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Settlements and the Israel-Palestinian Negotiations
An Overview

Geoffrey Aronson

Institute For Palestine Studies

Publisher's Note

This paper was prepared as part of the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) Final Status Issues project. The project combines research, documentation, and policy seminars with the aim of raising awareness of and contributing to the peace process on key final status issues. The IPS thanks the Diana Tamari-Sabbagh Foundation and the Ford Foundation for their assistance.

Geoffrey Aronson is the editor of the Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, published by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Israel, Palestinians and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank (1990), and an expert on Israel's occupation policies.

Settlement Facts

December 1995

West Bank
Israeli settlements: 150
Israeli settlers: 141,000
Palestinian population: 1 million

East Jerusalem
Israeli settlements: 9
Israeli settlers: 170,000
Palestinian population: 180,000

Gaza Strip
Israeli settlements: 16
Israeli settlers: 6,000
Palestinian population: 830,000

Golan Heights
Israeli settlements: 36
Israeli settlers: 12,000
Syrian population: 15,000

Introduction

Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula during the June 1967 war. Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1982 under the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. It is in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, then, that Israel's controversial settlement program‹the permanent transfer to occupied territory of part of Israel's civilian Jewish population and the creation of a physical infrastructure to sustain them‹ is being implemented.

Historically, settlements have been the practical expression of a national Israeli effort to preclude Palestinian self determination west of the Jordan River. More than any other manifestation of Israeli policy, settlements are the key index of Israel's intentions in the territories. With the historic agreement between Israel and the PLO signed in September 1993 and the two major agreements that followed, the future of settlements has become even more a barometer of Israeli-Palestinian relations. It is the contention of this writer that settlements and Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation are at opposite poles of the political spectrum. For lasting reconciliation to occur, Israel must radically revise its long-held view of settlements and transform what traditionally has been their role in Israel's national consciousness.

The growth and development of settlements since the Oslo agreement of September 1993 attests to Israel's continuing determination to remain the de facto sovereign in territories it now occupies, with a correspondingly prejudicial position for Palestinian social, economic, and political institutions. More than 300,000 Israelis now reside in over two hundred communities established since 1967: 170,000 settlers in 10 locations in East Jerusalem, 141,000 in 150 locations elsewhere in the West Bank, 6,000 in 16 locations in the Gaza Strip, and 12,000 in 36 locations in the Golan Heights.

The data used in this report are based in large part upon the my work as editor of the Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, published by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington, D.C. This information represents my best effort to ascertain credible estimates of Israeli settlement activity based upon both the official Israeli documentary record as well as the reports of other governmental and nongovernmental sources.

1. The Idea of Settlement and its Role in Israeli Policy

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. If that decision was moral, and we all boast of one hundred years of settlement, then today's settlement near Nablus, Jericho, and Bethlehem is moral....There is no third way. Either Zionism was moral from its inception...[and] then it is moral to settle in all parts of the Land of Israel - or, God forbid, there is no morality to our settlement today, [and] we must ask forgiveness for what we did in the last one hundred years.

For Menachem Begin, who spoke these words in an address before the Israeli Knesset in May 1982, Israeli settlement throughout the "Land of Israel" was an expression of the enduring vitality of Zionism and its moral vision. In his eyes, there was no vital distinction between the settlement policies practiced in the pre-state era and those that evolved in the wake of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula in June 1967. Settlement before and after was the product of the as-yet unfinished consolidation of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, which must necessarily come at the expense of Palestinian national aspirations.

In Israel's view, security, sovereignty, and settlement are inextricably linked. The security achieved by Israeli settlement, according to this calculation, is essentially an existential concept rather than a military imperative. As Moshe Dayan, at the time defense minister, explained in the early 1970s, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were essential "not because they can ensure security better than the army, but because without them we cannot keep the army in those territories. Without them the IDF would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population." [emphasis added.]

Labor's settlements during the 1967­77 period of its rule were located according to what was, in an Israeli context, a minimalist but ever-expanding conception of its territorial and ideological requirements. Labor's settlement plans were embodied in what came to be known as the Allon Plan - named for Labor Party minister Yigal Allon - and its various versions which succeeded each other from 1967 onwards. The plan called for the annexation of about one- quarter (later increased to about 40 percent) of the West Bank's territory, including:

  • Jerusalem and its immediate environs
  • A "security belt" 20 kilometers wide running the length of the Jordan Valley
  • The entire Judean desert, possibly including Hebron.

These West Bank areas would be settled by Israelis in both urban and rural communities. Under the plan, the southern Gaza Strip, where the Katif Bloc of settlements is located today, would also be annexed, as would the Golan Heights and a strip of Sinai linking Eilat to Sharm el-Sheik.

Allon envisioned an "autonomous framework" for Palestinians in two distinct and noncontiguous regions - the populated mountainous West Bank heartland north of Ramallah, and the Hebron region. These two areas would be encapsulated by West Bank territory that Israel would annex.

Dayan, however, had another vision. He believed in a wide-ranging "functional" solution to the disposition of the occupied territories rather than Allon's "territorial" one. As Dayan saw it, Israel would remain permanently in all the occupied areas, aswas clear from the "Five No's" he announced in September 1973:

  • Gaza will not be Egyptian
  • The Golan will not be Syrian
  • Jerusalem will not be Arab
  • A Palestinian state will not be established
  • The settlements established will not be abandoned.

Israel, according to Dayan's concept, would settle everywhere throughout the territories, and award Palestinians a measure of autonomy consistent with Israeli interests. All these features - Israeli control over most of the lands, unrestricted Israeli settlement, and Palestinian autonomy - are present in Israel's occupation policies to this day, notwithstanding the peace process initiated in Madrid.

Adoption of Dayan's program signalled the victory within the Labor Party of a maximalist program of settlement. In keeping with Dayan's program, the populated West Bank heartland in the area between Nablus and Ramallah and the Green Line border area between Israel and the West Bank were opened to Israeli settlement.

During the first decade of occupation, Labor established both the physical infrastructure and the political institutions needed for the creation and expansion of a permanent Israeli civilian presence throughout the territories. But what Labor had adopted incrementally over the course of a decade, the Likud Party, which came to power in 1977, embraced as its raison d'etre and the key to its political renaissance. In this it was spurred by popular movements led by Gush Emunim - Bloc of the Faithful - which already had been setting up outposts in the occupied territories and saw the 1967 victory as a divine signal to settle. Indeed, above and beyond the ideological imperative to settle the land - a central tenet to Zionism, to which Labor also subscribed - Menachem Begin viewed the settlement enterprise as his opportunity to create a political constituency rooted in the land, just as Labor had done with its kibbutz and moshav settlements in the pre-state era.

Thus, in July 1977, Prime Minister Begin refused U.S. President Jimmy Carter's request to freeze settlement activity. At the time, there were perhaps 50,000 Israelis living in annexed Jerusalem, but only 7,000 settlers in the 45 civilian outposts elsewhere in the occupied territories.

In September 1977, Begin's minister of agriculture, Ariel Sharon, unveiled a settlement master plan, "A Vision of Israel at Century's End," authored by Mattityahu Drobles, the co-chairman of the World Zionist Organization's Settlement Department, a quasi-governmental agency that spearheaded government settlement policies. The "Master Plan for the Development of Settlement in Judea and Samaria 1979­1983," which called for the settlement of 2 million Israelis in occupied territories by the end of the century, stressed the establishment of numerous settlement points as well as larger urban concentrations in three principal areas:

  • A north south axis running from the Golan through the Jordan Valley and down the east coast of Sinai
  • A widened corridor around Jerusalem
  • The populated western slopes of the Samarian heartland, which Labor had only just begun to colonize.
Settler Population, 1976­1995
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (excluding East Jerusalem)
Year Population Year Population
1995 145,000 1985 44,100
1994 135,000 1984 35,200
1993 120,000 1983 22,800
1992 112,000 1982 21,000
1991 92,000 1981 16,119
1990 76,000 1980 12,424
1989 69,000 1979 10,000
1988 63,600 1978 7,361
1987 57,700 1977 4,400
1986 51,100 1976 3,176
Source: Foundation for Middle East Peace.


End-of-Year Settler Population
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip*
* Does not include Israelis living in annexed East Jerusalem. Population figures vary - sometimes by as much as 20 percent - depending on the source.
Source: Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, January 1995.

With the Drobles Plan, the Likud carried a giant step further Labor's efforts to disrupt the territorial continuity of Palestinian communities and thereby preempt the possibility of Palestinian self-determination. As Drobles noted, the plan "will enable us to bring about the dispersion of the [Israeli] population from the densely populated urban strip of the coastal plain eastward to the presently empty areas of Judea and Samaria." The plan consciously sought to strike at the basis of potential Palestinian sovereignty by destroying the continuity of Palestinian-controlled territory. According to Drobles, "The disposition of the settlements must be carried out not only around the settlements of the minorities [i.e., the Palestinians], but also in between them, this in accordance with the settlement policy adopted in the Galilee and in other parts of the country...."

The Drobles Plan never realized its grandiose ambitions in numerical terms, but it did succeed in creating an extensive network of territorial obstacles - settlements - to a cohesive Palestinian entity. Moreover, the Likud government's investment in infrastructure and housing created the conditions for a takeoff in the settler population. During the 1980s, the government allocated approximately $300 million annually for the development and expansion of settlement in the West Bank; construction fluctuated between 1,000 and 2,000 housing units each year. By the end of 1985, the settler population (outside East Jerusalem) stood at 42,000, a 100 percent increase in only three years. By 1990, there were 76,000 settlers in approximately 150 West Bank settlements, excluding East Jerusalem.

Beginning in 1990, the exodus of almost a half-million Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel combined with a stepped-up U.S. diplomacy precipitated a construction boom in Israel and the occupied territories. Between 1990 and 1995, the growth rate of the settler population has been about 10 percent annually, resulting in an increase from 85,000 to 141,000 (still excluding East Jerusalem). Housing capacity was expanded in all West Bank settlements, but particularly in the suburban communities within commuting distance of Israel's commercial centers. The goal was to create demographic and territorial facts that would make any territorial division of the West Bank a practical impossibility. According to Ha'aretz reporter Nadav Shargay writing in June 1992, "the Jewish population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza need only grow by an average of 10 percent annually until 2005, for the settler population in the West Bank to total 500,000."

2. Settlement under Rabin

In the months before his death, Yitzhak Rabin acknowledged that a generation of settlement since 1967 had failed in its central mission - to transform the territories into an "unremarkable" part of Israel. The intifada had made clear to Israel the costs of persisting in this effort to accomplish in the hills of Nablus and Hebron what an earlier generation of Zionist pioneers had accomplished in the Negev and the Galilee. The Israel Defense Force (IDF), Rabin acknowledged in April 1994, had remained an "occupation army" in the territories captured in June 1967.

Rabin's decision to move away from direct rule of the occupied territories by force of arms was a direct consequence of this failure. But the envisaged change involved not a decision to evacuate the territories, but the determination to reshape the popular Israeli view of settlements and to establish a more secure basis for continuing settlement and military hegemony. The Oslo process, and the Palestinians' implicit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories that accompanied it, have become the new foundation for this effort.

For decades, Israelis had argued that settlements were "agents of peace" insofar as they forced a hostile Arab world, which rejected the idea of Jewish sovereignty, to become reconciled to Israel's existence. Rabin, during his tenure as prime minister that began in 1992 and was cut short by his assassination in November 1995, began the process of standing this myth on its head. In the Middle East at the dawn of the twenty-first century, he explained in April 1994, settlements could well endanger rather than promote peace by undermining the prospects for rapprochement with the Arab states at a time when they had become reconciled to Israel's existence.

Rabin asserted that the West Bank settlements had not only failed in their historical role of marking out the perimeter of Jewish sovereignty, but also that most had only "marginal security value" and those established by the Likud had "none."

