The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock

2. The Immovable Object: The Settlement Grid

2. The Immovable Object The Settlement Grid Abasic misconception plaguing debate about Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories is that their withdrawal by the Israeli government , if attempted, would entail only a cluster of microstruggles— like those rare moments when Israeli authorities forcibly dismantle the trailers of some settlement “outpost” and zealot settlers are dragged off in theatrical confrontation. But the problem of Jewish settlements is not represented by a few clusters of trailers on windswept hilltops. If we swivel the cameras just a few degrees in the West Bank, a true Jewish settlement is likely to come into view: a twostory town of hundreds or thousands of stone residences draped along a neighboring hillcrest, its outer edi‹ce forming a continuous defensive stone bastion, with tendrils of new construction stretching toward the neighboring settlement. Some of these settlements are small cities: Ariel, in the center of the West Bank, has about twenty thousand residents; Ma’ale Adumim, stretching east from Jerusalem, has over twenty-‹ve thousand. The larger settlements include major shopping malls and cinemas, full school systems, recreation centers 19 and parks, synagogues and cultural centers, and adjacent industrial zones with factories representing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Any visitor looking at these massive planned communities (and their huge road network) promptly loses any idea that the Israeli government has any intention of removing them—or that it even has the capacity to do so. The grid is now so embedded in the land—and the Jewish and Palestinian infrastructure is so interwoven, with resources such as water so inseparably bound together—that even a super‹cial tour suggests that it is inextricable. But the “facts on the ground” that debilitate any withdrawal are not simply physical and ‹nancial. To grasp the actual immobility of the Jewish settlements, we need to appreciate not only the grid’s physical weight—its size and infrastructure and its impact on the land and on Palestinian society—but also its political weight. The latter includes not only its off-cited importance to some currents of Zionist imagination but also its less-recognized ties to major state agencies as well as private commercial and industrial investment. These political and economic aspects obviously interplay: evacuating so vast a social infrastructure , including hundreds of thousands of people in full-scale cities, would entail huge costs and therefore require a tremendous political will on the part of any Israeli government. But such will is not simply missing in this case: Israeli public policy has for decades been directed into expanding the settlements, through channels more extensive and complicated than most people realize. While occasionally withdrawing a few outposts (with much public fanfare), the Israeli government has actually been funding and building the settlements and working hard to attract settlers to them (doubling their population in the 1990s), for three decades of (supposed) peace talks and at an accelerating pace since the Oslo negotiations began in the early 1990s. Assumptions that this state policy might be reversed and the settlers withdrawn have gravely underestimated all these dimensions. THE PHYSICAL GRID Detailed analyses of the settlements exist elsewhere, so their physical scale will just be summarized here. Jewish settlements in the occupied The One-State Solution 20 territories are routinely analyzed as falling into four regions occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War: the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. At this writing, these territories hold some 230 settlements and some four hundred thousand Jewish settlers (about 10 percent of Israel’s population). Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and considers them part of Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), Israeli sovereign territory. Because Israel took these territories forcibly in the 1967 war, however, international diplomacy considers all four to fall within the general category of “occupied territory,” whose ‹nal status is still pending. But each territory has a different political pro‹le and presents different challenges to any withdrawal. The Golan Heights is usually treated apart. Annexed by Israel, it is still disputed by its former sovereign, Syria. Its ‹nal disposition therefore remains essential to any comprehensive regional peace. It is a visually compelling region, with thirty-three Jewish settlements sparsely scattered through a craggy moor landscape marked by 131 destroyed Arab villages, which were bombed and/or bulldozed by Israel after the ›ight in 1967 of some one hundred thousand Arab residents . An...