Settlements are deliberate obstacles to better
future
The entire world can talk about a “peace process” all it wants, but the fact of
the matter is that regardless of how much outward progress has ever been made on this
front, the Israeli government has continued cynical machinations designed precisely to
undermine any possibility that the people of the Jewish state and those of Palestine will
ever be able to live next to one another under so much as a facsimile of normal
conditions.
The core of this strategy lies in the policy of building and expanding Jewish settlements
in the Occupied Territories, a shameless land grab whose inherent illegality under the
Geneva Conventions is further exacerbated by the human rights violations committed as part
of the effort to impose a quasi-apartheid regime on those whose property was taken away in
the first place.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has been instrumental in trying to
publicize the evils of the settlement policy, and its latest effort does just that. The
new report details the lengths to which successive Israeli governments including those
that publicly spoke a language of peace have been prepared to go in order to continue
the colonization of occupied land and so to throw up obstacles to any negotiated agreement
that might be hammered out in the future. In fact, according to B’Tselem and anyone
else willing to be honest about this ugly phenomenon, it was just when optimism seemed
justified that a decision was taken to accelerate settlement activity: Between 1993, the
very year the Oslo Accords were signed, and 2000, the number of settlers on the West Bank
(excluding Jerusalem) almost doubled. It is particularly disturbing to note that for most
of that period, Israel was governed by Labor Party leaders (Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres,
and Ehud Barak) who outwardly championed peace.
Taking over land is nothing new, and neither is the strategy of sending one’s own
civilians to populate it and establish de facto control so as to consolidate a central
authority’s claim to the territory in question. The nascent city-state of Muscovy
established settlements in order to limit the potential growth of nearby rivals, and Nazi
Germany was sickeningly forthright about its goal of obtaining Lebensraum (“Living
Space”) in Eastern Europe. But the Muscovite expansion that eventually led to
Imperial Russia took place in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries and, needless to say, the
Nazis were not allowed to retain what they conquered in the early years of Word War II.
The same rules have applied to other examples as well: Where the takeover took place in
the distant past, it has generally been allowed to stand; where it has been more recent
(as in European colonial projects), national liberation has been the rule almost
everywhere. The settlements are designed to realize the former formula by creating what
their advocates call “facts on the ground” and preventing the possibility of
peace for such a long time that the occupation becomes irreversible.
Bombings and shootings are terrible things, and no child deserves to die because his or
her parents were foolish or fanatical enough to raise them on a settlement. But no one
deserves to be turned out of their land, either. Until the Jewish state changes course and
starts dismantling the settlements, there will be people determined to inflict a few facts
of their own. Copyright © The Daily
Star |