"Elon Moreh [a settlement near Nablus opposed by Rabin in the mid-1970s but legalized by his successor, Prime Minister Begin, in 1977] does not guard Afula [a town just inside Israel proper] - the IDF does," declared Rabin. "And the IDF is the one that will defend [Israeli towns] - not the settlements. The security contribution of what I have described as `political settlements' is zero. It is a mistake to give a central security role to settlements."

By subjecting the settlement enterprise to such analysis, Rabin rejected the premise that settlement was an end in itself - an idea at the heart of traditional Zionism. This "retreat" constitutes the main right-wing complaint about Rabin's views, even though, in actual fact the Rabin government did not forsake the ideology of conquest. From the time he became prime minister until his death, Rabin adhered to policies reflecting both an attempt to build upon precedents established by the Camp David and Oslo Accords and the need to fashion a plan for continuing settlement that could attract support across the wide range of Israel's political spectrum, including the central core of the Likud Party.

Labor's 1992 Victory: A New Policy?

Yet Labor's victory and the installation of Yitzhak Rabin as Israel's new prime minister in July 1992 seemed to raise the prospect of a material change in Israel's settlement policies. Palestinians in particular held high expectations that there would be significant changes in settlement policy under a Rabin government, in part as a result of pre-election discussions with Labor Party figures.

The "Fundamental Policy Guidelines of the Government," Labor's 1992 party platform, promised that "new settlements will not be established and existing settlements will not be thickened, except for those in Greater Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley." It also committed the Rabin government to freeze the establishment of new settlements for one year.

Rabin also objected to "political settlements" - those outposts established in the populated West Bank heartland during the Likud's reign - in areas outside the confines of the Allon Plan.

"I am opposed to throwing away billions on the political settlements which are not in Greater Jerusalem and on the confrontation lines: the Jordan Rift Valley and the Golan Heights," he explained in June 1992.

Labor's platform contained no mention of a settlement or construction freeze, but it did commit Rabin to "refrain from moves and actions that will disrupt the orderly conduct of negotiations." The new government also pledged to maintain the security of settlers and to "consolidate and strengthen settlements along the confrontation lines [the Jordan Valley and Golan Heights]."

Soon after its installation in July 1992, the Rabin government announced that it would cancel thousands of units planned by Yitzhak Shamir's government for 1992 in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. This decision was the most visible signal of the new government's intention to change national priorities by deemphasizing the construction of new housing in the occupied territories. In other decisions aimed at constraining settlement, the government announced:

  • No new settlements would be created without government approval
  • Settlers purchasing homes in some settlements would enjoy less generous terms for "local loans"
  • Additional funding for 10 roads in the West Bank would be frozen
  • No new government land leases for the private construction of homes in settlements would be awarded
  • No new permits for private construction in settlements would be made available by the military government.

But most of the units canceled by Rabin soon after his election existed only on paper. The government's announcement concerning these cutbacks was accompanied by a decision to complete construction of 9,850 units in settlements throughout the West Bank, 1,200 in the Gaza Strip, and 1,200 in the Golan Heights. The completion and occupancy of these units were to increase the settler population in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) to 150,000 - a goal that was in fact attained when these units were occupied during 1995.

In practice, therefore, Rabin consistently maintained a high level - higher than the historical average of 1,200 new units per year - of new construction in the West Bank, particularly in favored West Bank settlements. No construction cutbacks were implemented in the area of "Greater Jerusalem" - defined by Minister of Construction and Housing Benjamin Ben Eliezer to include the West Bank settlements of Ma'ale Ephraim, Givat Ze'ev, Ma'ale Adumim, Beitar, and Gush Etzion. In November 1992, 77 percent of the total settler population lived in the West Bank settlement communities in Greater Jerusalem, where the 16,247 units under construction equalled 71 percent of the total throughout the occupied territories. Under the Rabin government, this area received a greater percentage of a shrinking government settlement budget. Ben Eliezer noted on Israeli television in mid-1992 that he would approve additional housing only to accommodate the "natural growth" of settlements. This proviso has served as the primary rationale for settlement expansion approved by the Rabin government.

It soon became clear, then, that Labor's victory in 1992 represented more a change in Israel's settlement style than its substance. Rabin, while engaged in redefining the place of settlement in Israel's ideological and strategic universe, remained an expansionist. He had never supported an end to state-supported settlement. During the 1992 election campaign, he explained that "I was always for the principle that it is permissible to build settlements even beyond the Green Line. As proof, it was a government headed by me that decided to create the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim" - the largest settlement in the West Bank and an anchor of Israel's "Greater Jerusalem" concept.

Furthermore, Rabin's understanding of the Labor Party's longstanding championship of "territorial compromise" involved Israel's annexation of 40­60 percent of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, its West Bank hinterland, the Jordan Valley, and lands east of the Green Line border. Under this concept, the rest of the West Bank, while remaining under effective Israeli control, would be relegated to cooperative Palestinian-Jordanian administration.

The rationale for Rabin's program was based upon security more than upon strictly ideological considerations. This was in contrast to Shamir's divinely-inspired ideological imperatives, which made the Likud appear to the United States as more strident and uncompromising. In keeping with Labor's tradition of presenting its policies in a more diplomatically astute fashion - precluding the kind of bitter, public wrangling that characterized Shamir's relations with President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker - Rabin deemphasized the politically divisive, marginal, and demographically questionable outposts. Instead, he focussed his government's settlement policies on consolidating the successful urban/suburban core of West Bank settlement communities developed (also by Likud governments) since 1977, the permanent retention of which has been declared a matter beyond political debate. Rabin also continued expanding settlements in the Jordan Valley and east of the Green Line.

Thus, optimistic assumptions that Rabin's election portended an Israeli renunciation of settlement resulted from a misreading of both Rabin and the Israeli electorate. Rabin did not seek radically to alter the settlement policies of the previous government and did not feel that the Israeli public had given him a mandate to do so. He had no intention of "drying out" settlements in the occupied territories, especially the growing suburban settlements that for more than a decade had stolen the settlement momentum from Gush Emunim's small outposts. Indeed, Rabin's primary intention was to manage and rationalize the less focused polices pursued by previous Likud governments.

Rabin's vaunted declaration about changing national priorities had been made in the context of a dramatic reduction in the number of new immigrants and the glut of available housing that resulted as he took office in 1992. Sharon's massive public building campaign of 1990­92 was an extraordinary response to an unique opportunity presented by one million potential new citizens. Housing construction from mid-1990 until Rabin's election was based upon the annual arrival of some 200,000 immigrants. The failure of this influx to materialize forced Rabin, just as it had forced Shamir, to scale back the pace of public construction throughout Israel, as well as in the occupied territories. And notwithstanding Rabin's dramatic announcement of an end to direct public financing of residential construction in settlements, construction currently underway will increase the Israeli population residing in occupied territory (including East Jerusalem) from its current 330,000 to 350,000 before the end of the decade.

Even at the time, analysts such as Yaron London in Yediot Aharanot were predicting that Israel's construction policy after Rabin's 1992 cuts would amount to "no more than a saner version of Sharon's extravaganza." And in fact, up until 1994, Rabin built housing for settlers at a pace largely determined by the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir and at a rate unequalled in Israel's 26-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Not without reason did Rabin boast in August 1992 that more housing in the territories was being built during his tenure than at any time since 1967.

The Post-Oslo Period

While the Labor-led government's post-1994 settlement efforts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem rival and in some respects surpass those of the Shamir government during 1989­92, the construction drive was implemented with relative discretion until 1995. Throughout 1993 and 1994, in a political environment that considered the settlement issue to be off the diplomatic agenda until "final status" negotiations were to commence in 1996, ministers kept quiet while the bulldozers worked. In fact, the groundwork was being laid for an unprecedented expansion of the settler population during the five-year interim period mandated by Oslo. As Shlomo Gazit, former head of Israel's Military Intelligence, pointed out in Yediot Aharanot on 22 January 1995, if currently approved housing plans are implemented, the Jewish population of "Judea and Samaria" will have doubled during the interim period.

The settler population continues to increase at a faster rate than anywhere in Israel itself, and few settlers are abandoning their homes. In fact, Housing Minister Ben Eliezer stated on 5 July 1994 that government policy "was and remains not to effect any action that will result in settlers leaving Judea and Samaria or cause the dismantlement of the settlements." By the end of 1994 the government was supplying housing subsidies to less than 150 settler families that returned to Israel.

Decisions to expand settlements in Rabin's preferred areas - East Jerusalem, its West Bank hinterland, and along the Green Line - are proceeding without reference to ongoing Israel-Palestinian negotiations. Israeli policymakers regard these areas as "non-negotiable." Additional construction has been undertaken, even in the so-called "political settlements," albeit at a pace far slower than in preferred settlements or the rate maintained from 1990­92.

Housing construction decisions are dictated primarily by domestic considerations, such as market demand and party politics. The sale of most of the units inherited from the Shamir government and completed by Rabin since 1992, particularly in the region around Jerusalem and along the 1967 border, for example, has created a market for the additional housing outlined in the government's new 1995­98 building program.

The government's three-year plans were announced in the context of a controversy that erupted at the end of 1994 over new construction at the settlement of Efrat, near Bethlehem (with thousands of Palestinians of the nearby town of al-Khadra claiming the land was theirs). The principal points of the government's 1995­98 plan, announced on 17 January 1995, are as follows:

  • 15,000 apartments to be built in East Jerusalem settlement neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders [Pisgat Ze'ev, Neve Ya'acov, Gilo, and Har Homa]
  • 13,000 apartments to be built in the nearby urban region [Ma'ale Adumim (6,000), Givat Ze'ev (1,000), Beitar (5,000), Givon, Har Adar, and Efrat]
  • 3,000 apartments to be built in other West Bank locations.

This three-year program represents a marked increase in the pace of new construction initiated by the Rabin government in the occupied territories during its first two years, when it completed the more than 11,000 units inherited from the Likud. According to Danny Rubinstein, writing in Ha'aretz on 10 January 1995, "This plan shatters any remnant of the Palestinians' illusion that the Oslo Accord will bring about either an Israeli withdrawal from significant territories in the West Bank, or that eastern Jerusalem can ever serve as a Palestinian capital." At a cabinet meeting on 22 January 1995, Ben Eliezer presented the 1995 component of the plan, involving the construction of 4,100 dwelling units in the West Bank settlements of Greater Jerusalem during 1995. The Rabin cabinet endorsed the creation of a special ministerial committee to vet this and other settlement construction, reaffirmed the "top priority" it attached to "the strengthened construction of united Jerusalem," and promised the allocation of "special resources" to this end.

The ministerial committee endorsed the settlement construction proposal with minor alternations when it met on January 25. During the committee meeting, member of Knesset (MK) Shulamit Aloni complained to Rabin, "You are exactly like the Likud. Don't you think that the Arabs need someplace to live?"

"I think about Israelis," Rabin replied.

In April 1995, the Rabin government announced the first expropriations of privately owned lands in Jerusalem since the beginning of the Oslo process. Nine hundred units for Israeli Jews were planned for 335 dunams in Bayt Hanina, of which 230 dunams were owned by Arabs, 90 dunams by Jews, and 15 dunams the ownership of which was unclear. On 200 dunams to be seized in Bayt Safafa, a police facility and construction of 400 dwelling units were planned.

The constellation of forces opposed to government policy abruptly increased with the unprecedented decision of two largely Arab parties that traditionally vote with Labor - Hadash and the Arab Democratic Party - to introduce a vote of no confidence in the Rabin government on the expropriation issue.

"We decided to offer this no-confidence motion after it was made clear that the Rabin government is implementing policies of the Likud," explained two Arab MKs.

