Hoping to satisfy the demands of Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war this week on two dozen Jewish settler outposts he considers illegal in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This already battered hillside trailer park is one of them.
Givat Assaf (“the hill of Assaf”) is situated a few kilometres northeast of the Palestinian town of Ramallah. The small cluster of about 18 caravans was erected in April, 2001. Its synagogue, paved lanes and quaint road signs lend the community an aura of permanence.
Earlier this week, however, the Israel Defence Forces served the outpost with an eviction notice. It was one of 10 such outposts told this week that occupants have three days to evacuate the premises or be considered as illegal residents, subject to forceful eviction. (The Israeli government says it has no immediate plans to evict the people, hoping they will be persuaded to leave peacefully.) “We're not going anywhere,” said one resident of Givat Assaf, a mother of two, who was on her way to shop in the nearby settlement of Beit El. “We've heard all this before,” she said wearily.
There are about 100 of these small, fortified outposts dotted throughout the West Bank. Some are no more than a few outbuildings that people use during the day; most are inhabited by one or two dozen families living in inexpensive caravans. Usually, they are found on the outskirts of larger established settlements, serving to extend the area under settler control.
What makes some outposts illegal, in the view of Israeli authorities, is if they have been constructed after March, 2001, which is when Israel promised the United States that no more settlements would be built. And settlements, say Mr. Obama and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, are the biggest single obstacle to peace.
It's not the first time Givat Assaf's future has been under threat. In 2004, the army tried to dismantle the outpost, but before its forces could arrive, more than 1,000 settlers from neighbouring communities gathered in the middle of the night to bar their entry. For days they kept vigil, stoning Palestinian cars that drove past. The army eventually withdrew.
“I can foresee the same thing happening this time,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council, which that represents most settlers. “Thousands of people will come out at every one of these outposts if the government tries to dismantle them.”
The construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has been a source of contention since Israel occupied the territory in 1967. Religious Jews, seeking to return to their Biblical roots, and nationalists, seeking to greater security, attempted to build in what they called Judea and Samaria. The Geneva Conventions prohibit such construction on land occupied by conflict, and early Israeli governments enforced that law. By the 1970s, however, and particularly since the 1980s, successive governments turned a blind eye or even assisted in such construction, much to the consternation of Palestinians who saw more and more of their land taken over.
Mr. Dayan, the Yesha Council's first secular chairman, doesn't believe the Netanyahu government really will act against these communities.
First of all, he says, “There's nothing illegal about these outposts. It was the government that established them; in some cases the government even built them.”
“It's only politics,” Mr. Dayan says, that labels them illegal.
(Israel's highest court disagrees. It recently asked Defence Minister Ehud Barak to explain why outposts held to be illegal still have not been dismantled.) Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared this week that he's dead serious about evacuating these outposts.
“Our situation today is different than it was in 1996 to ‘99,” he told his Likud caucus on Monday, “and we need to tailor our order of priorities.”
He told members of his party they must accede to the wishes of Mr. Obama and put the existential threat posed by Iran ahead of their interest in maintaining settlements in the West Bank.
“Even during the [recent election] campaign,” Mr. Netanyahu told the caucus, “I said that we are a law-abiding country and will deal with the illegal outposts – if possible, through dialogue.”
Of course, there's method in Mr. Netanyahu's course of action. The Prime Minister also has told his party and the public that he has no intention of acceding completely to Mr. Obama's demand that all settlement construction halt. He hopes that by dismantling the illegal outposts, at considerable political cost, the U.S. administration will understand why he must continue with construction inside the established settlements to accommodate what he calls “natural growth.”
More than 280,000 Israelis live in some 120 settlements in the West Bank, according to statistics kept by the settlement-watch group Peace Now. (That figure does not include the almost 200,000 who live in communities built inside east Jerusalem, also on land occupied in 1967.) To dismantle 23 outposts that house an average of 15 to 20 families would mean the eviction of 2,000 to 3,000 people, many of whom still would be accommodated inside the West Bank's legal settlements and outposts – part of their natural growth.
Looking at a map of all the outposts, one can see why the settler community views them as strategically important.
Not only do they serve to expand the area in which the established settlements operate, but they provide “facts on the ground” that act as a chain of links to other settlements. And this could prove enormously important in the future.
The worst-case scenario for Israeli settlers would be for Israel to conclude a peace treaty with the Palestinians that relinquished all occupied lands, including all settlements, to a Palestinian state.
The settlers' best-case scenario would be for Israel to retain the entire West Bank as sovereign Israeli land.
The realistic scenario, advocated by numerous peace proposals, lies somewhere in between, and that is where the chain of outposts really come into their own.
Most credible peace plans provide for Israel to retain the major settlements blocs of Ariel, which is close to Tel Aviv, as well as the Etzion Bloc and Maale Adumim, which are close to Jerusalem. In exchange for these areas, Israel would be expected to compensate the Palestinians with lands of similar value.
All Israeli settlements not part of these blocs would be relinquished by Israel.
Worried about this prospect, settler leadership over the years has been enlarging the area of each bloc. In Gush Etzion, for example, to the south of Jerusalem, settlements that were several kilometres away have been incorporated in the Gush Etzion municipality. It helped that several smaller outposts were erected over those years linking the communities.
The same thing now is unfolding northeast of Jerusalem, as a trail of outposts has been laid linking disparate settlements such as Beit El and Ofra to the bloc of Maale Adumim.
“Filling in those spaces [to link to Maale Adumim] is definitely part of our plan,” Mr. Dayan acknowledged this week. “Of course, ideally, we'd like to fill in all of Eretz Israel,” he said, using the settlers' term for an Israel the includes the Palestinian territories.
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