel would be forced to do so.

Concerned that the moves towards peace since the death of Yasser Arafat
might come to nothing, Mr Bush seems eager to project the image of an honest
broker. He chided Mr Sharon about the growth of Israeli settlements in the
Palestinian territories, adding that Israel should do nothing that
contravenes the internationally backed but stalled ³road map² peace plan. Mr
Sharon is planning to remove (forcibly if necessary) all Israeli settlements
from the Gaza strip. But he seems to be tightening Israel¹s hold on the West
Bank.

Though Mr Sharon is evacuating four West Bank settlements, other settlements
in the territory are continuing to grow, and the path of Israel¹s security
barrier leaves large chunks of Palestinian land on the Israeli side (see
article). By enraging Palestinians, this weakens Mr Abbas, who needs to show
concrete Palestinian gains if he is to have the authority to crack down on
militants, as Messrs Bush and Sharon want him to do. So Mr Bush stressed
Israel¹s ³need to work with the Palestinian leadership to improve the daily
lives of Palestinians².

Mr Sharon promised only to remove ³unauthorised outposts². These are often
set up without government permission by small groups of ideological Zionists
on hilltops. But it is the growth of authorised settlements, especially in
the areas around East Jerusalem thickly populated with Palestinians, that
are troubling Mr Bush. The road map foresees East Jerusalem as the capital
of any future Palestinian state. But the Israeli government has announced
plans to expand Maale Adumim, a Jewish settlement nearby, and has proposed
routing the security barrier around it, which would virtually cut East
Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank. Last year, Mr Bush delighted
Mr Sharon and startled the Palestinians by saying that bits of the West Bank
would probably have to become part of Israel in any final deal. But now he
is telling the Israeli leader that those bits must not grow any bigger.

Enemies without and within

The difficulty for Mr Sharon is that he, like Mr Abbas, is constrained by
the extremists among his people. Right-wing and religious Israelis, who
insist that none of Gaza or the West Bank be surrendered, rallied on Sunday
at the symbolic heart of the conflict: the hill in Jerusalem that Jews
revere as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. Israeli
authorities tried to stop the rally, saying they would ban both Jewish and
Muslim males under 40 from visiting the site. But a few dozen Jews arrived
anyway, and clashed with Palestinians who came to ³defend² the al-Aqsa
mosque located on the site.

A majority of Israelis support Mr Sharon¹s Gaza pullout plan. But the
minority opposed to it are a determined bunch: on Tuesday, protesters
chained shut 167 schools in and around Tel Aviv as part of a campaign to
disrupt daily life in the run-up to the pullout later this year. And Mr
Sharon has had to browbeat his right-wing Likud party to pass the withdrawal
plan through various legislative hurdles, knowing all the while that
Binyamin Netanyahu, the finance minister who wants his job, will rarely miss
an opportunity to gain ground from him on the right. (On Monday, Mr
Netanyahu threatened the Palestinians publicly, saying of Mr Abbas¹s failure
to crack down on militants: ³If he doesn¹t, then we will.²) Meanwhile, Mr
Sharon must also court the other parties in the Knesset, Israel¹s
parliament, as Likud runs a minority government with just 40 of the 120
seats. Thus every stage of the legal process has been fraught with
uncertainty.

Of course at any stage, violence from the Palestinians could bring peace
moves to a halt. But Mr Sharon sees a threat closer to home. He made
headlines by telling America¹s NBC News that the atmosphere in Israel ³looks
like on the eve of a civil war². Israeli security forces are taking
seriously the threats made on his life‹on Tuesday, they placed a leading
ultranationalist under house arrest, on the grounds that he might pose a
security risk‹and Mr Sharon said in that same interview: ³All my life I was
defending the life of Jews. Now, for the first time, security steps are
taken to protect me from Jews.² Yet he was optimistic about the
Palestinians, saying that while Arafat would never have been able to achieve
peace, a settlement may now be possible. Taken together, the two statements
suggest that with Mr Sharon¹s old foe now dead, the prime minister thinks
his most formidable enemies may be among his fellow Jews.