The extraordinary prospect of Likud MKs joining Arab MKs in toppling the government convinced Rabin to "defer" the expropriation orders at a special cabinet meeting on 22 May.

Ben Eliezer accepted the government's decision "with a grieving heart. This is a black day for me....The last thing I would have dreamed of is that the Likud ...would lend a hand to putting a lid on Jewish construction in Jerusalem...." Nonetheless, Ben Eliezer took comfort in the fact that only two plans had been frozen and "all other construction in Jerusalem will continue as planned. We undertook to build thousands of units and we will continue to build, not necessarily on Arab land and not through the expropriation of land."

During the first quarter of 1995, construction starts in Israel and the occupied territories were recorded at a pace not seen since the building boom of 1991. The increase has occurred exclusively in the realm of publicly financed construction.

In the settlements near Jerusalem during the first four months of 1995, construction was begun on 1,126 units, far more than the 324 units begun during all of 1994. During the second quarter, 224 units were begun. Under the 4,100 units approved by the government in January, the Ministry of Housing intends to start building 2,285 units in the Jerusalem region during 1995.

3. Settling Jerusalem

Israel's conquest of the West Bank in June 1967 enabled Israel to "reunify" East and West Jerusalem under its exclusive control.

On 27 June 1967, the Knesset authorized the government to extend "Israeli law, jurisdiction, and public administration over the entire area of the Land of Israel," thus establishing a legal pretext for all subsequent Israeli actions in the eastern part of the city. The next day, 71,000 dunams, only 6,000 of which had been part of the Jordanian municipality of Jerusalem, were annexed to Israel and placed under the jurisdiction of Israel's Jerusalem municipality. The lands thus annexed to Israel and incorporated into "unified Jerusalem" included areas as far north as Ramallah and as far south as Bethlehem.

Municipal Jerusalem

The annexation of Jordanian Jerusalem and its West Bank hinterland provided the foundation for an extensive program of residential construction for Israelis in the newly-acquired sector of the city - a program that during the past twenty-eight years has aimed at creating an unassailable Israeli presence there. In the years after 1967, 24,000 dunams (out of the annexed 71,000 dunams) were expropriated from their Palestinian owners for the construction of Israeli settlements in the annexed sector of the city. Today more than 170,000 Israelis live in 10 main settlement neighborhoods established in East Jerusalem, a number approximately equal to the official Arab population.

"International elements, including some in the United States," explained former deputy mayor Abraham Kehila in 1993, "are sometimes mistaken in identifying the eastern part of the city as Arab territory. But the truth is that the situation has fundamentally changed since the Six Day War. Anybody discussing Jerusalem's future has to take that into account."

While construction in East Jerusalem for Israelis has enjoyed the broadest measure of political support within Israel, government officials in mid-1994 revealed that a strict quota on construction for Arabs in the city has been enforced for more than twenty years with the aim of maintaining the Palestinian percentage of the city's residents at around 26 percent. The ministerial committee on Jerusalem explicitly adopted this limitation on Arab construction in 1973.

Since 1967, only 12 percent of all new construction in the city has taken place in the Arab sector, and this construction, unlike that for Israelis, has not benefitted from any government subsidies. During the 1977­1983 period, for example, 90 percent of all construction was for Israelis. This translates into annual rate of apartment construction of 2,170 for Israelis and only 230 for Palestinians. Housing construction for Israelis in East Jerusalem has been critical to the growth of the city and the maintenance of a stable Jewish majority of more than 70 percent. The 170,000 Israelis who today live in this area account for a startling 76 percent of the total increase in the city's Jewish population since 1967.

Government restrictions on Palestinian housing construction, and the complementary boom in Israeli construction which has seen approximately 40,000 apartment units built in East Jerusalem settlement communities, have ensured that Palestinians today comprise no greater a share of the city's population than they did in 1967.

Israeli planning programs envision an additional 46,300 housing units for the entire city, 10,000 of which are to be built on the 14,000 dunams of Israeli territory annexed to West Jerusalem in May of 1994. An additional 17,710 units will be located in settlement communities in East Jerusalem. The Arab sector has a capacity of 15,210 additional units, according to Israeli planners. But in contrast to extensive planning and infrastructural preparation for the Israeli sector, plans for Arab housing, without which construction is severely restricted, have routinely languished within the Israeli planning bureaucracy for years. In view of this situation, Israeli planners expect that in coming years the Israeli majority in East Jerusalem will increase at a relatively faster rate than in the past.

For most of the period it has occupied East Jerusalem, Israel, even while working towards securing an Israeli majority in the annexed part of the city, took care to preserve the separation of the city's various national and religious groups. New Israeli suburbs like Gilo and Neve Ya'acov encircled rather than penetrated existing blocs of Arab habitation. During the Likud's tenure, however, efforts also were made to increase the "Jewish presence" throughout Jerusalem's Old City - in, around, and among its Palestinian residents. This policy corresponded to that followed in the West Bank, where settlements were established, particularly during the 1980s, in areas close to Arab villages and towns.

The sensitive nature of such policies in the Old City outside the Jewish Quarter was demonstrated when the U.S. Congress voted in 1990 to reduce aid to Israel by $3.5 million, the amount that had been allocated by the Israeli government for the contested "purchase" of St. John's Hospice near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Led by Minister of Housing Ariel Sharon, ideologically motivated settlement groups spearheaded government efforts in the 1990­92 period to purchase homes and land and otherwise occupy sites in the Arab neighborhoods of Silwan, the Mount of Olives, Wadi Joz, Sheikh Jarrah, as well as within the Old City's Muslim and Christian Quarters.

"We have set a goal for ourselves of not leaving one neighborhood in East Jerusalem without Jews," explained Sharon in mid-1992. "This is the only thing that can assure a united city under Israeli sovereignty."

The Labor victory in June 1992 heralded a change in emphasis. For Rabin, Likud's provocative settlement in the Old City was "foolish and stupid. What is more important," he said shortly before the election, "is to establish a Jewish link between Ma'ale Adumim and Jerusalem."

Rabin did not increase the pace of the settlement drive on the Old City's Muslim Quarter and neighborhoods such as Silwan, but he also did not tamper with changes already introduced under the Likud. For, notwithstanding his hostility to the previous government's actions in the Old City, Rabin shared the broad Israeli consensus regarding the permanence of its rule over East Jerusalem.

"Jerusalem and outlying areas cannot be defined by us as a political or a security issue," Rabin explained shortly after his election in June 1992. "United Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty will remain our capital forever. For us it is the heart and soul of the Jewish people."

Throughout the eastern sector of the city, Rabin implemented the construction of new housing and infrastructure outlined in plans published during the Likud era; in some places, such as Har Homa, he moved to expand it. Plans for the construction of permanent dwellings at Airplane Hill, a site partly owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, as a southern settlement in annexed East Jerusalem have been resurrected. There are currently 1,400 duplex mobile homes on the site. The new plan calls for the construction of 2,700 housing units.

The Jerusalem municipality has won the preliminary approval of the Ministries of Finance and Housing to establish a new suburban settlement between Pisgat Ze'ev and French Hill in northeastern annexed East Jerusalem. The 800-dunam site comprises 680 dunams of Palestinian and 120 dunams of Israeli-owned uncultivated land.

Privately owned Arab land in Jerusalem routinely has been confiscated for the construction of large-scale housing estates for Israelis. In 1980, 4,400 dunams were taken for the creation of Pisgat Ze'ev, the largest expropriation in more than a decade. Israel was criticized for the expropriation at the time both by the United Nations (in Security Council Resolution 476) and the United States. The next confiscation occurred at Har Homa, on the southern edge of the city in 1991, where ground-breaking soon will begin for the construction of 6,500 units. Thirty percent of this land is owned by Palestinians, the remainder by Israelis. The confiscation of 535 dunams announced in late April 1995 for the expansion of Jerusalem settlements near Bayt Hanina and Bayt Safafa was, as noted above, frozen.

In November 1993, long-serving Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek was defeated by Ehud Olmert, a veteran Likud politician and former cabinet minister. Olmert, together with his coalition partners on the municipal council from the National Religious Party (NRP), are known patrons of Ateret Kohanim, a group that has spearheaded provocative settlement efforts in the Old City's Muslim and Christian Quarters and in the village of Silwan. They also favor new Jewish developments in the hitherto solidly Arab neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrar and A-Tur. Olmert himself favors controversial housing developments for Israelis on the Mount of Olives and in Ras-al Amud.

"We will bring 100,000 more Jews to East Jerusalem, and we do not need to be afraid about it," declared Shmuel Meir, head of the Jerusalem branch of the NRP, after Olmert's election. "We will work to strengthen the Jewish population there and to build thousands of new apartments in [the East Jerusalem settlement areas of] Har Homa, Neve Ya'acov, Pisgat Ze'ev, and East Talpiot."

Olmert, like other leading political figures on the municipal council, opposes the Oslo agreement concluded by Labor with the PLO, describing it as a "dark cloud over the city." He is determined to preempt Palestinian demands for sovereignty in the eastern part of the city and to make Jerusalem the capital of the state they hope will emerge from the Oslo process. And he views settlement in East Jerusalem as a crucial element of this effort to increase the settlement drive in the city. Olmert also favors additional housing for Israelis all along the pre-1967 cease-fire line that once divided the city "to ensure that the city will remain a united city under Israeli control for eternity." Indeed, one of his election promises was that he would "expand Jerusalem to the east, not to the west." He advocates expanding the city's border farther into the occupied West Bank, in the direction of the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, an option that planners have long considered but rejected for political reasons. Olmert's ability as mayor to determine Jerusalem's construction is limited by national and regional planning agencies, but in any case, the Rabin government's creation of "territorial continuity" - linking Ma'ale Adumim and Jerusalem - accomplishes the same objective without the political fallout that would attend outright annexation.

"Although I can't make political decisions on the issue of Jerusalem - these are the responsibility of the national government - I can make things happen on the ground, like building along the old border and creating continuity of Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem," he explained early in 1994. "My decisions on these issues will influence the options available to the government for a political solution for Jerusalem."

Greater Jerusalem

Nowhere has Rabin's policy of settlement expansion been more evident than in East Jerusalem's hinterland, the critical heart of the West Bank where Israel has established the infrastructure for the creation of an Israeli majority.

In the 1970s, the term "Greater Jerusalem" was applied only to the expanded boundaries of the city, including newly constructed suburbs such as French Hill, Gilo, and Neve Ya'acov built on annexed territory. Today, however the term encompasses a far greater expanse of the West Bank.

"The area from Ramallah in the north to Bethlehem in the south, Ma'ale Adumim in the east and Mevasseret [an Israeli suburb of Jerusalem] in the west is one metropolitan area," explained Moshe Amirav, a former member of the Jerusalem city council, in 1991.

Greater Jerusalem is defined by two concentric rings of Israeli settlements in lands captured during the June 1967 war. The inner circle of settlements is composed of the Israeli neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem, now housing more than 170,000 people. These suburbs are aimed at consolidating an overwhelming Israeli majority in the city itself by providing housing for Jews and thereby constricting the expansion of Arab population. They also create a physical barrier to the unification of Palestinian Jerusalem with its West Bank hinterland.

The outer chain of settlements encircles Jerusalem to its south, east, and north. This circle, extending 11 miles at its most distant from downtown Jerusalem, includes more than half of all Israeli settlers in the West Bank excluding annexed Jerusalem.

Ariel Sharon, in a late 1991 Knesset speech outlining his plan to increase the Israeli population in Greater Jerusalem to one million, promised to build a "solid belt of settlement" from the Green Line through the town of Beitar, just south of Jerusalem, which is planned to reach a population of 70,000, and Gush Etzion. "Thousands of units" were promised to expand Efrat northward to Bethlehem.

