Love of the Land: A Question

A Question

According to the MEMRI Iranian Media Blog:

"Iranian expatriate human rights activists report that 4,000 students demonstrated in Tehran to mark Students Day today, shouting "Death to (Iranian Supreme Leader Ali) Khamenei " and "Khamenei is a Murderer and His Religious Authority Is Null and Void," as well as "Death to the Government That Deceives the People."

At Amir Kabir University in Tehran, 1,500 students shouted for the "coup government" to step down, and chanted "Death to the Dictator" (referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad)." -more

To see a video of this week's Iranian student anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrations click on Tehran Video

Love of the Land: A Question

Love of the Land: Bibi Versus The Iceman

Bibi Versus The Iceman

I thought that I'd draw Obama and Bibi Netanyahu as battling SuperHeroes, but they came out looking like a pair of phony costumed TV wrestlers putting on a show!

* * *

The Arab-Israeli conflict will end when the Arab states accept the existence of a Jewish State in the region as natural. Political correctness requires that we ignore this obvious truth and pretend that the problem is simply a border dispute between "Palestinians" and Israelis.

Love of the Land: Bibi Versus The Iceman

Love of the Land: Absurd US position on Jerusalem isn’t constructive

Absurd US position on Jerusalem isn’t constructive

FresnoZionism.org
21 November 09

Here’s a perfect example of the misleading use of the settlement issue, from a Palestinian source. Ma’an News tells us that,

According to the [Israel channel 10] report, the US administration suggested, and Israel was preparing to allow, the following in exchange for a guarantee from Abbas that the PLO would re-enter talks.

• Weapons for Palestinian Authority security forces
• Release of 400 Fatah prisoners from Israeli jails before the Muslim holiday of Eid
• Extending the PA’s West Bank jurisdiction in Area B to full control and Area C to partial control

Channel 10 reported that Abbas rejected all of these offers, sticking instead to his insistence that there be no negotiations while Israel’s borders continue to expand.

One doesn’t need to be a Ph.D like Mahmoud Abbas (Patrice Lumumba U., Moscow) to know the difference between building some apartments — more correctly, talking about building some apartments — in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, and ‘expanding borders’. But this is the Palestinian excuse for refusing to return to negotiations with Israel.

The real reason, which is a quite good one and one with which I agree, is that they don’t want to negotiate since they know that their bottom line and Israel’s are so far apart. The PLO won’t — can’t — recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and will not accept a demilitarized Palestine. And they’ve also sold the idea that a ‘two-state solution’ includes the right of return. It really doesn’t matter if Abbas is ready to compromise on these issues or not, since he wouldn’t survive politically or physically if he did. So he prefers to blame it on Israel.

What I find particularly upsetting is our president and Secretary of State taking the same line. And they do, every time they use the highly misleading phrase ’settlement construction’ to refer to any building activity — or even planning activity — in the area that was occupied by Jordan in 1948, especially Jerusalem.

There is a consensus in Israel that Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem are not settlements, regardless of where the cease-fire line happened to fall in 1949.

Recently there’s been some excitement over the fact that a US passport issued to a citizen born in Jerusalem — any part of it — will not say ‘Jerusalem, Israel’ but rather only ‘Jerusalem’ for the place of birth. This is consistent with the American point of view.

The UN and the US in point of fact, do not recognize that Israel has anyrights in Jerusalem, East or West. But in this view, neither do the Palestinians! The original UN partition resolution of 1947 and UN Security Council Resolution 303 of 1949 call for all of Jerusalem to be internationalized, and the US State Department still holds this position.

It’s easy to forget that in 1967 Israel did not capture Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem from the Palestinians. These were part of the Palestine Mandate, which included the Balfour Declaration — the charter for a Jewish national home. The Jordanian occupation of this area was illegal, the product of a war of aggression. Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1980, when it declared that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Absurd US position on Jerusalem isn’t constructive

Love of the Land: Who Was Distracted by Settlements, Rahm?

Who Was Distracted by Settlements, Rahm?

