The Settlement Movement Owes Its Success in Expelling West Bank Communities to the Oslo Accords
"What is the hardest for you, at your work as a reporter?" two Jewish Dutch acquaintances asked me more than a decade ago. Their occupational fields – history research and documentary films – led them to focus on the Holocaust, which is part of our shared personal biographies.
Over the years, I got the impression that they distanced themselves from the news on Israel, so their question came as a surprise. They said they weren't asking about the technical difficulties or the very issue of the Israeli hostile domination over another people. But I didn't need any clarification to answer them: "Planning is the hardest part of my work." They didn't need any further explanation. Their own field of research has taught them that planning is a dangerous and scary skill when exercised by a society whose national project was ethnic purity and territorial expansion.
The Israeli Jews who live and breathe the familiar mess – "balagan" in Hebrew – that is Israel, find it difficult to attribute planning skills to their state.
But every 70-year-old Israeli city, 30-year-old upscale suburb, mall and highway interchange owe their existence to calculated legislation since 1948 – to the far-sightedness of the knights of the Zionist Labor movement. The saccharine glaze of the "peace process" and the masculinist-nationalist glaze of "security" have hidden and continue to hide the real Deep State, which excels at robbing land from Palestinians and appropriating it for Jews.
Last week, the security cabinet approved more measures of ethnic purity and land grab in the West Bank that comply with the demands made by the settler parties and lobbies. The settlers worked tirelessly to turn their wish list into actual policy. Their leaders faked rage tantrums against the Civil Administration – which, nevertheless, faithfully implemented the government's policy of planning and building for Jews while preventing Palestinians from doing the same, and also restricting their access to water – while at the same time working closely with it. Like putting the cat in charge of the cream, settlers played key roles in the Civil Administration long before one of their own was appointed the civilian deputy to its military commander.
Over the past decade, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee's subcommittee on Judea and Samaria affairs has been an important arena for exerting pressure and maintaining cooperation with civil administration, especially when the subcommittee was headed by settler Moti Yogev.
Civil Administration officials and officials of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories would be summoned to its hearings as if they were defendants in a field trial. Members of the right-wing NGO Regavim for the protection of the Nation's Land, of which Bezalel Smotrich was among the founders, and other settlers played the role of the prosecution. Like a kangaroo court, the conclusions were predetermined – more demolition orders against the Palestinians and more opportunities for settlement construction and expansion.
Since the 1990s, this invisible hand has been establishing outposts whose inhabitants would immediately unleash violence against Palestinian farmers and shepherds. In the 2000s in particular, the army rushed to surrender to the phenomenon of Jewish attacks and blocked Palestinians from accessing their springs and lands, where strictly kosher vineyards began to spring up.
The number of words and promises about dismantling the outposts was rivaled only by the number of complaints about settler attacks that the police refused to investigate due to a lack of public interest or the absence of suspects. Then, large herds of sheep and their shepherds (adults and children, on horses, all-terrain vehicles, donkeys and on foot) started to be deployed as particularly effective weapons in deterring Palestinian shepherds. The entire violent repertoire of beatings, arson, gunfire and invasions is available online to anyone who doesn't bury their heads in the sand.
The steady drip grew into a flood and the expulsion of some 70 Palestinian communities. The consistent pattern of most attacks, their systematic execution and the large amounts of money each herding ranch requires indicate that behind the scenes, the planning mechanisms and the financing – in the local settlement councils, in ministries and in the Knesset – were working in wonderful harmony.
The settlement movement of the religious and the nationalist ultra-Orthodox right owes its success in expelling communities from Area C to the planning skills manifested in the Oslo Accords. The right regarded them as an act of betrayal, while dismissing the shrewdness of the Labor Party's negotiators.
The Labor Party's proven experience in land theft, under some kind of seemingly respectable guise, like the sly Absentee Property Law and the even more sly definition "present absentees," also yielded the artificial islands of Area A and Area B, floating in an ocean of Area C. This temporary division of the West Bank, made by the Oslo accords as a guideline for the gradual military deployment, was meant to expire by 1999 – when full powers and authorities would have been returned to the Palestinians in C as well.
The temporary has become eternal. It was possible to understand the logic behind the gradual and conditional transfer of police and security powers from the Israeli military to the PA. But what is the connection between these and the right and powers to plan, to develop, to construct, to expand agricultural areas and collect the fees on real estate transactions? Why did Yitzhak Rabin insist on holding on to them in Area C?
These powers could have been given to the Palestinians immediately, while maintaining the security of the settlers. Connecting communities to the water grid, developing and implementing master plans, and building schools, clinics and tourism sites – how could these have harmed the security of Israelis?
The answer is that they couldn't have. They would have only thwarted new settlement plans, which Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak knew all too well. Their procrastination in the implementation of the interim agreement was no accident. Their large constituency, who did see the occupation as a problem and supported peace, preferred to forget the legacy of their camp, which had invented lies and false pretexts for the sake of acquiring more land with as few Palestinians as possible. The peace camp left the planning and implementation to the settlers.