The actions of the Rabin and Peres governments are proceeding in this spirit. Jerusalem's West Bank hinterland fits Labor's criteria for continuing vibrant settlement activity - successful and growing towns supported by the vast majority of Israelis as a natural part of Israel.

In the east, Ma'ale Adumim, with a current population of 22,000 and a planned population of 60,000, is being enlarged to create a territorial link with Jerusalem to the northwest and eastward "to the ridges" overlooking Jericho.

Settler Population
in "Greater Jerusalem" ­ 1993
Settlement
Population
Settlement
Population
Abir Ya'acov
360
 Har Adar
1,420
Adam
300
 Har Gilo
300
Allon
120
 Karmei Tsur
210
Alon Shevut
1,500
 Kedar
180
Bet Horon
530
 Kfar Adumim
780
Efrat
3,500
 Kfar Etzion
470
El'azar
280
 Ma'ale Adumim
17,000
Givat Ze'ev/Givon
7,100
 Migdal 'Oz
170
Giv'on ha Hadasha
600
 Rosh Zurim
280
Hadar Betat/Ilit
3,080
Tekoa
60 0
East Jerusalem
168,000
Total Population
206,420

Source: Peace Now. Reprinted in Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, February 1994.

The government is moving forward with plans to tie the Adumim bloc of settlements, anchored by Ma'ale Adumim, the largest West Bank outpost, to Jerusalem. According to Mordechai Gur, at the time deputy defense minister, the purpose of this effort was to consolidate the already existing "territorial continuity running from Vered Jericho overlooking Jericho through Ma'ale Adumim to Jerusalem." In October 1993, one month after the Oslo Accords were initialled, Gur noted that Israel intended to present this achievement to Palestinian negotiators as a geographical fact. "Ma'ale Adumim is part of Jeru salem," Gur declared. According to the Jerusalem weekly newspaper, Kol Ha'Ir, Gur "promised that the extensive construction underway in the city will continue and even increase."

The northern ring is anchored by Givat Ze'ev, which, like Ma'ale Adumim, was originally established with a view towards its eventual inclusion in a Greater Jerusalem. At Givat Ze'ev, the town's southern border has been extended toward Jerusalem by the annexation of hundreds of dunams of West Bank land near the Palestinian town of Bet Iksa. The addition of these lands to Givat Ze'ev, where 2,200 apartment units are under construction, is intended to create territorial continuity between this settlement close to Ramallah and Jerusalem.

As a demonstration of the government's commitment to the permanent retention of the West Bank area between Jerusalem and the Etzion Bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem, Rabin approved shortly after his election in 1992 the completion of the $42 million Gilo-Gush Etzion road linking the settlements south of Bethlehem with Jerusalem.

The government regards Gush Etzion as an integral part of Jerusalem's defensive perimeter," announced Benjamin Ben Eliezer. The highway, he added, "is of prime security importance." Gur had noted on 21 August 1992 that "Past experience has proven that in order to defend Jerusalem, one must have a strip of defense surrounding it in the north, south, east, and west. We shall insist that even though we shall have peace." He continued: "We must take into our calculation the necessity to defend Jerusalem and to build it in such a way that we shall be able to defend it."

In December 1993, Rabin approved the creation of a "municipal continuity" between Jerusalem, Givat Ze'ev, and Ma'ale Adumim, principally thorough the construction of new roads and tunnels.

Rabin has a longstanding interest in the Greater Jerusalem concept. As chief of staff, he advised in June 1967 that Israel annex a more significant portion of the West Bank to Jerusalem than his political superiors.

"In the Six Days War the government decided to extend Israeli law and jurisdiction to East Jerusalem," he explained in May 1991. "I proposed then to Prime Minister [Levi] Eshkol and to Defense Minister [Moshe] Dayan to apply Israeli law to a much larger area. If my proposal had been accepted, today there would be no Jerusalem problem. Eshkol and Dayan said they did not want to swallow too many Arabs. They simply took my proposal and narrowed it."

The de facto annexation of a large swath of the West Bank in close proximity to Jerusalem became far more explicit in the early weeks of 1995, when the Rabin government approved the three-year building plan, discussed in the previous chapter, that would add over 30,000 units (with a potential to house some 120,000 more Israelis) by 1998 to the already formidable Israeli population concentrations in an area running from Ramallah in the north to Hebron in the south.

"We have made it," explained Housing Minister Ben Eliezer's top aide on 10 January 1995. "Ma'ale Adumim is not part of Judea and Samaria, but a city like any in the center of the country, for example, Rosh HaAyn or Hadera. Every year, including this year, we are building thousands of units, which will join it to Jerusalem in the direction of Pisgat Ze'ev." Before implementation of these plans, the boundary of Ma'ale Adumim came to within 175 meters of the settlement in the northeast corner of annexed East Jerusalem.

Polis, the respected columnist for Ha'aretz, commented at the time that Ben Eliezer's plan for the construction during 1995 of an additional 4,000 dwelling units in Greater Jerusalem settlements "is intended to persuade the Palestinians at the negotiations on the permanent status to give up spacious territories outside the municipal bounds of the unified city."

More important in terms of demonstrating the existence of a political consensus in Israel favoring this policy, however, were statements from a range of government officials, including ministers belonging to Meretz, a coalition of parties usually the most critical of settlements among Israel's governing parties. For the first time, Meretz ministers Yossi Sarid and Amnon Rubinstein noted their approval of this campaign. Rubinstein explained on 10 January 1995 that although he opposes the thickening of settlements and further land confiscations, "it is necessary to strive to enable the Etzion Bloc to stay under Israeli sovereignty." And Sarid remarked that he supported continued construction in Ma'ale Adumim. Israelis long ago ceased to regard their new neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as settlements. In most respects, they are viewed as an "unremarkable" part of Israel.

4. The Oslo Process and Settlement

The Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles (DOP) on Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip signed on 13 September 1993 established a broad framework under which Israel was to devolve certain powers to Palestinian administrators, initially appointed by the PLO and subsequently by an elected Palestinian Council. As the Oslo process progressed and further agreements were signed, the date for Council elections was set for early 1996 and additional powers were transferred to the Palestinians. From the initial signing of the draft agreement, however, it was clear that control over land and settlement were not among the powers to be transferred.

According to the DOP, the territories were to remain a single territorial unit insofar as:

  • Israel would continue its responsibilities as de facto sovereign, bound by the international norms governing belligerent military occupation
  • Israel would forgo any right to annex territories during the interim period
  • Palestinians would not make unilateral declarations, of independence for example, aimed at changing the territories' status.

During the interim period pending the resolution of final status established by the DOP, Israelis living in or visiting the territories were accorded a different legal and administrative status than Palestinian residents, just as Israeli settlements were to enjoy a different legal and administrative status than adjoining Palestinian communities. Security of the settlers would be provided exclusively by Israel, which had the authority to continue building and expanding existing settlements and even to create new ones. The disposition of state lands in the West Bank continued to be controlled by Israel.

Under the DOP, the Palestinians conceded that their authority in the occupied territories, at least during the interim period, would not extend to Israeli settlements and settlers, to roads used by settlers, to the borders separating the territories from Israel, Egypt, and Jordan; and to East Jerusalem-- all issues deferred to the final status negotiations.

Neither the Palestinian Authority (PA) nor the elected Palestinian Council that would replace it would have any legislative powers concerning settlements or Israelis. Israel would redeploy from the territories, but the military government would not be abolished and sovereignty under international law would continue to be vested in it. More significantly, the code of military orders that had hitherto formed the basis of the legal systems in the West Bank and Gaza Strip - and that established the legislative veneer for land confiscations, settlement activities, and the separate status of Israeli settlers - was to remain in force. The draft agreement did, however, call for a joint review of these orders.

Although the DOP specifically excluded the issues of Israeli settlements and settlers from consideration during the interim period, their status during these five years was clearly and precisely addressed in the two agreements that followed - the Cairo agreement, signed on 4 May 1994, and the interim agreement, or "Oslo II," signed on 28 September 1995. Both agreements make the centrality of settlements abundantly clear. Thus, in presenting the Cairo agreement to the Knesset on 11 May 1994, Rabin straightforwardly acknowledged that "the concern for Israel's security and the security of Israelis and the settlements is evident in every line and word." Or, as Yossi Beilin, at the time deputy foreign minister and one of Shimon Peres' closest associates, wrote in a 27 September Ma'ariv article defending Oslo II:

The most ridiculous Likud accusation is that of abandoning the settlers. The agreement was delayed for months in order to guarantee that all the settlements would remain intact and that the settlers would have maximum security. This entailed an immense financial investment. The situation in the settlements has never been better than in the situation created following the Oslo II agreement [emphasis added].

map The Cairo agreement, officially titled the "Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area," detailed the mechanisms and limits of Palestinian autonomy according to the "Gaza-Jericho first" framework outlined in the DOP eight months earlier. Many of its provisions concerning settlement were confirmed and amplified in the subsequent Oslo II, and will be dealt with below.

The Cairo agreement also served as an important prelude to the later agreement by creating territorially unified blocs of settlements in the Gaza Strip: an important objective for both Rabin and the right-wing opposition had been to create territorially contiguous blocs of Israeli settlements amidst noncontiguous blocs of Palestinian autonomy. As Rabin explained to the Knesset in May 1994: "Placing the settlements in blocs, that is, demarcating the settlements that can be put in blocs, allows blanket protection of most of the settlements in the Gaza Strip, with the exception of two isolated settlements." As for these two isolated settlements - Netzarim (whose approach road separates Gaza city from the southern Gaza Strip) and Kfar Darom - the Cairo agreement specified that a large contingent of Israeli border police be based permanently at each, as well as at major road axes leading to them.

Oslo II, the "Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip" (also known as the "Taba agreement" for the Egyptian site where it was negotiated), outlined the next stage of Israel's redeployment in the West Bank and detailed the mechanisms and limits of extending Palestinian self-rule beyond the Gaza Strip and Jericho to significant portions of the West Bank. It is this agreement that sets the conditions for the years until the final status of the occupied territories is agreed upon.

Two striking aspects of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation stand out in this interim agreement: it transforms Israel's "belligerent" rule over Palestinians into a partnership operating with Palestinian consent, and it repudiates what Prime Minister Rabin had called the "hallucination" of Greater Israel fostered by a generation of Labor and Likud politicians. In this agreement, diplomacy has created an extraordinary, cooperative order between Israelis and Palestinians.

The agreement transforms Israel's occupation army into a "guest army," operating in the West Bank, as it already did in Gaza, not only by virtue of military conquest but also with Palestinian authorization. This represents a tremendous achievement for Israel's Labor Party, which had always sought Palestinian partners to relieve Israel of the burdens of administering the lives of Palestinians while assuring its military control and colonization efforts.

The main feature of the agreement, which runs to over 300 pages including annexes, is the division of the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) into three zones - each with a different mix of Israeli and Palestinian responsibility. Area A, which comprises about 1 percent of the West Bank, consists of the seven major Palestinian cities - Jenin, Qalqiliyah, Tulkarm, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In Hebron, however, a 3.5 sq. km. area inhabited by some 400 Israelis and 20,000 Palestinians will remain under complete Israeli control. In Area A, the Palestinian Council will have complete authority for civilian security.

Area B comprises all other Palestinian population centers (except some refugee camps) and totals 27 percent of the West Bank in which Israel will retain "overriding security responsibility." In Area C, comprising 72 percent of the West Bank including all settlements, military bases and areas (some on private Palestinian land), and state lands, Israel retains sole security authority. Powers not related to territory will be transferred to the Palestinian Council. The agreement includes a timetable for the transfer of undefined parts of Area C to Palestinian control, beginning in the latter part of 1996.