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
10 November 09

Rahm Emanuel’s statement today that “no one should allow the issue of settlements to distract from the goal of a lasting peace between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab world” may be interpreted in a couple of different ways. Some may see it as a jibe at Israel to give in on the issue so as to enable peace talks to proceed. But the truth is, if anyone has been distracted by the settlements to the detriment of peace, it would be Emanuel and his master in the Oval Office.

Some feared that the White House chief of staff’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities today in Washington might be the latest in a series of tit-for-tat ripostes between the Obama administration and the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. However, it appears that Netanyahu’s determined effort to pretend — at least in public — that all is well between the two bickering allies has resulted in the administration’s deciding that increasing the tension between the two isn’t in their interest. Thus, although Emanuel’s talk sought to defend his boss’s feckless pursuit of popularity in the Arab world by distancing himself from Israel at every opportunity, it appears as though he passed on the chance to take any direct shots at Netanyahu.

As for his line about letting settlements “distract” anyone from the goal of peace, if anyone has done that, it has been Obama and his minions, whose recklessness on this issue has led to no end of Middle East mischief in recent months. Obama was determined to end what he termed the George W. Bush policy of allowing “no daylight” between the countries (which was hardly true, as Bush’s secretary of state spent her last two years in office trying to push the Israelis into more concessions to the Palestinians). His decision to pick a fight with the newly elected Netanyahu over a settlement freeze in Jerusalem and the territories was as foolish as it was pointless. The Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, had just turned down yet another generous peace offer from Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Olmert. And the administration’s settlement stand merely encouraged the Palestinians to dig in their heels and refuse to talk until Netanyahu bowed to a demand that no Israeli government would ever agree to.

The result is that Obama’s settlement distraction helped further undermine the already weak Abbas and strengthened the hand of his Hamas rivals. With Abbas threatening resignation, there is now a chance that the Palestinians will opt, as they always have whenever they have been faced with a serious policy choice in the past, for an escalation of violence in the hope that more bloodshed will result in greater pressure on Israel. Obama and his hatchet man Emanuel have been chastened by the Israeli public’s strong support for Netanyahu’s refusal to bow to American pressure, and they appear to be adopting a more realistic policy on settlements these days. But their resentment of Netanyahu, who they thought they might topple a few months ago, has done nothing to advance the cause of peace, let alone regional stability. Let’s hope they take that line about distractions more seriously in the future.

It should also be noted that in the same speech Emanuel claimed that the administration has made some sort of progress on stopping Iran’s nuclear program since “thanks to the work of the president, there is strong and international consensus against a nuclear-armed Iran.” Sorry, Rahm, but that consensus existed long before Obama arrived in Washington. The problem today is whether the United States and its allies (who have taken a much tougher stand on Iran than Obama has) will draw the right conclusions from America’s failed attempt at nuclear diplomacy with Iran. On Iran, as well as on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama’s first initiatives have been fiascoes. What’s needed now is not rhetoric aimed at reassuring American Jews that Obama cares about Israel but rather a dramatic policy overhaul that recognizes and seeks to correct the dramatic mistakes that have been made in the last ten months.

Love of the Land: Who Was Distracted by Settlements, Rahm?

Love of the Land: What Carter Missed in the Middle East

What Carter Missed in the Middle East

Elliot Abrams
Washington Post
08 September 09

In an op-ed on Sunday ["The Elders' View of the Middle East"], former president Jimmy Carter, speaking on behalf of a self-appointed group of "Elders," described a rapacious Israel facing long-suffering, blameless Palestinians, who are contemplating a "nonviolent civil rights struggle" in which "their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela."

