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Why is it so hard to make peace in the Middle East? The greatest barrier is the Israeli settlements—these are both the motivation for and the engine of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Three decades of objections from the United States and Europe have achieved nothing. The rapid expansion of Israeli settlements—all illegal—has undermined Palestinian attempts at nation building. If they continue to spread, they will end the Israel that its founders envisioned. As Israel makes more incursions into Palestinian cities, it has placed new restrictions on the movement of their people and goods, stifling the economy. Oslo has ended. And still Israeli settlements increase and expand, in violation of all international resolutions. The settlement drive and its ideology have become a cornerstone of modern Israeli national identity. The policy of settlements and the current violence they are breeding have transcended the country ’s ethnic and religious divides to create a new Israelism based on a new Jewish nationalism. The settlers and their allies are re-creating Israel in their own image: as a theocracy in permanent conflict. Under the government of Ariel Sharon and with the explicit support of President George W. Bush, this process is becoming a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. These new settlers are nothing like their predecessors of the pre-1948 generation who founded Zionism and formed the state as a secular, socialist, and mainly European enterprise. The post-1967 settlers are predominantly religious , conservative, Reagan-style neoliberals. And unlike their predecessors, their settlement activity is state sponsored by Israel. The new Zionists (or postZionists ) believe that for their Greater Israel nationalism project to succeed, another campaign of ethnic cleansing will be necessary. Many members of Sharon’s cabinet are already speaking about “transfer”—the collective expulsion of the Palestinians. Worse, former general Efi Eitam, a newly appointed minister and leader of the National Religious Party, is a supporter of settlements. Though Eitam was once a Labor supporter, he now says that transfer is politically “enticing” but not realistic without war. In that case, he says, “Not many Arabs would West Bank Settlements Obstruct Peace Israel’s Empire State Building Marwan Bishara 247 remain.” And Eitam has in fact called for war on Iraq and Iran through Israeli preemptive strikes.1 Sharon has admitted that without the settlements, the army would have left long ago. But the settlements have a great advantage: they enable Israeli leaders to convince ordinary people that their military is not a foreign army ruling a foreign population. In 1977, when Sharon chaired the ministerial committee for settlement affairs, he oversaw the establishment of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He planned to settle 2 million Jews there. A quarter of a century later, Sharon remains adamant that Israel has a “moral right” to transform the demography of these territories. Since his election in January 2001, Sharon has built thirty-five new settlements.2 In the second half of the 1970s, during the transition from a Labor to a Likud government, Sharon emerged as a leader capable of realizing the dream of a Greater Israel beyond Israel’s internationally recognized borders. Shimon Peres’s encouragement to Israelis to settle everywhere in the occupied territories strengthened Sharon’s drive to implement the program of the influential bipartisan (Likud-Labor) Greater Land of Israel movement, which foresaw an Israel spreading from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. The number of settlers in the occupied territories outside East Jerusalem increased from 7,000 in 1977 to over 200,000 in 2002—plus 200,000 others in East Jerusalem. Their 200 settlements take up 1.7 percent of the West Bank, but they control 41.9 percent of it.3 Many of these settlers are armed and dangerous fanatics with a shoot-to-kill license from the Israeli army. Over the years, settlers’ death squads have attacked unarmed civilians, gunned down elected officials, and tortured and killed many other Palestinians. During the Oslo peace process, Israel doubled its settlements, tripled its settlers , and connected them with a network of bypass roads and industrial parks, ensuring their domination over the Palestinian territories. As the minister of infrastructure in the Netanyahu government, Sharon concentrated Israel’s investment programs in the occupied Palestinian lands. The Rabin and Barak governments were no less active. There was an orgy of settlement building during the Barak government under the supervision of Yitzhak Levy, then leader of the National Religious Party and minister for the...

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