The broad range of protections for settlements and settlers during the interim period secured in the Cairo agreement was reaffirmed - and indeed expanded - in the interim agreement. The protections enumerated in Oslo II include:

  • Agreement that no settlement will be evacuated during the 5-year interim period scheduled to end in May 1999
  • Exclusion of settlements, settlers, "vital arteries" (main roads, water pipelines, electrical and telephone lines), and water resources from any Palestinian jurisdiction, interference, or control
  • The creation of blocs of settlements, where the territorial continuity between them has been assured
  • Extensive and complex arrangements for security cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian military, police, and internal security forces
  • Limitation on the size, armaments, and jurisdiction of Palestinian security forces
  • Continuing Israeli supervision over the use and registration of all lands
  • Limitation on Palestinian land use near settlement areas and continuing Israeli control over Palestinian zoning and land use decisions.

Oslo II also reaffirms the principle, sanctified in the Cairo agreement, that settlers and Israelis in the autonomous areas would under no circumstances be placed under Palestinian authority, even in criminal matters. Thus, Palestinian legislation cannot "deal with a security issue which falls under Israel's responsibility" or "seriously threaten other significant Israeli interests protected by this agreement." Rabin's explanation to the Knesset of this provision at the time of the 4 May accord applies to the interim agreement as well:

the legal appendix stipulates that the Palestinian authority will not have - I repeat, will not have - powers with regard to Israeli citizens, Israeli settlements, and the area where the military installations will be located. This means that the Palestinian police will not be able to detain Israelis, and the Palestinian courts will not try them. Israel alone will have this power, as before. Furthermore, Palestinians who harm or attempt to harm Israelis in the regions under Israeli authority and who are captured by the Israeli security authorities will be questioned by Israel....

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the prime minister specified that "even if an Israeli commits a crime in the area under the authority of the Palestinian authority - for example, on the streets of Gaza - it is the duty of the Palestinian authority to detain the suspect and call the Israeli authorities, which alone have the power to arrest him and keep him in custody."

As for land, Oslo II secured the critical recognition by the recently elected Palestinian Council of the "legal rights of Israelis related to Government and Absentee land located in areas under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council." This important clause establishes an agreed upon rationale for continuing Israeli control over all state and "absentee" lands, even in Areas A and B. This is a crucial concession on the part of the Palestinians, since by the time the original DOP was signed Israel already had classified substantial portions of the West Bank (estimates range from just under 50 to just over 70 percent of the total land area) as "state land." The clause also establishes a precedent for the continuation of settlements and their expansion even in the event of their transfer to nominal Palestinian control.

In principle, however, Oslo II does suggest that in a permanent solution, Israel's explicit territorial requirements in the occupied territories will be limited to settlements and military locations. While these considerations still provide the basis for an assertion of formal sovereignty over a large proportion of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they do represent the first time that Israel has formally established any limitation on its territorial claims to the areas.

The ruling Labor Party's view of a final territorial settlement is reflected in the territorial arrangements made in this interim pact: Israel is laying claim to significant territories around Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and its western high-lands, and the June 1967 border region. Israeli control of the road system and strategic heights along the area's central spine has produced a gerrymandering of territory in much of the reminder of the West Bank. Indeed, if further demonstration of Labor's vision of the future were needed, its construction of over $30 million in bypass roads would serve. The bypass road network enables Israelis to travel from one settlement to another and from the settlements to Israel proper without passing through Palestinian population concentrations. Palestinians, restricted to an antiquated road network that hardly has been improved since 1967, are not permitted to use these roads.

A few days after Oslo II was signed, Major General Uzi Dayan, head of the IDF Planning Branch and a chief negotiator of the accord, explained that elements of the agreement relating to security were guided by three considerations: the West Bank's place in Israel's overall strategic security concept, defense of the settlements and their routine life, and the prevention of Palestinian armed attacks against Israeli population centers.

Given Israel's determination, clear since the beginning of the Israeli-PLO talks, to exploit the advantages awarded by its superior power, it is no surprise that Oslo II reflects in large measure its vision. The agreement, while giving the Palestinians far greater control over their everyday affairs throughout the territories, offers them unchallenged control of less than 10 percent of the West Bank (when one takes into account the clause assuring Israel legal rights over the "state lands" in Areas A and B) with uncertain promises about future expansion. At the same time, the agreement successfully preserves what Israel considers to be its cardinal interests in the West Bank - principally its demands to remain in strategic control of the entire area and to preserve its exclusive control over settlements and settlers. As the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv concluded in an editorial of 27 September 1995, even after the agreement: "The key to the future of the territories is still in Israel's hands."

Oslo II is unusual and perhaps unique among disengagement agreements; traditionally, the displacement of one army by another and the transfer of power detailed in such agreements is complete and unambiguous. But a close reading of the September 1995 accord shows that the occupation has not ended and that Israel's wide-ranging responsibilities as occupying army under international law have not changed. The PLO is not really assuming sovereign power. The military government is not being abolished. Israel remains, with Arafat's consent as well as according to international law, the de facto sovereign of the areas that the PLO will now administer under contract with Israel.

Thus, while PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat's objective is clear - Palestinian sovereignty and a complete end to Israeli rule, the Cairo and Oslo II agreements suggest a different outcome. They offer the road map of the policy the Israeli government is drawing for the occupied territories minus East Jerusalem; and not only for the interim period but for the "final status" as well.

Israel's policy of encouraging the transfer of large numbers of its own population - settlers - into the territories is a violation of the Geneva Convention. The settlers represent Israel's interest in remaining permanently in the territories. Their demand for resources (primarily land) and for security from hostile Palestinians have turned Israel's internationally-mandated responsibilities towards the Palestinians - as the residents of the territories occupied during time of war - on their head. The DOP, the Cairo agreement, and Oslo II sanctify these conflicting responsibilities; indeed the prevailing assumption guiding both Israel and the PLO, at least as it is expressed in these three agreements, is that Palestinian and settler requirements are not irreconcilable.

This assumption, however, is contested by significant elements in both Israel and the Palestinian community. In the early days after the Oslo agreement, Ehud Barak, at the time Israel's chief of staff, warned Rabin that the redeployment called for in the West Bank could not be effected while settlements remained. The settler community argued that any devolution of power to Palestinians created a mortal threat to them.

The comments of Avraham Tal, writing in the newspaper Ha'aretz immediately after the Cairo agreement of May 1994, are still valid in the wake of Oslo II. On 6 May 1994, he criticized the "security absurdity" created by the Cairo agreement's preservation of settlements, which he argued, prevents the establishment of a workable autonomy regime. "In order to implement the principle that settlements will not be uprooted during the interim period and that Israel will continue to be responsible for the security of Israelis within the Palestinian authority," Tal wrote,

the IDF will be compelled to occupy almost 20 percent of the Gaza Strip [the Katif Bloc], to fortify four additional settlements, and to rule over three principal traffic axes.

During the interim period, the IDF will also have to protect about 100 Israeli communities scattered throughout Judea and Samaria: in order to accomplish this it will continue to rule the roads of the territories, to fortify numerous settlements and to have completely free access to most traffic axes. Under these conditions, the "independent government" of the interim period lacks all meaning, and from the Palestinian perspective, is pathetic.

Rabin believed, however, that the Cairo and Oslo II agreements represented a great victory in his campaign to secure a permanent Israeli role in the occupied territories. Winning the PLO's collaboration in a system of continuing Israeli rule in Gaza and the West Bank was first among his achievements, he believed.

"Arafat's arrival [in Gaza]," noted the Ma'ariv's political commentator Chelmi Shalev in May 1994, "symbolizes the PLO's liquidation as an external, terrorist organization and its conversion into the Palestinians' established political arm, operating in the territories under an Israeli eye. This, in actual fact, was the main goal of the Rabin government in the entire Oslo process."

5. Settlement and Post-Cairo Policy

Rabin's response to the killing of 29 Palestinians in Hebron on 25 February 1994, three months before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, offered clear evidence that he had no intention of evacuating any settlements during the interim period.

The rampage by a settler at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque prompted the most insistent calls since Oslo for the inclusion of the settlement issue in Israel-Palestinian negotiations.

Faisal Husseini, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat's representative on the West Bank, was one of many Palestinians calling for a revision the Oslo Accord's provisions on settlements. "What was acceptable before is not acceptable now," he said. "There is no way of taking peace and the settlers together. It's either the settlers or peace."

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who periodically called for a reevaluation of the need to maintain Gaza settlements, warned after the massacre that the settlement of Kiryat Arba, where the assailant lived, is a "hot-house for murderers."

"Woe unto us if we don't deal with [settlements] now. Israel must search its soul and see what settlements are really needed," said Peres.

Rabin, however, rejected the calls for a general disarming of settlers and the evacuation of the 42 Israeli families living in the center of Hebron's more than 60,000 Arabs in favor of far more limited measures, such as banning the more militant settler organizations. "Israel," Rabin declared in the Knesset on 1 March 1994, "will not change its fundamental positions regarding the security of the State of Israel and its citizens, including the Jewish settlers in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip."

The PLO criticized Rabin's response as "hollow" and demanded the disarmament of all settlers and the dismantling of unspecified settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But demands for a revision in the terms of the Oslo agreement were never formalized.

In subsequent months, Israel's measures did not have a demonstrable effect on settlers. Had a decision been taken to remove the zealots in the immediate aftermath of the bloody events of February, Rabin would have made both a political and security master stroke. The settlement movement and its political patrons were then unprepared for such a move, which would have won public support. The IDF, too, would have been relieved of assigning its soldiers for the thankless and dangerous task of guarding the settlers.

But the moment for such a decision quickly passed. The settlers organized themselves against such a move, prominent rabbis sanctioned the refusal by soldiers to obey orders to evacuate any settlement, and the settlement lobby went on the political offensive to warn of calamity if Rabin tried to remove the Hebron settlers.

Evacuation of Hebron would have established the principle that dismantling settlements was an integral part of the Oslo process. For that reason alone, Rabin opposed such a move. His commitment not only to maintain settlements, even those as divisive as Hebron and Netzarim in Gaza, but also to assure their "natural growth"-- that is, their continued expansion-- attests to the government's fundamental identity of interests with settlers in the occupied territories.

Throughout 1994, Rabin and the settlers shared an informal consensus on the need to delay the expansion of Palestinian self-rule and to pursue an accelerated program of settlement construction in Jerusalem and its West Bank environs, if not in the West Bank as a whole.

Desultory negotiations on redeployment continued throughout 1994 and the first half of 1995, punctuated by high profile Palestinian attacks on Israelis both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. The attacks only strengthened Rabin's preference to delay redeployment. Thus, as Rabin acknowledged during 1994:

Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] is where there is a particular burden on the regular and reserve army forces...because the planning of settlements there was not for the security of settlements. I am not talking about the Etzion bloc, or about Ariel or other large communities. We will have not just two elements like Netzarim and Kfar Darom [settlements in Gaza where Palestinian attacks occurred], but between 50 to 70 like them.

While the requirement to protect settlers was at the heart of the protracted negotiations on redeployment, Rabin's settlement policies themselves were almost entirely absent from the formal talks. The PA, having conceded the fundamental point on the maintenance of settlements during the interim period, watched Israel's continuing settlement drive with increasing frustration but without an effective strategy to confront it. Indeed, the Palestinian leadership, confronted with a multitude of outstanding issues deemed to be of greater immediacy (such as the freeing of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel and direct passage between Gaza and Jericho), was at the forefront of efforts to defuse popular concerns about Israel's actions. Continuing settlement, it was argued, could not be permitted to disrupt the peace process. When circumstances forced Palestinians to raise the issue formally with Israel, the structure of negotiations made it impossible for them to have a substantive influence on Israeli policy.