As with most of Carter's recent statements about Israel and the Palestinians, instead of facts we get vignettes from recent Carter travels. And while he finds "a growing sense of concern and despair" among "increasingly desperate" Palestinians, polls do not sustain this view. The most recent survey by the leading Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki (done in August, the same month Carter visited), shows "considerable improvement in public perception of personal and family security and safety in the West Bank and a noticeable decrease in public perception of the existence of corruption in [Palestinian Authority] institutions." This does not sound like despair. In fact, positive views of personal and family safety and security in the West Bank stood at 25 percent four years ago, 35 percent two years ago and 43 percent a year ago, and they have risen to 58 percent in the past year, Shikaki reports. There are other ways to measure quality of life in the West Bank: The International Monetary Fund recently stated that "macroeconomic conditions in the West Bank have improved" largely because "Israeli restrictions on internal trade and the passage of people have been relaxed significantly."

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Love of the Land: What Carter Missed in the Middle East

Love of the Land: The Bogeyman in The Hills of Judea and Samaria

The Bogeyman in The Hills of Judea and Samaria

Ariel Harkham
JPost
07 September 09

Earlier this month, Ori Nir, a spokesman for Americans for Peace Now and former Haaretz reporter, revealed an alarming, even terrifying, bit of news in an opinion piece for the Washington Jewish Week: There are bogeymen in the hills of Israel. Citing only an incident in 1988, and one in 2000, Nir argued that the "brutality" of soldiers and settlers in the West Bank has spread across the Green Line, causing the wave of violent crime the country seems to be experiencing lately.

Never mind, for the moment, that Israel has one of the lowest murder rates in the world - a statistic that even the most basic level of research would have confirmed for Nir. But the fact that the Peace Now spokesman so vigorously set out to identify the settler movement as the cause of a pseudo-effect goes to show just how much this cause is an apparition conjured by fear mongering, a moral bogeyman in the hills of Judea and Samaria.

NIR'S OPINION piece, like the logic of the entire anti-settler machine, reminds me of the story of the man who walked into a bar, only to be physically assaulted by another customer. Rising to defend himself, the man inadvertently broke a few bottles and glasses. After tensions had cooled, the bartender took the man aside and berated him, but left the instigator alone with his drink. The man, indignant at being unfairly targeted, retorted, "Why aren't you saying this to the other guy? I mean, he's responsible." The bartender stared at him incredulously, and said, "It wouldn't make any difference. That guy is deaf."

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Love of the Land: The Bogeyman in The Hills of Judea and Samaria

Love of the Land: Obama’s Dangerous Strategy

Obama’s Dangerous Strategy

melaniephillips.com
Jewish Chronicle
03 September 09

The farce over doorknobs for centrifuges masks the fact that President Obama’s whole Middle East strategy is in the process of imploding.

Obama has been pressuring Israel to freeze every brick and widow-frame of all settlement construction as a precondition for the US ‘getting tough’ with Iran. This has caused Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to walk a diplomatic tightrope. But it is arguably President Obama who has the rope around his own neck.

Israel’s supposed policy of expanding the settlements has been presented as the major stumbling-block to peace with the Palestinians and Arab support against Iran. This was absurd, and indeed Obama is now softening his stance.

Construction of new settlements has been frozen for years with no concessions from the Palestinian side. And the idea that Israeli concessions were needed to bring the Arabs on side against Iran was ridiculous. The Arabs are desperate for the Iranian nuclear threat to be removed because Iran is an overwhelming threat to their existence.

The settlements are irrelevant to the Iran crisis — which has predictably become even more acute because Obama’s policy of appeasing the Arab and Muslim world has gone belly-up. In response to his hand of friendship, the Iranian regime rigged its election, tortured and murdered its internal opponents and turned even more extreme.

As for Israel, Netanyahu faced down Obama over his attempt to define Jewish houses in east Jerusalem as ’settlements’ and to freeze construction there, too. Having united virtually all of Israel against him (only four per cent of Israelis think Obama is pro-Israel) the US President grovelled to the Arabs for a sign of some move towards peace with Israel. They refused.

He begged the Iranians to ‘engage’ with him. In response, they have now appointed as defence minister Ahmad Vahidi, a terrorist wanted for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires and who was also involved in the 2006 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex which killed 19 American soldiers. Meanwhile, Iran continues to develop the nuclear capability which threatens not just Israel but America and Europe.

In any event, Obama has already said that he will get tough with Iran if it remains intransigent by this autumn. So how could the settlement issue have been the clincher?

