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P. David Hornik P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem whose work has appeared in many Israeli, Jewish, and political publications. Reach him at:
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By P. David Hornik
August 26, 2004
Originally published by FrontPageMagazine.com.
The Bush administration isn't doing itself proud on the matter of Israeli settlements. A couple of weeks ago Elliot Abrams, chief of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, was sent to Israel to "discuss" with Sharon the announced plans to build 600 new apartments in the town of Maale Adumim. Although Abrams is sometimes cited as a member of the "neocon cabal" that allegedly twists U.S. foreign policy to fit the nefarious schemes of the Likud Party, he was actually positioning himself to the left of the Israeli Labor Party by making Maale Adumim an issue at all.
Maale Adumim is, to repeat, a town of 30,000 in the Judean Desert a few miles east of Jerusalem. If you search hard, you can find a few fringe Israelis - Ramsey Clark or Susan Sontag types - who see it as an obstacle to peace and think it's a crime for Jews to live in such a place. In practical terms, the plans to move eight thousand settlers from Gaza entail huge social and financial problems and threaten to bust Israel's 2004-05 budget. So it seems the 30,000 Jews of Maale Adumim, living a few minutes' commute from Jerusalem in Judea, the Jewish heartland (the place where Jews come from), are there to stay.
If so, nitpicking about a "natural growth" of 600 apartments seems an unfortunate move for an administration that says it seeks to bring freedom and human rights to the Middle East. Reportedly, during their chat Sharon had to reassure Abrams that the plans don't include any building between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem; those acres will remain untainted. Like all the administrations before it, the Bush administration sustains the exquisite sensitivity to Arab hectoring, carping, and perceptions.
And last week Abrams's boss, Condoleezza Rice, kept the heat on Israel by urging it to "live up to [its] obligations under the road map" and saying settlement expansion "is not consistent with our understandings under the road map." She had praise, on the other hand, for Sharon's disengagement plan precisely because it involves uprooting other settlements. It was the same old depressing refrain - already disproved a hundred times at a high cost in blood - that you buy Middle Eastern stability in the coin of Israeli appeasement.
I'm not among those who tout Israeli settlement as something always glorious and always justified. It's not blasphemous to ask whether particular settlements, especially the more isolated ones in heavily Arab-populated areas, are wisely situated or more trouble than they're worth. (That description, by the way, doesn't apply to most of the Gaza settlements, which exist separate from the Arab population on the sand dunes of Gush Katif.) I wouldn't be overly upset by the removal of a few of these isolated settlements for military reasons, if accompanied by assertive steps to offset Arab perceptions that terror had succeeded.
What is objectionable, though, is the Bush administration's continued loyalty to two principles: (1) that all Jewish settlement in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is basically illegitimate and at best to be pragmatically tolerated; and (2) that creating zones completely free of Jews is a key to peace and harmony.
The first notion ignores the facts that Israel won those lands in a defensive war of survival in 1967, that it has at least as much legal right to them as the Arab side, and that they are the cradle of biblical civilization, rich in landmarks and associations for both Jews and Christians. As such, it cuts against the foundations not only of Israeli but also of American identity. The second notion assumes that peace can be made at a time when the sight of Jewish villages stirs murderous passions in Palestinians, and that there is a symmetry between removing the villages and removing the passions. But as Daniel Pipes has pointed out, we will only know those passions are gone "when Jews living in Hebron (on the West Bank) have no more need for security than Arabs living in Nazareth (in Israel)."
The solution, then, is not to make some areas Judenrein; it's to promote the principle that both Jews and Arabs can live in all parts of the land, and need to work out the political arrangements.
According to the latest reports, the U.S. and Israeli administrations have now reached an informal understanding where Israel can keep building within the "construction lines" in the large settlement blocks, as opposed to the "municipal boundaries" that still contain empty land. But, even if true, this very small concession only comes at a time when Sharon is seeking the wholesale destruction of other settlement blocks in the midst of a terror war; and it sustains the idea that, in the name of peace, the great bulk of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza must remain free of Jews. And just in case Israel gets out of line, "the U.S.," says the Jerusalem Post, "is sending a team of 'technical advisors' to Israel next month, reportedly led by a top official in the State Department's intelligence bureau, to continue the work of jointly defining the construction line of the settlements."
What's really getting defined here are U.S. interests - in a way that's objectionable to many American Jews and Christians who support both Bush and Israel. The more they make their voices heard, the more the administration will refrain from treating Jewish life in the Land of Israel as a military and political menace.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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