The Rabin government's settlement activities were forced onto the agenda in the early months of 1995. Beginning in late December 1994, popular Palestinian opposition to the expansion of the Efrat settlement south of Bethlehem was followed by numerous Palestinian protests throughout the West Bank, particularly in regions where settlements were fencing in additional lands claimed by Palestinians, or where new roads were being established for Israeli settlers.

On 3 January 1995, the Israeli cabinet decided to stop construction at the Efrat site. While the government presented the action as a precedent-setting decision in which a legally authorized settlement project was canceled by government fiat, it approved the construction of 200 dwelling units at another site closer to existing residential development in Efrat. And less than two weeks later it announced a three-year building plan, in effect the most explicit declaration since 1992 of the Rabin government's intention to continue its expansionist policies.

The Palestinian protests pushed Palestinian negotiators, for the first time since the signing of the Oslo Accord in September 1993, to raise the issue of settlements in talks with Israel. But the resulting talks failed to produce anything more than a reiteration of longstanding Israeli government policies and a reassertion that settlements remain an exclusively Israeli concern during the interim period.

Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath, describing the Efrat decision as moving the construction "from one hill to another," expressed doubts that the government, which "was chosen because of a platform which described settlement as an obstacle to peace," still maintained that position. "You thicken, add, and create [settlement] facts during the interim period," he stated, "that will create precedents for the final status, in opposition to clauses and to the spirit of the Declaration of Principles."

The same day as the Israeli cabinet decision, settlements were the main topic at a meeting in Cairo of the Israel Palestinian Higher Liaison Committee. Minister Yossi Sarid explained that settlements had become the central problem in the negotiations. During these discussions, Palestinians demanded an explicit Israeli commitment to stop settlement construction and land confiscation.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres explained that Israel would not negotiate settlements during the interim period. He reiterated Israel's commitment not to establish new settlements or to confiscate new lands for settlement expansion or construction. Many lands now being fenced off to Palestinians had in fact been declared "state lands" by previous Israeli governments, he explained, and were only now being removed from Palestinian control. He added that new lands were being confiscated for two purposes only: for infrastructure such as water and sewers; and to enable the construction of "bypass" roads between settlements and around Palestinian population centers. Peres noted that Palestinian negotiators had approved of this construction as essential to Israel's redeployment in the West Bank. He stressed that land confiscations were an Israeli affair, in which the Palestinians had no role to play. In essence, he declared the issue "closed" until final status talks begin.

Attempting to take advantage of the momentum created by the Palestinian protests, the Palestinian Authority organized on 9 January a conference in Jericho on "the destruction of peace by settlements." This effort by Palestinian officials to take direction of an apparently spontaneous popular outburst of opposition to Israeli settlement and land confiscation failed to win substantive Israeli concessions. Their attempt to involve Washington in the controversy fared no better. On 10 January, the PA made a formal request to the United States "to intervene immediately to stop the settlements."

Washington's public response continued to maintain the position established in the wake of the Oslo agreement - that the settlement issue is a bilateral concern. "We admit that [settlements] are a problem," explained the State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly on 10 January 1995, "but we also revert back to the Declaration of Principles and enjoin the parties to deal with these issues in their negotiations."

At a 17 January meeting of the Knesset Committee on Foreign and Security Affairs, Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin explained that the problem facing Israel was not whether to continue settlement construction, but at what pace. "There is a great difference between natural growth and meteoric growth," he said.

He explained that he was "sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive," and promised more government support for construction in the East Jerusalem settlements of Har Homa and Shu'afat and to accommodate the natural growth of West Bank settlements Ma'ale Adumim, Beitar, and Givat Ze'ev.

The Oslo Accords, insisted Rabin, contain "no explicit commitment from us to freeze settlement in the territories."

When Rabin met PA head Yasir Arafat on 19 January 1995, he "informed" him of longstanding Israeli policy. His message to Arafat was that there would be no change in Israel's settlement program. Subsequent meetings with Arafat at the Erez checkpoint, in Cairo, and later in Washington broke no new ground. As far as Rabin was concerned, the settlement issue, at least as it related to the Palestinians, was closed.

In the short time since the Rabin assassination, the government of Shimon Peres has begun to establish policies towards settlers and settlements that distinguish it from its predecessor. These policies have served to illuminate the extent to which the central ideas concerning settlers embodied in the Oslo II agreement with the Palestinian reflect a broad Israel national consensus. They also reveal a more concrete political aim - to split the right-wing anti-Labor coalition before the October 1996 elections by drawing the religious community and moderate Likud voters to the Peres camp.

Peres has changed the public atmospherics of the relationship between the prime minister and the settlers. Rabin, even as he determined to protect settlements, could not refrain from conducting a public firefight with the settlement movement. Peres, like Rabin, has no intention to undermine the vitality of settlement in the West Bank. But he has used the post assassination period not to isolate and denigrate the settlement movement, but to encourage its mainstream to understand the commitment under Oslo to maintain the settlements.

Even before he took charge of the government, it was understood in some quarters that Peres was no enemy of settlements. An article by Shalom Yerusalemi in Ma'ariv on 25 October 1995 bears quoting:

Peres would like to stabilize the map of the interim settlements, hoping that this will be the permanent map of Israel and the Palestinian entity. Neither separation, nor annexation. To swallow the Palestinians, but not to eat them. That is why Peres is so enthusiastic about Oslo II, which gave the Palestinians control of only about 27 percent of the West Bank and left Israel with authority over Palestinian security and foreign affairs. Perhaps that is also the reason why he rubbed his hands with glee after the accord was signed and said in private conversation at the home of the Chinese ambassador: "We screwed the Palestinians."

Indeed, Peres conducted the lengthy negotiations at Taba mainly about the authority to be transferred to the Palestinians and said hardly anything about the borders. Peres believes, or wants to believe, that the 140,000 Jewish settlers will remain in the Territories in perpetuity, and that no Jewish settlement will ever be evacuated.

In presenting his government before the Knesset on 22 November, Peres explained:

Even though we have reached an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, we have no intention of ignoring the distress of the settlers in the territories....We will not lessen our responsibility for their security, and we will not turn a blind eye to their needs. And without violating agreements, we will talk with them, in order to resolve the real problems that have arisen-- or will arise--because of changes on the ground.

This public commitment has been fortified by a number of initiatives. Peres has sought to split the settlement movement by attempting to isolate religious extremists from the settler mainstream. On 19 November, the cabinet declared that "extremist, violent, racist, and terrorist organizations are a severe danger to Israel's democratic regime, the security of the state, and public welfare; the cabinet will work to outlaw them."

Administrative detention orders have been issued targeting settlers of the Hebron area belonging to right-wing groups associated, for example, with the late Meir Kahane. More than 120 indictments for such offenses as disorderly conduct, assault, and violating military commands have been handed down against settlement activists, including members of the "This is Our Way" and "Women in Green" groups that led protests last summer. A number of prominent rabbis also were called in for questioning but released for lack of evidence.

Peres, however, is attempting to defuse what Minister Efraim Sneh and others see as an inevitable conflict. He has dismissed calls to dismantle the military education system of "Hesder Yeshivas" which combine military service with religious studies often led by rightist rabbis.

He has also sought, with great success, to convince the National Religious Party (NRP) to moderate its opposition to Oslo. Peres views the NRP, the pro-settlement views of which led it in 1977 to desert Labor in favor of a coalition with the Likud and which commands the support of many religious settlers, as critical to his efforts to broaden public support for his government and the Oslo process. In his effort to court the NRP, he has reversed his view of the need to dismantle the NRP settlement of Netzarim in Gaza. At the end of November, Peres engaged Minister Yossi Beilin to declare, in the context of a dialogue with the NRP, not only that he was glad that the settlement in Hebron existed, but also that Israel "can attain a permanent arrangement in which most of the settlers would remain in their settlements and the areas they live in would be annexed to Israel and become part of sovereign Israel." The NRP, and the settlers they represent, are far more comfortable with Peres' preference for a "functional" compromise of the kind outlined in the Oslo II Accord than with Rabin's preferred territorial "separation" from the West Bank.

In the discussions that Beilin conducted with the NRP during November, it transpired that the party was willing to refrain from efforts to topple the government if Peres agreed to three conditions: to increase settler security; to support increased settlement construction, especially in Greater Jerusalem; and not to move beyond the Oslo II Accord before the 1996 election. Members of the Meretz Party vetoed a positive formal response from Peres. But Peres nonetheless won NRP support for Oslo II when the party's Knesset members issued a statement on 28 November that declared, "the NRP has not changed its position about Eretz Israel and our right to live in it. Nevertheless the NRP believes that no future government will embark on war in order to return to the [West Bank and Gazan] cities we left, unless security circumstances or gross violations call for a response."

An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz two days later observed that Beilin's remarks to the NRP were "especially surprising to those who thought that the Peres government would be at least as dovish as the previous government." It suggested that "the electoral future of the Labor Party depends on it being able to point to clear differences between it and the right."

Meretz Minister Yossi Sarid, a supporter of Rabin's preference for territorial separation, criticized Labor's growing affinity for a functional solution. "To my dismay, a cantonization plan for the West Bank is taking shape in the Labor Party today that returns us to the old and terrible idea of a functional compromise. I can only describe this plan as a policy of annexation in-the-making, little different from the enclave plan of Ariel Sharon."

In the weeks after Rabin's assassination however, it became increasingly clear that a national Israeli consensus supporting Oslo II, shrouded by rhetorical opposition during Rabin's tenure, had blossomed. The NRP statement is one indication of this backing. Former Likud Minister Ariel Sharon reiterated his support in mid-November when he noted that a Likud government could accept the implementation of Oslo II. Even Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu towards the end of December suggested a plan not much different from the Oslo II map, calling for a "demarcated autonomy, not a Palestinian state" in which Palestinians will rule Arab-inhabited areas while most of the West Bank will remain as a security area as defined in both the Camp David Accords - formulated by a Likud government - and the Oslo agreement devised by Labor.

The growing accommodation to Peres' policies by the religious settler movement was given another boost when the editor of the settler magazine Nekuda, Uri Elitzur, published by the Council of Jewish Communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (YESHA) called in December for a settler dialogue with the Palestinian Authority. The question, noted the editor, is not whether Oslo II is good or bad, but "how to live with it." The editorial caused an uproar among settlement leaders, forcing Elitzur to withdraw his suggestion for an official dialogue with the Palestinian Authority. Nevertheless, the action reflected an evolving accommodation by settlers to the reality that Oslo II represents an understanding that their future strategy has to aim at maximizing their advantages under the system Peres is creating.

In the West Bank itself, settlers may not like the Oslo agreement, but they are becoming reconciled to its existence. The implementation of the initial IDF redeployments, including the opening of bypass roads, has not yet produced any calamity. Settlers are anticipating with trepidation what Oslo II calls "further redeployment": the transfer of parts of Area C - comprising almost three-quarters of the West Bank - from Israeli to Palestinian rule. Settlers are determined that this land will remain under Israeli control. With Peres at the helm, the prospects of realizing this aim have never been better.

6. U.S. Policy on Settlements

From the June 1967 war until Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, successive U.S. administrations maintained a consistently negative view of settlement activity in the occupied territories. U.S. policy held that settlements were illegal and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Washington also viewed such settlements, particularly in East Jerusalem, as unilateral actions prejudicial to the determination of Jerusalem's final status. As of 1976, U.S. statements also characterized settlement construction as "an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace between Israel and its neighbors...."

The first Security Council resolution specifically directed at Israel's settlement construction was Resolution 446, passed on 22 March 1979, which declared that the "...policies and practices of Israel in establishing settlements...have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just, lasting peace...." Jimmy Carter was president at the time, and the debate surrounding the resolution provided a forum for an expression of U.S. views, as well as a lesson in their practical limitations.