And what does ‘getting tough’ mean? Why, sanctions. The Iranians must be quaking in their boots. We can all write the script for that debacle already. Talk about shutting the stable door after the centrifuges have bolted.

And then what? When Plan B fails, what is Obama’s Plan C? I think we know. It’s called ‘living with a nuclear Iran’ — or the surrender of the west.

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Love of the Land: Obama’s Dangerous Strategy

Love of the Land: Crisis in Israel-Europe Relations?

Crisis in Israel-Europe Relations?

Barry Rubin

The Rubin Report

06 September 09

The AP reporter’s voice shows she’s very young and her choice of words show she’s very inexperienced. “What do you think,” she asks me, “about the crisis between Europe and Israel.”

Crisis? Well most immediately this is the kind of “crisis” you want, over a very narrow issue—construction on settlements—which can be easily resolved. The Europeans are supporting U.S. efforts, U.S. policy has become a lot more positive on this issue in recent weeks, and some resolution will soon be found.

The resolution will soon be found because President Barack Obama needs one. In the pattern so often repeated by this administration he has put himself in a corner. If he is going to look “good” at the UN session, feel he has a basis for raising sanctions on Iran, and broker an Israel-Palestinian Authority meeting he has to solve this issue of construction. Right now, he needs a resolution far more than does Israel.

This administration has a genius for putting itself into the weaker position on any international issue.

It’s funny, though, how European governments always find some reason to be annoyed and threatening pressure on Israel but never ever on the Palestinians. Have you noticed that? Massive corruption, incitement to violence, letting terrorists go or never arresting them in the first place, violating commitments, none of its seems to matter.

So European governments have an interesting choice: Is their main goal to be “pro-Palestinian” (if condemning a people to decades of conflict by supporting their intransigence can be called supporting them) or seeking Israel-Palestinian peace?

The answer in most cases—all countries are different—is the former. Being “pro-Palestinian” makes them look “progressive” and “humanitarian,” supposedly scores points in the Arab and Muslim world, theoretically promotes trade and investment with the aforementioned places, and so on.

Also, if European leaders believe—some do, some don’t—that there isn’t going to be peace (even if they privately blame the Palestinians) this policy can seem to make sense for their interests.
Israel’s problem is not predominantly with the European masses or even, to a lesser extent, with governments, but with the European intellectual elites. After all, take the four main countries of Europe: France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

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Love of the Land: Crisis in Israel-Europe Relations?

Love of the Land: Another Tack: It's not the settlements, stupid

Another Tack: It's not the settlements, stupid

Sarah Honig
JPost
03 September 09

Without historical context there can be no real understanding of existential issues, certainly not of essential continuities. That's why those who seek to obfuscate and skew do their utmost to erase telltale fundamental perspectives and present whatever they focus upon as cogent isolated concerns.

Case in point: US President Barack Obama's fixation on settlements, whether they be a collection of squatters' makeshift lean-tos on a stony hill in the middle of a barren nowhere or entire populous urban quarters of Jerusalem.

The real issue is a layer deep beneath surface palaver. It's a layer which Arabs implicitly understand, which Jews pretend (or prefer) not to understand, and which Obama righteously denies. To paraphrase what Bill Clinton hectored during his first presidential campaign: "It's not the settlements, stupid."

Settlements are mere transitory pretexts, alleged irritants which in fact conceal a far darker but basic truth.

Obama hints at it when he admonishes against creating "new facts on the ground" ahead of the deal he proclaims he's about to concoct. Peace is feasible providing Israelis effectively stay inanimate and refrain from altering reality beyond the non-border (1949's armistice line, a.k.a. the Green Line). Otherwise they jeopardize Obama's magic remedy to all that ails the region but which thus far eluded cure by lesser healers than himself. His unspoken apparent assumption is that whatever betokens Israeli/Jewish life and vitality perforce undermines harmony and bliss. Bottom line priority - weaken Israeli/Jewish interests.

THIS HAS been the Arab subtext since the very advent of Zionism, though at different intervals the casus belli assumed different facades. In all instances the pro forma grievance was that Jews were "changing facts on the ground," just as now.

On occasion, as currently, the outcry centered on settlements, or more specifically on land purchases. (Jews weren't always accused of robbing Arab land. Sometimes their crime was buying stretches of wasteland.) At times it was immigration.

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Love of the Land: Another Tack: It's not the settlements, stupid

Love of the Land: Despair, Indeed

Despair, Indeed

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
05 September 09

Jimmy Carter brings us his report, fresh from his Middle East visit with his fellow ”Elders,” including the Medal of Freedom prize-winning duo of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. Carter and crew go to the Middle East and see “despair.”

Not the despair of Jews in Israel who would like to live in peace with their neighbors and have tried repeatedly to give the Palestinians their own state. Not the despair of victims of Hamas violence or of honor killings. Not the despair of the Palestinian people who would like a government free from corruption. Not the despair of Jews who find it incomprehensible that teaching the Holocaust is considered to be a human-rights violation by Hamas. Not the despair of Israel and its neighbors who are contemplating a nuclear-armed Iran and a timid U.S. response. And certainly not the despair that Israelis must feel as a U.S. administration renounces past obligations and delights in picking a fight with its ally.

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Love of the Land: Despair, Indeed

Israel Matzav: An historical defense of Jewish 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria

An historical defense of Jewish 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria

At the outset, I must say that we need another word for 'settlements.' My problem is that the word 'settlements' has a connotation of being temporary and not permanent. It's the same problem I have with the word 'settler,' which I almost never use at all (and even then generally I don't use it without scare quotes). Instead of 'settler,' I use the word "revenant," which means one who has returned to his former land. This op-ed comes from the guy who taught me the word "revenant."

Some have questioned why Jews should be allowed to resettle areas in which they didn't live in the years preceding the 1967 war, areas that were almost empty of Jews before 1948 as well. But why didn't Jews live in the area at that time? Quite simple: They had been the victims of a three-decades-long ethnic cleansing project that started in 1920, when an Arab attack wiped out a small Jewish farm at Tel Hai in Upper Galilee and was followed by attacks in Jerusalem and, in 1921, in Jaffa and Jerusalem.

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Israel Matzav: An historical defense of Jewish 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria

Israel Matzav: Why Hillary Clinton has it wrong about the 'settlements'

Why Hillary Clinton has it wrong about the 'settlements'

On Thursday, I blogged an article by Elliott Abrams (pictured) in the Wall Street Journal, in which Abrams recounted the history of the US - Israeli understandings relating to 'natural growth' of the 'settlements' and the eventuality that the 'settlement blocs' would end up in Israeli hands.

Mrs. Clinton has largely been supported by Dan Kurtzer, the former US ambassador to Israel (whose brother lives in a 'settlement bloc'). Steve Rosen explains why Abrams got it right and Kurtzer got it wrong.

A little history here will help to explain the contradiction

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Israel Matzav: Why Hillary Clinton has it wrong about the 'settlements'

Israel Matzav: Lieberman slams Obama on Iran and 'settlements'

Lieberman slams Obama on Iran and 'settlements'

In an interview that's not likely to win him any friends in the White House, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has slammed American President Barack Hussein Obama for his policies on Iran and on Israeli 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria.

He lambasted the West for not giving more support to Iranian reformists. "This really fanatic extremist regime is still in power, and the young people who are ready to fight and die for change are not getting any real support from the West," he said. "The fact that this regime continues to be an acceptable partner for dialogue is really a bad message. It shows the bad guys are winners."

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Israel Matzav: Lieberman slams Obama on Iran and 'settlements'

Israel Matzav: Israel and US nearing a deal on 'settlement' growth

Israel and US nearing a deal on 'settlement' growth

The Los Angeles Times reports that Israel and the United States are nearing a deal that would define the 'natural growth' of 'settlements' to allow some growth to take place. The Times does not sound very pleased about it.

After weeks of talks, U.S. officials have signaled that they are close to an agreement with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that could open the way to a resumption of high-level peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Former Sen. George J. Mitchell, Obama's envoy for Middle East peace, said this week that he hoped for a U.S.-Israeli accord "very soon."

The talks have focused on two issues the Israelis raise to argue against a complete halt to settlement growth, officials say.

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Israel Matzav: Israel and US nearing a deal on 'settlement' growth

Israel Matzav: On the legality of Israeli 'settlements'

On the legality of Israeli 'settlements'

On Thursday, I linked a Washington Post article that unearthed a 30-year old 'legal opinion' from the Carter administration's State Department Legal Adviser that claimed that Israeli 'settlements' are 'illegal' under the Geneva Convention. It seems that opinion was based on the writings of a legal scholar who vehemently argued that 'Israeli settlements' are completely legal (Hat Tip: Daled Amos).

Those who maintain that the settlements are illegal rely on Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, August 12, 1949, which states:

Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country…are prohibited…

and in the sixth paragraph:

The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

They interpret this as applicable to Israel’s settlement of the West Bank and Gaza, understanding Israel to have become a "belligerent occupant" of this territory through entry by its armed forces. They also argue that settlement policy leads to the violation of Palestinian rights under international humanitarian law–specifically, their right to self-determination, equality, property, freedom of movement, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement.Those who maintain that settlements are legal interpret Article 49 (6) of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention as inapplicable to Israel’s settlements.

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Israel Matzav: On the legality of Israeli 'settlements'

Israel Matzav: More to the 'settlement blocs' than 'natural growth'

More to the 'settlement blocs' than 'natural growth'

Rick Richman reminds us that there's something much more important about the 'settlement blocs' than how many babies are born there every year.

The more important point, however, is that the major settlement blocs are located on strategic high ground, or in other militarily significant locations, which are undoubtedly part of the “defensible borders” promised to Israel in the 2004 Bush Letter — as part of an agreement relating to the Gaza disengagement that should be deemed “enforceable.” There is no definition of “defensible borders” in the letter, but the one thing everyone knows it does not mean is the 1967 borders.

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Israel Matzav: More to the 'settlement blocs' than 'natural growth'

WER ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS A VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW ?

Were Israeli settlements a violation of international law?

On Israeli Settlements

June 17, 2009 5:30 AM

by Dore Gold
President, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

http://www.jcpa.org

The Obama administration's tough, confrontational rhetoric on Israeli settlements raises a number of specific questions: Were Israeli settlements a violation of international law? Were Israeli settlements a violation of agreements and an obstacle to further progress in any future peace talks? Did the administration envision Israel withdrawing completely to the 1967 lines or did it accept the idea that Israel would retain part of the territories for defensible borders?

Many observers are surprised to learn that settlement activity was not defined as a violation of the 1993 Oslo Accords or their subsequent implementation agreements. If the U.S. is now seeking to constrain Israeli settlement activity, it is essentially trying to obtain additional Israeli concessions that were not formally required according to Israel's legal obligations under the Oslo Accords.

President Bush's deputy national security advisor, Elliot Abrams, wrote in the Washington Post on April 8, 2009, that the U.S. and Israel negotiated specific guidelines for settlement activity, whereby "settlement activity is not diminishing the territory of a future Palestinian entity." If the U.S. is concerned that Israel might diminish the territory that the Palestinians will receive in the future, then the Obama team could continue with the quiet guidelines followed by the Bush administration and the Sharon government.

Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is estimated to be 1.7 percent of the territory, the marginal increase in territory that might be affected by natural growth is infinitesimal. Moreover, since Israel unilaterally withdrew 9,000 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the argument that a settler presence will undermine a future territorial compromise has lost much of its previous force.

The U.S. and Israel need to reach a new understanding on the settlements question. Legally and diplomatically, settlements do not represent a problem that can possibly justify putting at risk the U.S.-Israel relationship. It might be that the present tension in U.S.-Israeli relations is not over settlements, but rather over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank that the Obama administration envisions.

Disturbingly, on June 1, 2009, the State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, refused to answer repeated questions about whether the Obama administration viewed itself as legally bound by the April 2004 Bush letter to Sharon on defensible borders and settlement blocs. It would be better to obtain earlier clarification of that point, rather than having both countries expend their energies over an issue that may not be the real underlying source of their dispute.

In his June 4, 2009, Cairo speech, President Barack Obama continued to focus U.S. policy on Israel's construction practices in the West Bank, which he forcefully criticized: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop." His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was no less forceful when speaking on May 27, 2009, about Obama's stand on this issue: "He wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth' exceptions."

The Obama administration's tough, confrontational rhetoric on Israeli settlements raises the question of whether it represents a sharp break from the policies of past administrations. Moreover, Obama's assertion that current Israeli construction represents a violation of past agreements raises the question of which agreement he had in mind.

Israeli settlements in the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War date back more than forty years. They began as military and agricultural outposts that were located for the most part in strategically significant areas of the West Bank which Israel planned to eventually claim. These settlements were also situated in areas from which Jews had been evicted during the 1948 War. While the U.S. did not support the settlement enterprise, its response to the settlements has varied in intensity, depending on the overall relationship between the two countries.

For example, the Carter administration abstained in the UN Security Council repeatedly in 1979 when draft resolutions came up for a vote that condemned Israeli settlement activity. Yet suddenly in March 1980, the administration initially decided to support Resolution 465 that called for "dismantling" all settlements, although later it reversed its position.

This varying response to the settlement issue also stemmed from U.S. policy on a number of specific questions raised by the establishment of Israeli settlements:

Were Israeli settlements a violation of international law?

Were Israeli settlements a violation of specific bilateral agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors and an obstacle to further progress in any future peace talks?

To what extent did the administration envision Israel withdrawing completely to the 1967 lines or did it accept the idea that Israel would retain part of the territories for defensible borders and its security needs?

There were also two other conflicting considerations. For years Washington opposed settlements because it was felt that they were unilateral actions that pre-judged the outcome of future negotiations. But at the same time there was the view that constrained U.S. statements or activities against the settlements: while all administrations opposed settlement activity on policy grounds, the U.S. felt that using the UN to press Israel was inappropriate, since it was argued that Arab-Israeli differences of this nature should be resolved bilaterally between the parties themselves.

The Settlements and International Law

Before turning to the specific issue of the settlements, it is instructive to recall that Israel's entry into the West Bank, in particular, created a number of legal dilemmas that would ultimately impinge on how the legal question of settlements was examined. Israel entered the West Bank in a war of self-defense, so that the UN Security Council did not call on Israel to withdraw from all the territory that it captured, when it adopted UN Security Council Resolution 242 in November 1967. The previous occupant in the West Bank from 1949 to 1967 had been the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose sovereignty in the territory the entire international community refused to recognize - except for Britain and Pakistan. Prior to 1949, the governing document for legal rights in the West Bank was the 1922 Palestine Mandate, which gave international recognition to Jewish legal rights.

U.S. officials were cognizant of these considerations. Eugene Rostow, a former dean of Yale Law School who was also Undersecretary of State in the Johnson years, would write years later that "Israel has an unassailable legal right to establish settlements in the West Bank." He argued that Israel's claims to the territory were "at least as good as those of Jordan." Prof. Stephen Schwebel, who would become the State Department legal advisor and subsequently the President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, went a step further when he wrote in 1970 that "Israel has better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem, than do Jordan and Egypt." On July 29, 1977, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance stated that "it is an open question as to who has legal right to the West Bank."

In the late 1960s, the Johnson administration was critical of Israeli settlement activity, but did not characterize the settlements as illegal. It was not until the Carter administration that the State Department Legal Advisor, Herbert Hansell, expressed the view that the settlements violated international law. The Carter policy was reversed by all of his sucssessors. Thus, President Ronald Reagan declared on February 2, 1981, that the settlements were "not illegal." He criticized them on policy grounds, calling them "ill-advised" and "proactive."

