Reaping the Whirlwind: The Price of Israeli Settlements

By Rachelle Marshall

The Israeli settlers who threaten civil war if the Rabin government gives up an inch of occupied territory point to God's covenant with the Jews in the Old Testament to justify Israel's claim to the land. But far more relevant to their disruptive presence on the West Bank is the prophet Hosea's warning: "They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind." Israel may have to pay with continuing bloodshed for the more than 180 Jewish settlements that now spread over territory once inhabited almost exclusively by Palestinians.

The right-wing settlers' opposition to the interim agreement between Israel and the PLO appears to have little popular support. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has expressed only contempt for the protesters, calling them "ridiculous." The roadblocks and other demonstrations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv organized last summer by the settler movement Zu Arzenu ("This is Our Land") have aroused more annoyance than sympathy among Israelis. Nevertheless, pressure from the settlers undoubtedly has stiffened Israel's resistance to removing its troops from Hebron, where they guard a cluster of 400 ultra-religious Jews. Because PLO negotiators insisted that Israel must withdraw its troops from all major Arab towns before they would sign an agreement, the issue became a major obstacle to what Labor party officials call the "peace process."

Despite Rabin's professed opposition to their methods, the right-wing protesters may actually be serving the prime minister's purposes. The Oslo accords call for Israel and the Palestinians to reach agreement within three years on how authority over the occupied territories is to be apportioned. The Zu Arzenu insists that all publicly owned land that has been used by generations of Palestinians for common purposes such as agriculture and grazing remain permanently in Israel's hands. Rabin is less noisily pursuing the same goal. On the same day Israeli television showed the army removing Jewish squatters from the hilltop they had seized near one West Bank village, the government declared 920 acres of land belonging to another village, Beit Fajjer, to be state land— the first step toward confiscating it. The area Israel will take over contains stone quarries that have been the villagers' chief source of income for as long as anyone can remember, A few weeks earlier the government closed off 2,500 acres of farm and grazing land belonging to three villages near Hebron to provide a firing range for the army.

Israel also has seized thousands of acres of privately owned Arab land for "security purposes." A U.N. delegation that visited the West Bank and Gaza last June reported that Israel had confiscated over 17,500 acres since the signing of the Oslo agreement, and now controls about 1,500,000 acres or 73 percent of the occupied territories. The U.N. report warned of mounting tension between Israel and Palestinians because of the continuing confiscations.

The Zu Arzenu's goal is not only to expand the presence of Jews on the West Bank but also to preserve existing settlements. The wave of demonstrations this summer that included the creation of more than 30 "new settlements" was meant as a warning to the Israeli government that any attempt to reduce the number of settlements on the West Bank would be fiercely resisted. The Jewish residents of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, have vowed to shoot Israeli soldiers who try to force them to leave, and Knesset member Rehavam Ze'evi of the Molodet party has suggested that Zu Arzenu members fire back at police who try to break up their demonstrations. Professor Ehud Sprinzak of Hebrew University told the audience at a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco last September that even political assassination has become a possibility, because ultra-religious Jews regard Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as traitors and consider any talk of giving back part of the West Bank to be "a rebellion against God."

Israeli leaders with expansionist ambitions foresaw just such an outcome when they began building Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory captured in the l967 war. Although the Fourth Geneva Convention states that the "Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies," the Labor government immediately asserted Israeli ownership of large areas of the West Bank, eventually taking over about 40,000 acres before it was voted out of office in 1977. Government officials claimed at the time that settling Jews in the newly acquired territory was a "security measure," but many Israelis condemned the confiscations as unjust and a source of future problems. Historian Amos Elon called what the government was doing "vile," and an official of the left-wing Mapam party wrote in Ma'ariv that the land expropriation was "a dishonorable page in Israel's history."

When Menachem Begin became prime minister in June 1977 one of his first priorities was to speed up construction of Jewish housing on the West Bank. Within a year his government established 21 new settlements. Begin greatly accelerated the building program after he signed a peace agreement with Egypt in 1978. When Begin took office there were fewer than 10,000 Jews on the West Bank. Today, thanks to housing subsidies and cheap mortgages, there are more than 140,000.

After 1977, the new settlers included not only Israelis looking for affordable housing but religious zealots—many of them from America—who laid claim to all of "Greater Israel." Begin encouraged their presence, knowing it would be difficult for future governments to remove them. He also saw the settlements as obstacles to a peace agreement that required Israel to return any part of the occupied territory to the Palestinians. Although hard-core religious militants constitute fewer than a than a fourth of all settlers, they wield a powerful influence through the Likud party.

In his autobiography, The Revolt (W.H. Allen, 1951), Begin quoted from a speech he gave to Irgun fighters in 1948 expressing his ultimate goal: "The State of Israel has arisen, but our country is not yet liberated...Our God-given country is a unity. The attempt to dissect it is not a crime but a blasphemy and an abortion. Whoever does not recognize our natural right to our entire homeland does not recognize our right to any part of it." The accompanying map in Begin's book shows all of Palestine west of the Jordan River as part of "the homeland." (It is worth noting that a Palestinian who used Begin's words today in behalf of a Palestinian state would be jailed as a rejectionist and dangerous extremist.)

Begin's sentiments currently are shared not only by militant settlers but by the 1,500-member Rabbinical Association, which declared last summer that if the government gave up any part of the West Bank, it would be violating the Old Testament injunction to "populate the land of Israel." In a move that could undermine the traditional loyalty of the army, the rabbis urged Israeli soldiers to disobey orders to withdraw.

A Tragic Aftermath

A tragic aftermath of the Oslo agreement, which many Palestinians saw as a betrayal of their long struggle for statehood, was the rise in attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians, including stabbings and gruesomely cruel bus bombings. Far less publicized has been a campaign of violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers against Palestinians. James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, recently reported in the Jerusalem Times that the daily life of the 120,000 Palestinian residents of Hebron "consists of settler rioting, empty Arab shops, wanton police beating, the closure of the city and the destruction of its economy, and daily harassment and pressure." At least twice during the past summer, the undercover "Cherry unit" of the Israeli army hunted down and murdered wanted Palestinians in Hebron, demolishing nearby houses in the process.

On Sept. 10, Jewish settlers in Hebron stormed into a girls' school to tear down a Palestinian flag and beat the headmistress and several pupils between 6 and 11 years old with pipes and bottles.

In mid-August, settlers at Beit-El seized a hilltop near the Arab village of Deir al-Kara and when villagers came to protest, fired into the crowd and killed 22-year-old Kheiri Qaissi. Witnesses said that after the shooting, club-wielding settlers beat elderly people who were unable to flee. Ze'ev Lipskind, a resident of Beit-El, later was jailed for the killing of Kheiri Qaissi, but there have been no reported arrests of Israelis involved in numerous incidents of beatings and vandalism.

Instead of removing the settlers, Rabin is providing them with permanent protection.

In fact, the gentleness with which the Israeli army and police treat Israeli militants is in striking contrast to their use of bullets and tear gas against Palestinians. Since late July, armed settlers have been camped in tents outside Orient House, the residence of Palestinian minister without portfolio Faisel Husseini in East Jerusalem. The protesters are demanding that Israel shut down the building, which the Palestinians have used to receive foreign visitors. In addition to vandalizing nearby cars belonging to Red Crescent doctors, the settlers fired their rifles as Husseini entered and left his home. Police questioned some of the settlers in connection with the shooting but quickly released them. So far the only person arrested has been one of the Palestinian guards who held off an attempt by demonstrators to rush the gate. He was charged with "pushing a settler." On Aug. 23 the Israeli Cabinet's Committee on Jerusalem voted to forbid any political activities at Orient House, which some Palestinians see as the first step toward closing it.

Instead of defusing a potentially explosive situation by removing the settlers, Rabin is strengthening their hold on the land by providing them with permanent protection. The $330 million network of new roads under construction on the West Bank includes four "strategic highways" off-limits to Palestinian cars, and scores of smaller roads that will bypass and isolate Palestinian communities. Even after Israeli troops redeploy from Palestinian towns and villages, the new network will allow the army to control all strategic sites and major roads in the West Bank.

If Israel refuses to dismantle the settlements, Begin's dream of extending Israel's borders to the Jordan River will for all practical purposes be realized. If so, however, a whirlwind is almost certain to follow. An agreement that allows Israel to control the land and the water, with the army patrolling the roads, will not be a peace treaty but a document of surrender. Palestinians who welcomed the Oslo accords as a step toward eventual statehood cannot be expected to settle for limited autonomy over isolated fragments of the West Bank while remaining at the mercy of armed settlers and subject to crippling border closings by Israel. With resentment and frustration on one side and fear and hatred on the other, outbreaks of violence between Palestinians and Israelis are sure to erupt.

For nearly 30 years Israeli leaders have faced a clear choice between prolonging the occupation and making peace with the Palestinians. That choice is even more crucial today, when militant settlers are turning the West Bank into a tinder box. Rabin now must decide whether to continue catering to these ideological zealots or bring an end to the cycle of violence and oppression that has haunted Israel since its inception.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance writer living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.