The United States, along with the United Kingdom, abstained on this resolution criticizing Israel. However, on the narrow issue of settlements, Ambassador James Leonard noted: "as had been stated on a number of occasions at the United Nations and elsewhere, we are opposed to these settlements. We are opposed because we believe they could be perceived as prejudging the outcome of negotiations, and further because we believe they are inconsistent with the Fourth Geneva Convention and international law."

Resolution 452 calling for an end to settlement activities in the occupied territories, was passed several months later, on 20 July 1979. Consistent with its reluctance to censure Israel, the United States abstained. Nonetheless, the U.S. representative reaffirmed that "those settlements prejudge the outcome of Middle East peace negotiations [then underway with Egypt] and are inconsistent with international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention. We have asked Israel to cease its practice of establishing settlements, and I repeat that request here today." The United States was the only Council member to abstain on this resolution.

The next year, the United States did permit itself to use its vote in the Security Council to express its opposition to settlements. Security Council Resolution 465, passed on 1 March 1980, called Israeli settlement activity "a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention" and called on Israel "to dismantle the existing settlements and, in particular, to cease on an urgent basis the establishment, construction, and planning of settlements...." In discussing this resolution, U.S. Ambassador Donald McHenry stated, "We regard the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal under international law, and we consider them to be an obstacle to...a just and lasting peace in the Middle East." But even while voting in favor of the resolution, the United States questioned the resolution's manner of dealing with existing settlements. McHenry stated that, "there are a number of factors of a practical character that make impractical the call...for the dismantling of existing settlements. Some projects are not so easily dismantled."

Within days, however, the United States took the extraordinary step of disavowing its vote. The assistant secretary of state for congressional relations explained that "this call for dismantling [settlements] was neither proper nor practical. We believe that the future disposition of existing settlements must be determined during the current autonomy negotiations...."

More than any other president before him, Jimmy Carter attempted to engage Israel in an effort to stop settlement construction. Yet, like his predecessors, he was not willing to employ more than a token demonstration of American power or diplomacy in pursuit of this objective. Never was this attitude made clearer than following his administration's repudiation of its Security Council vote. At a news conference in April 1979, Carter noted, after expressing his hope that Israel would refrain from establishing new settlements, that "there is a limit to what we can do to impose our will upon a sovereign nation." Carter had personally asked Prime Minister Menachem Begin to freeze settlements at their first meeting in 1976, without result. Another direct appeal from Carter to Begin at the tripartite summit at Camp David in September 1978 had resulted in a short, insignificant, three-month interruption in some settlement activity.

Until 1980, then, U.S. policy regarding settlements rested upon five not-altogether consistent principles that can be gleaned from various official statements on the issue. These were:

  1. Settlements are illegal and a violation of international law
  2. Settlement construction prejudges the outcome of negotiations and is an obstacle to peace
  3. Once established, settlements can not easily be dismantled
  4. The disposition of settlements was a subject for negotiations
  5. Washington will go no further than pro forma protests about continuing settlement construction.

President Reagan's "Peace Plan" of 1 September 1982 was not inconsistent with this position on settlements:

The United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements during the transitions period. Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated.

But it was during Reagan's tenure - the period during which settlement construction entered its "take off" phase - that settlements ceased to be described as "illegal." No Security Council resolutions characterizing them as such were introduced during his administration.

President George Bush continued the precedent established by Reagan. Like Carter, however, Bush was publicly critical of Israel's settlement policies, particularly after the Gulf war when Secretary of State James Baker was trying to initiate an Israeli-Arab dialogue, and for the first time in years explicitly included East Jerusalem as occupied territory in which there should be no new settlements. Yet it was Bush who, under an agreement with Israel reached at the end of his term, endorsed for the first time extensive settlement activity.

In a June 1990 letter, Bush warned Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that if disagreements persisted between the two countries on settlements and the peace process,

there won't be any choice for the U.S. but to define its stand in a clear fashion both in public and at the UN.

You well know of my strong opposition to all settlement activity. I believe that such activity constitutes an obstacle to peace in that it signifies both Israel's desire to annex the territories and its insistence to take unilateral measures in order to change the existing situation, even before negotiations begin. Settlement activity necessarily spoils the atmosphere and makes more difficult the finding of Arab partners for peace.

Bush admonished Shamir to "consider a change in the government of Israel's order of priorities because our ability to advance the peace process depends upon reaching an understanding between our governments on the settlement issue."

Baker reaffirmed this position when he stated, during the summer of 1991, that U.S. policy "has been embraced by the administrations of both parties in this country...the creation of additional settlements are not conducive to the peace process. And in fact, we see them as the obstacle to peace and we've made our views known quite clearly to the Government of Israel."

Despite his administration's concern about settlement, the diplomatic framework for Arab-Israeli negotiations that Baker formulated during the first three quarters of 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf war, ignored Israel's policies in the occupied territories. U.S. diplomacy in the Madrid formula eschewed debate on the principal issues dividing the antagonists - including Israel's settlement program - in favor of realizing the tactical achievement of an international conference. As Bush himself noted in a June 1991 letter to Shamir, the shape of this postwar diplomacy reflected "a process already based for the most part on [Israel's] conditions."

Shamir used the occasion of the frequent visits Baker made to Israel while devising his negotiating framework in order to highlight Israel's power to continue, and indeed to expand, settlement; each time the secretary arrived in the country, a new outpost or expansion was announced. Baker was angered by such actions during (and in some measure in response to) his diplomacy, but was constrained in his discussions with Shamir by his own negotiating framework from dealing with the issue. Because the diplomatic concept he was pursuing centered upon an agreement on procedure, thereby implicitly excluding discussion of this central topic, he never asked for an Israeli commitment to freeze settlement activity. And Shamir, aware of this, forged ahead. "There has been a big disproportion between the coverage given by the media to the settlements issue and the attention and time devoted to the matter in our talks and discussions," the prime minister noted during Baker's July 1991 visit. "I do not consider this a particularly special or important issue liable to affect the current negotiations. The question of the settlements is not relevant to the political process."

But in September 1991, President Bush postponed consideration of an Israeli request for $10 billion in loan guarantees because of the extraordinary pace of Israel's settlement program. Figures compiled by the United States revealed that Israel had tripled its construction program during 1991 to more than 27,000 units in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. This was in violation of the Shamir government's February 1991 pledge, made as part of the U.S. agreement to provide Israel $400 million in loan guarantees, not to construct more than a "baseline" of 1,200 units annually in the West Bank.

The United States traditionally has prohibited Israel from spending U.S. aid money in occupied territory. Under the terms of the same $400 million loan guarantee agreement, Israel also pledged "not to direct or settle Soviet Jews beyond the green line" dividing Israel from the occupied territories. This pledge did not prevent thousands of recent immigrants from settling in West Bank communities, with government assistance.

"Israel deceived us on the subject of settlements," Aaron Miller, one of Baker's closest Middle East aides, was reputed to have complained in September 1991. "The government of Israel gave the U.S. fraudulent figures about the creation and expansion of settlements." In a late September visit to Israel, Baker told Shamir that the United States would not guarantee the loans unless Israel agreed to freeze settlements and stop the flow of money to the occupied territories.

By early 1992, Washington appeared to be insisting on more meaningful Israeli commitments that would exact a financial cost for continuing settlement and perhaps even force a slowdown if not a halt in Israel's settlement program. Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 6 February, Baker noted, "It is the view of the administration that any additional assistance [to Israel] should be extended only on terms and conditions that support United States policy positions and that do not run counter to United States policy positions, positions that have been the policy of every administration since 1967."

In a March 1992 speech, Baker aide Dennis Ross confirmed that, "there were assurances [from Israel], and in the aftermath of the $400 million in guarantees, settlement activity tripled." Efforts that month to reach a compromise between President Bush and congressional leaders failed because of the administration's insistence that new construction in the territories be banned as a condition for the guarantees.

"We will not accept any proposal by the Congress which fails to meet this fundamental test," explained State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiller at the time. "It must be consistent with United States policy since 1967 that settlements are an obstacle to peace."

Differences over settlements were not resolved until after the Labor Party victory in June 1992 and the formation of a new government by Yitzhak Rabin. The change was due less to specific concessions on Israel's part regarding settlement than on the U.S.'s trust in Rabin's changed set of national priorities. As Baker himself told a 22 July press conference in Cairo, "There appears to be an entirely different approach on the part of the Israeli government towards settlements in the occupied territories." The next day in Damascus, he declared: "I believe we will see an important, major reduction in settlement activity."

The terms of the preliminary agreement Baker reached with Rabin included:

  • The expectation that Washington would "turn a blind eye" to continuing settlement construction in annexed East Jerusalem
  • Agreement to continuing construction in the West Bank beyond that currently in progress to accommodate the settlements' "natural growth"
  • Provision of accurate data to Washington on construction plans
  • An Israeli agreement to establish no new settlements.

Baker's advance work was consummated on 11 August 1992, when Israel's new prime minister met with President Bush in Maine. The deal struck between the two men was far more generous than anything that had been offered to Rabin's predecessor. In granting Israel the $10 billion in loan guarantees, President Bush acquiesced in Israel's decision to complete the 11,000 units under construction throughout the territories and approved the agreement on additional construction reached in July. According to Ha'aretz's Akiva Eldar on 19 August, the agreement also included "unlimited settlement in Jerusalem and along the confrontation lines."

This important agreement established the guidelines for U.S. policy on settlement construction during Labor's tenure in office. It marked the first time Washington had formally agreed to settlement construction in the territories, and it established a permissive measure of Israel's building activities there that allowed both unlimited "natural growth" and settlement expansion funded by ostensibly "private" interests - this last a concept having little meaning given the fact that "private" construction projects are carried out with the permission, cooperation, and in most cases large subsidies of government agencies and are usually put up for bid by the Housing Ministry itself.

If anything, the Clinton administration has interpreted the Bush-Rabin understanding even more favorably, notwithstanding its assessment of "settlement penalties" resulting in deductions of $437.5 million, $216.8 million, and $60 million from U.S. loan guarantees in the autumn of 1993, 1994, and 1995 respectively. The provision allowing for "natural growth," for example, was publicly reaffirmed. In March 1993, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Edward Djerejian explained that "there is some allowance for - I wouldn't use the word `expansion' but certainly continuing some activity, construction activities in existing settlements. And that's basically in terms of...natural growth and basic, immediate needs in those settlements."

The evolution of U.S. policy regarding settlements under Clinton was further illuminated in Assistant Secretary of State Robert Pelletreau's testimony before Congress on 4 October 1994. From Pelletreau's remarks, it became clear that:

€Settlement expansion, after the Oslo agreement, was no longer an "obstacle to peace" but merely "a complicating factor in the peace process"

€Settlement expansion was not deemed inconsistent with the DOP

€Privately-funded settlement construction was not held to violate any agreement with the United States

€Settlement expansion in East Jerusalem was no longer considered a unilateral action prejudicial to determining the final status of Jerusalem.

These elements of U.S. policy are part of a broader, post-Oslo U.S. retreat from its traditional views. This retreat is particularly evident and settlement expansion funded by ostensibly "private" interests - in UN deliberations, where it became clear that the very principle of UN involvement in the central issues that had long defined Arab-Israeli affairs was no longer accepted by Washington. Following Oslo, the Clinton administration embraced the Israeli view that the UN no longer had any role to play on central settlement-related issues such as the legality of Israeli settlements and the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian sovereignty. Since these concerns would be resolved in "final status" negotiations scheduled to begin in the spring of 1996, they were no longer, according to Washington's reasoning, of concern to the international community.

