Settlements: The Spoiler

In the wake of King Hussein's announcement that he would not enter into negotiations with Israel on the Reagan Middle East peace proposals, one of the post-mortem questions debated in Washington is this:

To what extent did the continuing buildup of Jewish settlements on the West Bank influence the King in his decision?

Only the King himself really knows—but there are many observers who believe that the influence was considerable, and that the President himself is the last one in the capital who should be surprised.

For on September 1, 1982, when he presented his peace proposals, President Reagan not only urged the "immediate" adoption of a settlements freeze, but added that further settlement activity... "only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated."

There seems little doubt, in the view of these observers, that the confidence of King Hussein was diminished, as the President warned it would be, by the continuation of the settlements program—particularly since, seven months after the President asked for the freeze, the program is not only still in operation but has actually accelerated into high gear. If the President could not persuade the Israelis to accept a settlements freeze, how could he ever talk them into accepting that part of his proposals which call on them to evacuate the West Bank altogether?

Reagan's record of persuasion since last September was also clearly a major reason for PLO leader Yassir Arafat's reluctance to gamble on the Reagan plan by giving Hussein a mandate to negotiate on his behalf.

So just what has been happening in the West Bank since Reagan announced his plan? The short answer is that Israel has been doing nothing less than carrying out a "crash" program to colonize the territory as quickly as possible—and in the process has created a climate of ethnic tensions in which the harassment of Palestinians has risen sharply.

Visitors to the West Bank who have not been there since before September have trouble believing the changes they see. In some places the countryside is hardly recognizable; once-familiar scenes of Arab villages are blocked from view by the tile-roofed houses of new Jewish settlers; new highways cut across the landscape, with road signs in English and Hebrew; Israeli families in cars identifiable by their yellow license plates cruise the area on the lookout for housing bargains.

The house-hunters are no longer the traditional pioneering Zionists seeking to stake out a claim in Eretz Israel: they are office workers from Jerusalem looking for government-subsidized suburban housing that is cheaper and better than their city apartments; dual nationals from New York trying to help out Mr. Begin while making good investments for themselves; and businessmen looking for factory sites. One pair of Israeli film moguls have announced plans for a 10 million dollar studio in Jericho. Other business investors are taking up the offer of the Minister of Science and Development, Yuval Neeman, to set up sophisticated high-tech and research and development plants in a northern area of the West Bank that he hopes to turn into a sort of Israeli "silicon valley."

Tempting Subsidies

The Israeli government has not only been offering tempting subsidies to house-buyers and businessmen—the film moguls, for example, will receive 75 percent of their capital in government grants and low-interest loans—but is trying as never before to spread the word. In early April, Israel's Housing Ministry put on a public exhibition in a suburb of Tel Aviv which was the first ever to be devoted exclusively to the purchase of homes in the West Bank. More than 50,000 Israelis passed through in the first week, getting a pitch from more than 20 participating construction and finance companies. A few weeks earlier, in New York, more than 300 prominent Jewish Americans who showed up at a hotel to listen to speeches by Israeli officials on the outlook in the Middle East found a land-purchase promotion program going on as well—with tables stacked with hardsell brochures noting that prices in the West Bank "are rising rapidly," and with salesmen explaining how Jewish Americans could become absentee owners.

The Israeli authorities have made no secret of their motivations in settling the West Bank as quickly as possible. Deputy Minister of Agriculture Mikhail Dekel, in charge of settlement activities, has said publicly that he expects 100,000 Israelis to be living in the West Bank by 1985—compared to 30,000 today and only 3,500 in 1977—and that "this will make it politically impossible for any Israeli government to agree to return the area to Arab rule." Other Israeli observers have noted that a population of 100,000, which would include about 50,000 voters, could elect four Knesset members. Four are often enough to swing the balance of power in Israel's faction-ridden Parliament.

Separate and Unequal

Unlike in previous times, when settlements were put in relatively remote places, the government has been establishing them with increasing frequency in areas heavily populated with Arabs: in late March, approval was given to convert a military outpost overlooking Nablus, the West Bank's biggest city and the traditional center of Palestinian nationalism, into a large town for Jewish settlers. But the trend has nothing to do with any desire to integrate the Arabs and the Jewish settlers into one big happy family. Everything is separate—even if not equal. The Jewish settlements, with typical suburban comforts and sometimes even luxury, are set apart from the surrounding, generally poor, Arab villages by barbed wire and watchtowers. The settlers have their own post office, courts, police, transport system and water supply, and few of them have any need, much less a desire, to venture outside their enclaves. Typical of the settlers' approach are these words on a billboard along the so-called "Trans-Samaria" highway: "You can reach your home in 20 minutes without passing through an Arab town."

Settlers do, indeed, have good reason to fear going through Arab towns and villages, since Palestinian youths frequently hurl stones at passing Israeli cars. But the way the Palestinians see it, this is a natural reaction to the tightening grip of Israeli authority on their homeland—the encroaching settlements, the confiscations of land, the limitations on Arab construction, the intimidation of teachers, the expulsion of Palestinian nationalists, and the use of such measures as collective punishment, curfews, closing of schools, welding-shut of shops and deliberate harassment of political suspects to enforce the Israeli will. In addition, Palestinians believe that the Israeli government, despite some lip service to the contrary, averts its eyes from the terrorism carried out against Arabs by militant Jewish settlers. Seldom is anyone even charged for such an offense, and convictions are even rarer. Israeli police are still supposedly investigating the car bomb attack in 1980 that crippled two prominent West Bank mayors.

Since the Reagan plan was proposed last September, the atmosphere of the West Bank has been one of growing lawlessness, with the Palestinians as the principal victims. Within just the last few weeks, for example:

A bomb went off outside a mosque in Hebron during morning prayers, only minutes before hundreds of worshippers would have come thronging out into the street. Two men were injured, and a mosque window was shattered, with the stone wall around it blackened from the explosion.
A number of settlers, some of them shouting "death to all Arabs," fired through the windows of three Arab homes in a Hebron suburb. Bullets wounded one four-year-old girl who was watching television with her family.
A group of militant civilians and uniformed Israeli soldiers, equipped with heavy arms, were arrested minutes before launching an operation to establish a settlement at the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque complex, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
At a school in Yatta, seven settlers rounded up the children at gunpoint and shouted abuse at them for an hour in the school courtyard.
Hundreds of Palestinian school girls were hospitalized with mysterious symptoms which Palestinians attributed to deliberate poisoning, and the Israeli authorities to Palestinian incitement and "mass hysteria." The Israelis had no explanation for why a few Israeli soldiers and border guards came down with similar symptoms.
Anti-Carter demonstrations by Palestinians during the former President's recent visit to Jerusalem seemed to get the headlines in the West, but at the same time yeshiva (religious school) Jewish students went around the Old City smashing the windows of Arab-owned stores. Vandalism of this type—which includes breaking windshields of Arab cars, polluting or uprooting crops on Arab farms, and pulling down of electricity pylons in Arab villages—has become commonplace in the West Bank.