A new, post-Oslo era has begun in the occupied territories. The understandings between Israel and the Palestinians that made possible the establishment of a Palestinian Authority lead by Yasser Arafat and the creation of Palestinian security services with a mandate in Palestinian populated areas [Areas A] of the West Bank have been irrevocably undermined.
The Bush administration presides at a time when the “promise of Madrid” has been rendered hollow. The United States, together with Israel and much of the Arab world, proved unable to realize the vision inspiring the Madrid process–a comprehensive peace between Israel and its neighbors, the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in East Jerusalem, and the construction of a regional alliance against anti-American political Islam and the creation and deployment of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq and Iran.
Settlement–scores, almost one hundred years ago, in areas of the Land of Israel populated by Arabs and sometimes solely by Arabs–was it moral or immoral: Permitted or forbidden? One of the two. If it was moral then settlement near Nablus is moral. . . . There is no third way.
Israel’s unprecedented assault against Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank is guided by the strategic objective of undermining the prospect of Palestinian sovereignty in these areas and preserving Israeli settlements.
In Ariel Sharon’s first public address after Yasser Arafat’s December 2001 call for an end to the armed Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, the Israeli prime minister displayed the elements that have long defined his public image as a pragmatic expansionist.
Among the many invocations of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, two declarations–those by Osama Bin Laden and President George W. Bush–stand apart. Each of these men, at opposite poles in the international campaign now being waged, nonetheless believe that the unresolved status of Palestine is a critical element in their respective efforts to mobilize international, particularly Arab and Islamic, constituencies in their favor.
Demands for a freeze in the expansion of Israeli civilian settlements located in territories occupied by Israel in June 1967 are now at the center stage of Arab-Israeli diplomacy. The peace initiative promoted earlier this year by the Egyptian and Jordanian governments and the report of a presidentially appointed commission headed by former senator George Mitchell and endorsed by all parties have placed a settlement freeze at the heart of their recommendations for stabilizing deteriorating relations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The contention that the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and Israeli-Palestinian peace are not incompatible is one of the principal assumptions upon which Arab-Israeli diplomacy during the past decade has been built. From the earliest days of the Madrid process, U.S. diplomacy has accommodated an Israeli refusal to endorse a halt to settlement growth and to defer Palestinian demands for a “settlement freeze.” Only when Yasser Arafat conceded on this issue in 1993 was the stalemate broken that had attended the Madrid-mandated talks and the road opened to the historic Declaration of Principles at Oslo.
Ariel Sharon is a pragmatic expansionist who views Israeli settlement in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as both an ideological imperative and a security asset. As the recently elected prime minister of Israel, Sharon faces the challenge of integrating these objectives into an overall policy toward Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and the three million Palestinians under Israeli occupation who oppose Israel’s colonization policies.
Despite an extraordinary effort, a departing President Bill Clinton failed in his effort to formally establish agreed-upon parameters for the future conduct of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Nevertheless, the events of the last seven months have moved the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians irrevocably beyond the diplomatic and territorial constraints established in the Oslo accords.