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July 23, 2009
Israeli settlements in the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War began as military and agricultural outposts located for the most part in strategically significant areas of the West Bank that Israel planned eventually to claim. These settlements were also situated in areas from which Jews had been evicted during the 1948 war. While the United States did not support the settlement enterprise, its response to the settlements has varied in intensity, depending on the overall relationship between the two countries.
In the late 1960s, the Johnson administration was critical of Israeli settlement activity, but did not characterize the settlements as illegal. It was not until the Carter administration that State Department legal adviser Herbert Hansell expressed the view that the settlements violated international law. The Carter policy was reversed by all his successors. Thus, President Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that the settlements were “not illegal.” He criticized them on policy grounds, calling them “ill-advised” and “proactive.”
Settlement activity was not defined as a violation of the 1993 Oslo Accords or their subsequent implementation agreements. During the secret negotiations leading up to the signing of Oslo, Yasser Arafat instructed his negotiators to seek a “settlement freeze” but Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres rejected those demands. Nonetheless, Arafat agreed to the accords despite the lack of a settlement freeze. The Oslo Accords were essentially an interim arrangement; they stipulated that the settlements would be addressed in permanent-status negotiations.
In seeking to constrain Israeli settlement activity, the United States is essentially trying to obtain Israeli concessions that were not formally required under Oslo.
The 2001 report of a commission headed by Sen. George Mitchell recommended that as part of confidence-building measures between the parties, “Israel should freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements.” The Bush administration adopted the Mitchell report, putting the settlement issue right in the center of United States-Israel discussions.
It appeared at the time that the United States felt itself to be in an awkward position as an honest broker in peacemaking if Israel were to expropriate more land for settlement growth during the course of future negotiations. To address this concern, the Sharon government proposed a formula whereby Israel could continue to build within existing settlements, but only from the outer ring of construction inward in each settlement. That way, Israel could address the need for natural growth without taking more land for Israelis living in the settlements.
As the Bush administration drafted its 2003 road map for peace, it decided to include the Mitchell report’s settlement freeze. According to Dov Weisglass, who headed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s negotiating team on the settlement issue, the two sides concluded that no new settlements would be built, no Palestinian land would be expropriated or otherwise seized for the purpose of settlement construction, building within the settlements would be confined to “the existing line of construction,” and public funds would not be earmarked for encouraging settlements. Weisglass also wrote to U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in 2004 that his government undertook to remove what were known as “unauthorized outposts.”
The Bush administration and the Sharon government never formalized these understandings in writing. This has allowed the Obama administration to question their existence and validity. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, Elliot Abrams, has been partially supportive of Weisglass’ claim. According to Abrams, the formula succeeded in creating a situation whereby “settlement activity is not diminishing the territory of a future Palestinian entity.”
The Obama administration’s current focus on Israeli settlement activity — including natural growth — raises a number of questions. If the United States is concerned that Israel might diminish the territory the Palestinians will receive in the future, then the Obama team could continue with the quiet guidelines followed by the Bush administration and the Sharon government. Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is estimated to be 1.7 percent of the territory, the marginal increase that might be affected by natural growth is infinitesimal. Moreover, since Israel unilaterally withdrew 9,000 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the argument that a settler presence will undermine a future territorial compromise has lost much of its previous force.
The United States and Israel need to reach a new understanding on the settlements question. It is clearly an overstated issue in the peace process. Legally and diplomatically, settlements do not represent a problem that can possibly justify putting at risk the United States-Israel relationship.
Dr. Dore Gold, Israel’s ambassador to the UN from 1997-99, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. This essay originally appeared at bitterlemons.org
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