The first suggestion that Washington viewed the Oslo agreement as an opportunity to circumscribe the UN role in the conflict's resolution occurred in November 1993, when U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright argued that Jerusalem, as a final status issue, should not be addressed by UN bodies and that the historical UN interest in these issues was a relic of a previous era. The established principles for the resolution of the conflicts over Jerusalem, refugees, and the Golan Heights were now the bilateral concern of Israel and the PLO. The UN, she argued, should therefore limit its involvement to resolutions supporting reconciliation and economic development. It was in this spirit that the United States opposed a draft resolution on settlements introduced by the Arab Group in February 1995.

The Oslo Accords were also used by the Clinton administration as a rationale for soft-pedalling opposition to continuing settlement construction. When, for example, Martin Indyk, ambassador-designate to Israel, was asked at his confirmation hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 2 February 1995 about U.S. policy on major new settlement construction just approved by the Rabin government, he declared:

Like the issue of Jerusalem - Israel and the PLO have agreed that settlements are a final-status issue and should be negotiated in the final status negotiations that will begin in May of next year.

My view is that settlements are a problem that complicate-- settlement activity is a problem that complicates the negotiations. It's not the only problem, certainly, at the moment; I think terrorism has a much more complicating impact, but it is a problem that complicates the negotiations. It certainly has a very negative impact on the Palestinians and in the wider Arab world as well....To try to put this in context for you, because the numbers should be very large, the Rabin government, as I said at the beginning, has seriously curtailed settlement activity, and one compares that to the previous government where there was a great deal of government-funded activity going on. These numbers are, in fact, very small, although I'm sure in the minds of the Palestinians that doesn't make a great deal of difference.

7. Conclusion

Israeli officials have been as circumspect about their "final status" preferences as Palestinian officials have been outspoken about their insistence upon Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as their capital. But a revealing window into Israeli thinking was offered by Shimon Peres at a UNESCO conference in Grenada in December 1993, only a few months after the Oslo agreement. Peres, generally considered to be the Palestinians' greatest advocate among Israel's leadership, offered an audience of intellectuals the following scenario:

The West Bank, in Peres' view, will have a different political future than the Gaza Strip. The latter would progressively obtain the attributes of statehood, while the West Bank would develop as an autonomous polity composed of Palestinians and Israeli settlers.

The autonomous authority would be responsible for all internal matters. Security and foreign affairs would remain in Israel's hands. A local parliament would be established for the West Bank, in which both Palestinians and Israeli settler candidates would stand for election, their respective representation determined by the relationship of the relative populations. Peres maintained that aside from questions of security and foreign affairs, the settler and Palestinian communities in the occupied territories have mutual interests - on tax, infrastructure, health, and environmental issues.

Each community, Peres suggested, would maintain its national identity. Settlers would continue to be Israelis and vote in Knesset elections. Palestinians would vote for candidates to the Jordanian Parliament.

Peres' plan is instructive in a number of important respects. It builds upon principles established for the interim period: unfettered Israeli control over settlement policy and expansion, and Palestinian acquiescence in the explicit distinction - in legal, security, planning, and other realms - between settlements and settlers on the one hand and Palestinians on the other.

Peres anticipates that final status agreements would sanctify these precedents (with some relatively inconsequential changes relating to sharing control over state lands not then included in the settlement inventory) and establish a firm contractual basis with the PA for legitimizing settlement in the West Bank and Gaza regions.

Peres' preferences reflect an attempt to combine the ideas of Israel's two most important architects of post-1967 thinking about the occupied territories. Moshe Dayan, Peres' mentor, long attempted to fashion a "functional compromise" for a shared rule of the territories among Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan. Yigal Allon, who counted Rabin as a supporter, argued for a territorial division of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan. Under Peres' ideas, Israel would withdraw from Gaza, although perhaps no further than it already has. The West Bank would be divided functionally into spheres (security, local affairs, Israeli settlement, etc.) with responsibility apportioned to either Israel, the Palestinians, or Jordan. Israel would remain the ultimate arbiter of the area, and Israeli settlement would proceed unhindered.

Peres appears prepared to accept Palestinian statehood, albeit limited in practical terms to the Gaza Strip or parts of it. And he acknowledges, and promotes, the PLO as the vehicle for implementation of this idea.

These two elements - the idea of statehood and the PLO as a partner - are viewed by Palestinians as the most promising concessions made by Israel during the last years of negotiations, and a prelude to Israel's complete withdrawal from territories conquered in 1967. For Israel's leadership, these two elements, once considered extremist heresy, are now accepted as necessary for protecting Israel's interests and securing its presence in the occupied territories. In Israel's view, the PLO has been transformed from a threat to Israel's vision of the future to its guarantor.

Peres can justly claim a national consensus on much of his thinking. Reviewing the program of Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, one Israeli report noted in spring 1995 that "it seems that the differences between [Netanyahu] and Labor leaders who support ideas raised by Shimon Peres in closed rooms - that Gaza should be regarded as the sole Palestinian entity alongside the state of Israel - is not so great."

In Gaza, the PA already exercises many attributes of statehood, a concept that Israel, in the context of an agreement that assures its own requirements, may be prepared to endorse.

But Arafat's powers in the West Bank are set to be far more circumscribed. Israel is eager that the burden of administering Palestinian affairs be transferred out of its direct control to the PA and in some instances to Jordan, but the scope of military security and territorial authority it is prepared to relinquish falls far short of what has already been ceded in Gaza. This system of interlocking, sectoral control through flexible lines of Israeli and Arab authority, some of it exercised informally, is at the heart of Peres' long-preferred system of "functional compromise" in the West Bank.

Constantly growing and expanding Israeli settlements, protected by the Israeli army, which maintains decisive power in the territories, continues to be at the heart of Israel's vision of the future.

These settlements and the IDF are locked in a symbiotic embrace. Settlements require the army to protect them and limit the power that Israel can cede to the PA. The IDF, which still wants to control the occupied territories after a final settlement, requires the mission of protecting settlements if it is not to become simply an army of occupation.

It has now become clearer than ever that Israel has no intention of removing more than a token number of settlers and settlements - at most - as part of a negotiated end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

"I hope that in the permanent agreement that we reach with the Palestinians, Jews would remain in Hebron," noted Motta Gur, Rabin's deputy at the defense ministry and his contact with the settlement movement, shortly before his death in mid 1995. "This is part of our plan, we believe in this, and we'll strive for it."

The Israeli presence in Hebron-- 400 settlers, most of them children, in a town of some 60,000-- is without doubt the most divisive and embittering of all settlement throughout the West Bank. To declare that Hebron would not be evacuated is to announce that no settlement, anywhere, would be dismantled.

Having done much to undermine the traditional ideological basis for settlement, Israel's Labor government-- under Peres as under Rabin-- is attempting to construct a post-Oslo rationale for continuing colonization. During the early part of 1995, Israeli spokesmen introduced two unconventional justifications. In one new formulation, the rights of Israeli settlers are deemed equal to those of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The second asserts that the presence of settlers in the West Bank, which the international community has decried as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, is no different than the existence of the Palestinian community in Israel.

"If there is building going on in the existing settlements, it's true all over the West Bank, in the Arab settlements too. You cannot stop life," explained Peres on 2 March 1995. "Why should it be?...Why can't they live together? What's wrong?...There's a 17 percent Arab minority in Israel - no problem whatsoever. There's a 10 percent Jewish minority [in the West Bank] - why should it be a problem?"

The diplomatic path that the Palestinians have joined, and the conditions that characterize it, leave them few options to change materially either the pace or the implications of Israel's settlement policies. When PA Chairman Arafat has been forced to respond to Israel's settlement activities - at Hebron in March 1994; at Efrat in January 1995; and in Jerusalem in May 1995 - he has consistently maintained that the continuation of the Oslo process and the health of Israel's Labor governments outweigh the damage caused by Israel's settlement actions. At this late stage in the negotiating process, it is impossible to suggest a strategy consistent with the current diplomatic framework that is capable of reversing the momentum of settlement expansion anywhere in the occupied territories. Within the Palestinian community, popular opposition remains the sole remaining vehicle not only for forcing the settlement issue onto the diplomatic agenda but also for galvanizing effective Israeli opposition to settlement expansion.

But given the history since Oslo, Palestinian protests cannot expect much support from the Palestinian champions of the Oslo process. Those who oversaw the creation of this diplomatic framework either willfully ignored the centrality of settlements or, more likely, inexplicably failed to understand their importance as a prime indicator of Israeli intentions. For while Palestinians may have conceded that many if not most settlements would remain as part of a peace agreement, they have failed to confront the notion that the continued existence of these outposts also legitimizes a permanent, preponderant Israeli military role throughout the territories. Palestinian leaders have failed to acknowledge the critical importance of settlements in the ongoing contest for control of lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Palestinian acquiescence in maintaining settlements during the interim period has established a precedent that will be difficult to alter in final status talks. Permitting any settlements to remain in final status would obstruct Palestinian achievement of any credible degree of sovereignty in the West Bank or Gaza, not necessarily because of the settlements per se, which directly control less than 15 percent of the land area of the West Bank, but because of the extensive security measures required to insure their existence, including the permanent presence of the IDF in the territories. The Oslo II security clauses give some indication of the extensive security measures Israel would require.

Israeli leaders, led by Prime Minister Peres, are redefining the need to maintain settlements less as an expression of Israeli sovereignty and security than an issue of simple fairness ("Arabs live in Israel. Why can't Jews live in the West Bank?"). This evolving approach asserts that settlements have no security function in and of themselves, nor a significant role in state-building. For Israeli leaders, however, settlements continue to serve as instruments legitimizing continued military control. A settlement such as Netzarim, for example, highly marginal in terms of its minuscule population and isolated location (but which effectively divides the Gaza Strip in two), requires the full force of IDF protection.

The maintenance of settlements cannot easily be reconciled with Palestinian independence. All Israeli plans, from the Allon Plan to Dayan's to Sharon's and, most recently, to the variation of the Allon Plan devised by Israeli analyst Joseph Alpher, have as their common denominator the creation of territorial obstacles to Palestinian independence. The only difference between them is the degree. Alpher, viewed as more "progressive," proposes significant but relatively fewer obstacles. Sharon, seen as more "militant," proposes more. Implementation of any of these plans would result in a greater or lesser degree of Palestinian autonomy, but not true sovereignty or independence.

Israel may be prepared to evacuate marginal, isolated settlements in an agreement on final status. This number could reach as many as 70, with a combined population of as much as 15,000­20,000, although the number would probably be far smaller. Extensive debate, both among Israelis and with Palestinians, can be expected on this issue. When or if agreement to remove such small outposts is reached, the "trauma" of the exercise will surely be cited as one reason for not touching major settlement areas where the bulk of settlers reside - Ariel, Green Line settlements, Gush Etzion, Kiryat Arba, and Greater Jerusalem.

Evacuation of these marginal outposts, most established by Likud, could facilitate implementation of Rabin's vision of "separation" from Israel of the West Bank and Gaza. But it is less consistent with Peres' integrationist functional vision of power-sharing in the West Bank, and therefore, with Peres as prime minster, less likely than it would have been were Rabin still in power. As tempting as it may be, Palestinians would be advised not to be drawn into extended debate on evacuation of these marginal outposts, which are not the key to Israel's objectives, at a price [whether implicit or explicit] of recognizing continued existence of larger, more viable settlements. Rather, the demand for settlement evacuation should be considered as a single package. The principle of evacuation is the key element that needs to be negotiated. The PA, however, needs to address how it would respond to a prospective offer to evacuate some outposts.

Palestinian independence can be secured without settlement evacuation, but only if the link between settlements and Israeli military control is broken and the preferred status of settlements/settlers is revoked. The key issue here is whether a security regime can be established that would convince Israel to reassess its intention to secure the PA's acceptance of effective IDF control of the West Bank and Gaza in the final status agreement. Protection of settlers is only one element of this security regime. Other elements relate to Israel's regional security concerns, and will be equally problematic.

 

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