Why Israeli Settlements Will Never Be a Success Story - Opinion
At a public event I recently attended, representatives of several organizations working on proposals to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took the stage one after another to persuade the audience to support their respective plans. They answered questions about different aspects of their proposals and made their case to the audience, which then voted for its preferred plan.
The speakers tried to emphasize the differences between the plans, to make things more interesting, but struggled to do so. Although the proposals all had different names, they were, in essence, variations of the same idea: a two-state solution. The reason is simple: there is no other realistic solution.
In a recent article, Haaretz's Matan Golan surveyed in detail the progress of the settlement enterprise under the auspices of the ruling coalition ("103 Nails on the Map"; June 30). The figures are daunting. The government has approved the establishment of more than 100 new settlements, a move that will nearly double their total number. And that doesn't include the hundreds of outposts and farms currently being regularized.
The new settlements are being established in strategic locations with the aim of making a Palestinian state impossible. It is therefore easy to understand the widespread view that process is irreversible. With the backing of the current coalition, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is moving ahead with his efforts to bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. At the same time, settlers subject Palestinians in the West Bank to daily abuse while continuing to establish new communities.
Taken together, these developments may create the impression that the settlers have reached an unprecedented position of power and, in practice, already won the battle. However, although their influence in the government is indeed unprecedented, their strategy reveals their weakness.
In the early 1990s, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a leading figure in the settlement project, wrote: "We settled on the hilltops, but we didn't succeed in settling in Israelis' hearts." Already then, the movement's leaders understood that they had failed to persuade the majority of the Israeli public of the settlement project's importance, whether on the grounds of religious redemption or national security.
More than a decade later, Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the public response to it confirmed to the settlers that little has changed. Israelis, by and large, did not see the disengagement as the catastrophe that settlers thought it to be. It also taught the movement another lesson: that the establishment of settlements is a reversible process, and that all it takes is a single government decision for them to be evacuated.
Since then, the settlers have acted on that lesson. Recognizing that their physical presence alone could not prevent evacuation, and that Israelis were not flocking to the hilltops en masse, the movement shifted the focus to creation of hegemony. It sought influence in government ministries, the military, and the media, while accumulating political power that far exceeds their proportion in the population, partly through its influence within Likud's Central Committee.
Nor did the attempt to "settle in the people's hearts" cease. In fact, that effort was even accelerated through the current government's broad support for the so-called garin torani( "Torah nucleus") groups, whose aim is to settle among and change the character of the secular population in the country.
Despite all this, the settlement project has been far less successful than it might appear. Recently, I joined a protective presence group in the Jordan Valley which seeks to deter and document settler violence and military harassment. During our long drive through the West Bank, we were accompanied – along with Israeli flags that waved at almost every intersection – by signs trying to attract new families to the settlements. This was the sight of a housing market in which supply exceeds demand.
Shaul Arieli, a retired Israel Defense Forces officer who became a leading expert on the Israeli-Palestinian political process, has shown that the large number of settlements does not reflect the actual number of settlers. In recent years, many settlements have experienced negative migration.
Since 2010, the number of Israelis in the West Bank has risen from about 300,000 to around 500,000, but that growth is due almost entirely to natural population increase. Overall, settlers constitute some 15 percent of all West Bank inhabitants, and approximately 80 percent of them live in the large settlement blocs. These blocks are expected to remain in Israel's hands within the framework of a two-state solution with land swaps, as has been discussed in past negotiations. The current "fully right-wing government" may have facilitated the establishment of new settlements and outposts; but the really hard part, it turns out, is finding people who actually want to live there.
This failure has given rise to a new strategy: seizing control of as large an area as possible with as few people as possible. How can that be achieved? By means of violence.
The so-called farms that have sprouted up in the West Bank are sometimes described as settlements. In reality, a typical farm is an outpost inhabited by one family and a few young people who arrive on a rotating basis to help them out. They erect their makeshift homes close to Palestinian communities not because of a lack of space in the territories – there's lots of it – but with the aim of expelling a particular population from its land. And in many cases they succeed. Dozens of Palestinian communities have been forced out of their homes in the past three years, and those who remain suffer from daily abuse.
The violence takes multiple forms: damage to the water and electricity infrastructures, sheep rustling, physical attacks, the torching of homes and vehicles and even murder. Hardly a day goes by in which inhabitants of farming outposts don't disrupt local Palestinians' everyday lives in some way. When the latter try to defend themselves or their property, it's often they who are arrested. The pressure wielded against them continues unabated, until they leave.
Among proponents of the settlement project, the farms are portrayed as a major success. Here's what journalist Amichai Attali wrote on Ynet, the website of the mass-circulation newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in March: "You have to understand what a wild revolution is taking place here. All the settlements, the cities and the communities across Judea and Samaria, the whole settlement enterprise that you've been hearing about for almost 60 years, sits on an area of 230,000 dunams of land [57,500 acres]. Today there are 130 farms in J&S, all of which together cover an additional area of more than a million dunams. It beggars belief. A few hundred farmers, who with flocks of sheep are holding a vast area."
However, these farms and other isolated settlements never were, and never will be, a success story, because they have no viable independent existence. Their very existence requires an ever-increasing influx of state resources to maintain them economically and provide security, which is precisely why everything that has been built there is reversible. To halt the whole project, all that's needed is to deprive them of their "oxygen." How many of their residents will continue to do what they're doing if the army and the police stop protecting them? If the state stops building roads for them? Stops arming them?
The two-state solution has been eulogized many times, and not by chance. The right's biggest PR campaign is intended to persuade us that it's impossible to live here in peace, and that there's no other alternative but to fight a forever war against the Palestinians. In Matan Golan's article, researcher Arieli is quoted as saying, "The feeling that a political solution is no longer realistic is a cognitive victory for the settlers over the Israeli public."
But the reality on the ground tells a different story: The settlers have not succeeded in creating a reality that will prevent establishment of a Palestinian state, and the fact that they are resorting to strategies marked by ever-more intense violence is a testament to that failure.
Shani Cohen is a faculty member at the Hebrew University's economics department and a research fellow at Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy.