EVELYN GORDON: CURBING SETTLEMENTS IS ALL COST NO GAIN
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predictably assailed
Israel’s announced decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh
Adumim and eastern Jerusalem. He noted that just four days earlier,
the Middle East Quartet (i.e. the U.S., EU, UN and Russia) had issued
a report deeming settlement construction an obstacle to peace. What
Ban didn’t mention is that just a few days before that report came
out, a leading Israeli leftist expert on the settlements published a
comprehensive rebuttal of this claim, providing facts and figures
showing that the settlements effectively aren’t growing at all.
This juxtaposition begs an obvious question: If the world is going to
accuse Israel of “massive settlement construction” that “threatens the
two-state solution” when even leading leftists admit this is a lie,
why should Israel continue to pay the very real price exacted by
freezing settlement construction?
Shaul Arieli, who published the rebuttal in Haaretz last week, is
hardly an apologist for the settlements. Since retiring from the army
as a colonel in 2001, he has become a prominent peace activist. He
helped produce the Geneva Initiative, a nongovernmental template for
an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. He’s on the board of the
Council for Peace and Security, a group of former security officials
that advocates for a peace deal. He has been involved in numerous
legal cases challenging the West Bank security fence. He gives
lectures and tours on the feasibility of a peace agreement, and he’s
considered a leading expert on demarcating a future
Israeli-Palestinian border.
Nevertheless, Arieli has no patience with those who keep predicting
that settlement construction will doom the two-state solution if it
hasn’t already. His view is expressed unambiguously in the article’s
title: “Look at the Figures: Israel’s Settlement Enterprise Has
Failed.”
First, he noted, though the settlement population is growing faster
than the general Israeli population, “In 2015, as in the preceding
five years, almost 90 percent” of this increase was “a result of
natural population growth,” meaning people having babies. In other
words, though the number of individual settlers has grown, the number
of families–the relevant figure for anyone considering evacuating
settlements–has remained virtually unchanged. In fact, the number of
people moving to the settlements has plunged to a mere third of what
it was when Benjamin Netanyahu began his first term as prime minister
in 1996.
Moreover, Arieli wrote, “Last year, as in all the preceding 40 years,
75 percent of the population growth occurred in settlement blocs.” In
short, almost all the increase, from both births and migration, is
happening in a handful of settlements near the Green Line that every
peace plan ever proposed has agreed will remain Israeli. Thus it
hasn’t affected the prospects of a two-state solution at all.
But while Arieli’s facts are indisputable, his explanation for why
settlement growth has stagnated obscures an important truth. In his
view, it’s because Israelis “are voting with their feet” against the
settlements, despite “the efforts invested by Benjamin Netanyahu’s
current government in consolidating the settlement enterprise.” In
reality, however, nobody knows what Israelis would do if given a
choice because, for the last seven years, they haven’t had one. Nobody
will move to the settlements if there are no houses to move into. As
data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics unambiguously shows,
since taking office in 2009, Netanyahu has built far fewer units in
the settlements than any of his predecessors. True, he periodically
announces grandiose building plans, as he did this week. But most are
quietly frozen again immediately afterward; very few ever get built.
And this entails real costs for Israel. First, Israel has a desperate
shortage of affordable housing within commuting distance of the center
of the country, where most of the jobs are. Indeed, when young people
who have left or are considering leaving Israel are asked why, their
number-one answer is the lack of affordable housing. But since the
major settlement blocs are all in commuting distance of the center,
more construction there would significantly ease this shortage.
Consequently, seven years of near-zero settlement construction have
done serious damage to an essential Israeli interest.
Second, as journalist Nadav Shragai correctly noted last week,
Palestinians interpret Israel’s failure to build as proof that
Israelis have little attachment to the land. And if they aren’t
attached to the West Bank–the Jewish people’s historical, cultural and
religious heartland–then they surely aren’t attached to pre-1967
Israel, which has shallower Jewish roots, the Palestinian thinking
goes. This, in turn, encourages the Palestinian belief that there’s no
need to make peace with Israel, because it will disappear on its own
in another few decades–an opinion held, astoundingly, by over 85
percentof Palestinians.
Finally, Israel’s fear of building in the West Bank and eastern
Jerusalem reinforces the international narrative that this is occupied
Palestinian territory rather than disputed territory to which Israel
has a valid claim. For someone unfamiliar with either the facts behind
Israel’s claim or Jewish psychoses about upsetting non-Jews, it’s
quite reasonable to conclude that Israel wouldn’t act so fearfully and
guiltily about building there if it really believed its own claim to
the territory. And someone who thinks Israel is a thief occupying
stolen Palestinian lands will naturally be more anti-Israel than
someone who understands it is offering to cede its own land for the
sake of peace.
Perhaps all these prices would nevertheless be worth paying if the
virtual freeze on settlement construction were buying Israel
international support. But instead, Israel is being internationally
castigated as if it actually were engaged in massive settlement
construction.
As Arieli himself noted, building in the settlement blocs and Jewish
neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem doesn’t endanger the two-state
solution in any way. And these are the very places where construction
would be most helpful in alleviating Israel’s housing crisis. Thus
it’s long past time for Israel to resume building there. There’s no
reason for it to keep paying the price of curbing settlement
construction if its restraint earns it no international dividends.
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