Israel Prepares The Ground for An Apartheid Autonomy in The Territories

By Frank Collins

Israel's objectives in the continuing post-Oslo negotiations become clear if, instead of listening to the empty declarations of the political leaders, we take seriously Israeli actions on the ground. These "facts on the ground," past and present, are steps toward Israel's creation of a completely segregated binational society in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

New confiscations of Palestinian lands and expansion of existing Jewish settlements are being rushed so that the Israeli areas will be maximized by the time Palestinian autonomy is extended to the West Bank outside the Jericho area. The acquisitions of new land and the expansion of existing settlements enable the combining of multiple settlements into contiguous settlement blocs.

The formation of the Katif bloc of settlements in Gaza before the Palestinian autonomy is an example of this strategy. In the West Bank, the effect is to divide the Palestinian areas into enclaves. Israeli law prevails in these settlement blocs just as it does in the individual settlements. Accordingly, for all intents and purposes these areas are de facto parts of Israel, whether formally annexed or not.

Israel also claims the "state lands" remaining from the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate periods, as well as additional lands confiscated from Palestinians during the Israeli occupation and declared to be state lands. It is fundamental Zionist policy that Israeli state lands can be leased or purchased only by Jews. Therefore, these lands, too, are effectively part of Israel. By these actions, Israel transparently plans to withhold large areas of the West Bank from the Palestinian autonomy now being negotiated for the West Bank and Gaza, which together constitute only 22 percent of the original mandate of Palestine. (Under the 1947 U.N. partition plan, 47 percent of the mandate was to go to the Palestinian state.).

The remaining land that Israel is offering to the Palestinians for autonomy amounts to no more than 18 percent of the area of the West Bank, meaning that the Palestinians would end up controlling less than 9 percent of the original mandate of Palestine.

Israel transparently plans to withhold large areas of the West Bank from the Palestinian autonomy.

Bypass roads, for Jews only, are being constructed throughout the West Bank to separate the settlers' travel routes from Palestinian towns and villages. The intended result of these several Israeli actions is to segregate the West Bank Palestinians still living in a fraction of their original country into Bantustans even more stringently than the Blacks were segregated in South Africa under that country's apartheid policy.

The idea of autonomy for the territories conquered by Israel was written into the Camp David agreement, but there was little U.S. pressure to implement it. The Israelis considered the Camp David clauses on autonomy to be too favorable to the Palestinian aspirations for a separate state to want to see autonomy put into effect. It was not until the Israeli authorities finally realized that the costs of their occupation of the Gaza Strip far outweighed its benefits that the call for "Gaza First" was raised in the Hebrew press and autonomy for Gaza was reconsidered.

However the Israelis, in reviving the idea of autonomy for Gaza, did not contemplate autonomy for the whole Gaza Strip, but only for those areas of the Gaza Strip inhabited by Palestinians. The Israelis therefore insisted that the existing Jewish settlement blocs continue as areas of full Israeli rule. The separation of the autonomous Palestinian areas of Gaza from the Jewish settlements would obviously lead to Bantustans similar to those being set up in the West Bank, a prospect quite compatible with settler ideology.

Limited Palestinian autonomy in the the Gaza Strip outside the Jewish settlement blocs, with limited access of Palestinians to the settlements, could have been instituted by unilateral Israeli action through additions to the 1,100 military orders that already governed the Palestinians in Gaza with the force of law. Presumably, the Rabin government realized, however, that such military decrees would have been denounced as blatant racist apartheid throughout most of the world including the United States, Israel's indispensable ally.

Israel's Firm Supporter

As Israel's only ally, the United States has been heavily involved in the drive to maintain Israeli supremacy in the occupied territories. The U.S. set the "peace process" in motion, has resolutely pushed for bargaining conditions favorable to Israel at every stage in the preliminaries and has been Israel's firm supporter in every international dispute concerning the peace process.

The Oslo Declaration of Principles (DOP), which was signed in Washington with great acclaim on Sept. 13, 1993, carried forward many of the concepts of the Camp David agreement and much of the language. There is one essential difference, however. In connection with the interim period of five years, Camp David refers throughout to the "West Bank and Gaza." In contrast, the Oslo DOP refers to the "Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza." The change transformed the issues in dispute from geographic to demographic ones and, at the same time, elliptically introduced the subject of Jewish settlements and separate, preferential treatment of Israelis in the territories.

The signing of the DOP was followed by protracted negotiations on specifics which produced the Cairo agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area, signed May 4, 1994. The limited, demographic character of the Oslo agreement is in no way lessened by the explicit definition of the boundaries of Palestinian jurisdiction in the Cairo agreement, because Israelis and Israeli institutions are unconditionally excluded from Palestinian jurisdiction within these boundaries. This exclusion of Israelis from the jurisdiction of the Palestinian National Authority creates two categories of persons, Israelis, subject only to the laws of Israel, and Palestinians subject to the PNA and to the general powers reserved to the Israeli army, including its 1,100 military orders.

The agreement signed Sept. 28 is an extension of the Cairo agreement to the remaining portions of the West Bank. The difference is that the Cairo agreement dealt with the Gaza Strip, which the Israelis were anxious to abandon, while the West Bank with its Jewish settlements is still regarded by Israel as a prized possession.

There is a widely held impression that the interim agreements are of small importance in comparison with the final status agreement effective after five years. The Oslo DOP contains the much-cited clause: "The two parties agree that the outcome of the permanent status negotiations shall not be prejudiced or pre-empted by agreements reached for the interim period" (Article V-4).

In fact, Article V-4 of the Oslo DOP already has been countermanded by the paragraph in the preamble of the signed Cairo agreement which reads: "reaffirming that the interim self-government arrangements, including the arrangements to apply in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area contained in this agreement, are an integral part of the whole peace process and that the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338."

The interim agreements are growing out of facts on the ground and existing arrangements, just as the Jewish settlements were legitimized by the acknowledgement of their existence and the defining of their status in the Oslo agreement.

In this framework, it is clear that the terms of the final status agreement will not differ radically from the restrictive agreements already negotiated between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat.

With the interim agreements having been defined in the Cairo agreement as preludes to the final status agreement, it is difficult to conceive of any Israeli government negotiating away, in the final status agreement, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank on which billions of dollars have been spent. Or opening to Palestinian travel the bypass roads on which hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent in order to separate the Jewish settlers' travel routes from Palestinian towns and villages. On the question of Arab East Jerusalem, what will be left for the Palestinians to negotiate if the ground is covered by Jewish settlements and the demolition of Palestinian homes is continued using various Israeli legal artifices?

Finally, what is the likelihood that the Israeli right to close off the territories at any instant on "security" grounds, as permitted implicitly under the Oslo agreement in this interim period, will be voided in the "final status negotiations"?

Frank Collins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Report, recently returned from a month's travel in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel.