Where Will the Palestinian State be Established?

Israeli president Shimon Peres recently observed, “There is a competition here over staying power, not just over the ability to withstand suffering.” Peres was referring to the conflict with Hamas in Gaza,that has just entered a new phase with the joint declaration on June 19 of a tadhiya or “calm.” He could point with equal justification, however, to the ongoing campaign of settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, that has succeeded, despite Palestinian opposition, in settling almost half a million Israelis in territories captured in June 1967.

Settlements are the most visible, potent, and tangible manifestation of Israel’s “staying power” in its ongoing struggle with Palestinians to prevent the creation of a genuine Palestinian state. They represent an existential challenge to Palestinian efforts to establish sovereignty and independence, and thus are understood by Palestinians as the critical benchmark against which the prospect of their liberation from occupation is to be measured.

U.S.‑led diplomacy has failed to address the central challenge that settlements pose to the international consensus supporting an end to Israeli occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with its neighbors. Indeed, to judge by remarks made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her June visit to the region, it is not clear that she fully understands that settlements are more than simply one of the generic issues to be negotiated.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was at pains to convey to Rice that “Israel fulfill its obligations vis a vis colonization, because we consider settlement activity as the most important obstacle facing the political process. And the more there are dates [announcing tenders for new settlement housing] and construction of settlements, the more this will constitute an impediment that will obstruct reaching any peace.”

Rice acknowledged that almost eight years into the George W. Bush administration, U.S. remonstrations to Israel about settlement construction go no further than “pressing the case”—the long‑standing, pro forma effort to convey to Israel that the U.S. views settlements as problematic and that “it is in Israel’s interest to do everything that it can to promote an atmosphere of confidence.”

“I think the issue here,“ Rice explained to reporters on June 15, “is to try to get back to a place that there’s some confidence that [Israel’s settlement program] is not an effort, in some way, to dictate or prejudge the final status issue and to prejudice the final status outcome.”

Settlements, as Israelis and Palestinians know too well, serve the very purpose—unilaterally determining Israel’s border—that Rice wants to discount. Her insistence that this is not the case has been betrayed by the administration’s own policy of acknowledging in April 2004 that “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”

Recalling this commitment, a reporter asked Rice, “didn’t President George Bush’s [April 2004] letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acknowledge the facts on the ground?”

“It acknowledged the current realities of 2004,” Rice noted. “And of course there are current realities and new realities since 1949 and 1967 for both sides. So what the president’s letter said is there are population realities. Look—some of those realities have been recognized in every agreement that never quite made it as well. So this is nothing new, that those realities have been acknowledged. But the president said subject to mutual agreement and I would remind [you] that the president’s letter talked about realities at that time. And there are realities for both sides, which is why they need to draw a map and get it done.”

No one but Israel and the U.S. has formally acknowledged that these settlement realities will determine Israel’s border with a Palestinian state. The American acknowledgment of the facts created by settlements is not subject to Palestinian endorsement. The secretary invoked the precedent of the stillborn diplomatic dialogues at Camp David and Taba in order to justify unilateral presidential recognition offered without reference to any diplomatic process. Notwithstanding Rice’s demurral, Bush’s commitment was indeed new, and it remains, far more than his administration’s lukewarm and patently ineffective criticism of Israeli settlement policy, an important legacy of his presidency.

As the Economist wryly noted in a recent feature about Bush’s foreign policy, the only thing worse than a failure is yesterday’s failure. The president’s May trip to Israel and the visits of his peripatetic secretary of state lowered the bar of expectations yet again for the diplomatic process inaugurated at Annapolis in November 2007. The U.S. still hopes for some sort of agreement between the parties before Bush’s term ends. Yet it also considers sufficient the creation of the Annapolis process as a platform for the future.

Prime Minister Salam Fayad notes, however, that measured against the standard of ending settlements and occupation—the core Palestinian demands—the Annapolis process has failed. “The change that has taken place on the ground is not qualitative and so far has no significance. It could be labeled as limited change in both quality and quantity,” Fayad explained. “My cause with the Israelis is not a matter of roadblocks. My cause is the occupation. Therefore, with respect to these issues . . . what I am asking the Israeli defense minister to do is to stop the settlements in the first place. . . .

“I do not see the progress that you are talking about and I do not sense any progress. The track that people see in the road map track is the settlements and this is what people see every day and hear every day about a settlement an-nounce-ment. For this reason, I cannot assume that things are proceeding in the right way. . . . During the two meetings that were held with Rice and [Israeli defense minister Ehud] Barak, we raised these issues and we asked, ‘Where will the state be established under these continuous settlement activities?’ The question in the minds of many, including myself, is, ‘Where will the state be established?’

“Even if you believed in the possibility of a solution this year, you must not accept the continuation of these settlement activities let alone if you have a strong and almost certain feeling [as Fayad himself has expressed] that the solution will not be achieved this year.

If the solution is not possible this year, the international effort should at least focus on keeping the possibility of the solution alive and this necessitates in the first place a halt to the settlements.”

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert remains deaf to this demand. He made clear to Rice that “construction would continue in the Jewish neighborhoods that are expected to remain Israeli under any agreement.” Construction of thousands of units is proceeding in various stages in scores of settlements.

Rice’s by‑now‑familiar litany of complaint about Israel’s settlement policy is dismissed by Israelis. As one Jerusalem Post columnist noted, “it is likely too late for Rice to reverse the consequences of those policies she pursued in this corner of the world. Nor to prevent Israel from pursuing the same construction policy in Jerusalem that has guided all of its governments, including this one, since 1967.”

Little wonder then that Palestinians are, as Bush noted, not only “discouraged by the settlement activity,” but also despairing of Bush’s commitment to end the occupation, and as the final months of his presidency unfold, casting for a more effective strategy to reach that goal.