The question about the legality of settlements came from how various legal authorities interpret the applicability of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention relative to civilian persons in times of war. Article 49 of the convention clearly prohibits "mass forcible transfers" of protected persons from occupied territories. Later in the article, it states that "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." American interpretations of this article maintained that it referred to forcible deportations that were practiced by the Nazis and not to Israeli settlement activity. During the Bush (41) administration, the U.S. ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Morris Abram, explained that he had been on the U.S. staff during the Nuremberg trials and was hence familiar with the "legislative intent" behind the Fourth Geneva Convention. He stated on February 1, 1990, that it applied to forcible transfers and not to the case of Israeli settlements.

It should be added that in the Israeli legal community, charging that settlement activity could be comparable to the forcible evictions by the Nazis during the Second World War was regarded as extremely offensive. When Israel had to vote on whether it accepted the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, the head of its delegation, Judge Eli Natan, explained that while it gave him great pain to vote against the creation of the court, Israel could not vote for a politicized statute that defined settlement activity among the "most heinous and serious war crimes." For Natan, who was himself a Holocaust survivor, as well as for his team, this was a vulgar charge. The U.S. stood with Israel against these abuses in the founding document of the International Criminal Court, which implied that the State of Israel, a country made up partly by survivors of the Holocaust, was guilty of crimes on the same order of magnitude as what its perpetrators had committed.

The Settlements and Past International Agreements

Many observers are surprised to learn that settlement activity was not defined as a violation of the 1993 Oslo Accords or their subsequent implementation agreements. During the secret negotiations leading up to the signing of Oslo, Yasser Arafat instructed his negotiators to seek a "settlement freeze," but Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres refused to agree to Arafat's demand. Nonetheless, Arafat agreed to the Oslo Accords despite the lack of a settlement freeze. The Oslo Accords were essentially an interim arrangement; they stipulated that the issue of settlements would be addressed in permanent status negotiations. If the U.S. is subsequently seeking to constrain Israeli settlement activity, it is essentially trying to obtain additional Israeli concessions that were not formally required according to Israel's legal obligations under the Oslo Accords.

Settlements became a far more salient issue with the release on May 4, 2001, of the report of a commission headed by Senator George Mitchell that sought to address the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 and to propose a return to negotiations. The Mitchell Report recommended that as a part of confidence-building measures between the parties, "Israel should freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements." The Bush (43) administration adopted the Mitchell Report, putting the settlement issue right in the center of U.S.-Israeli discussions.

It appeared at the time that the U.S. felt itself to be in an awkward position as an honest broker in peacemaking if Israel were to expropriate more land for settlement growth during the course of future negotiations. To address this concern, the Sharon government proposed a formula whereby Israel could continue to build within existing settlements, but only from the outer ring of construction inward in each settlement. That way, Israel could address the need for natural growth without taking more land for Israelis living in the settlements. These idea came up in discussions between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

As the Bush administration drafted its 2003 Roadmap for Peace, it decided to include the Mitchell Report's settlement freeze - that included natural growth. Dov Weisglass, who headed Sharon's negotiating team on the settlement issue, has explained that Sharon had serious reservations about the proposed freeze. According to Weisglass' account in Yediot Ahronot on June 2, 2009, in order to facilitate the Israeli government's acceptance of the Roadmap, Israel reached an understanding with the U.S. about what exactly a settlement freeze entailed. The two sides concluded:

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  No new settlements would be built.
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  No Palestinian land would be expropriated or otherwise seized for the purpose of settlement.
• 
  Construction within the settlements would be confined to "the existing line of construction."
• 
  Public funds would not be earmarked for encouraging settlements.

Weisglass wrote a letter to U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on April 18, 2004, in which he reconfirmed what he described as the "agreed principles of settlement activity," indicating that it was his understanding at the time that such an understanding indeed existed. He also wrote that his government undertook to remove what were known as "unauthorized outposts" - small settlement extensions that were constructed at local initiative without formal Israeli government approval.

However, the Bush administration and the Sharon government never put these understandings in writing, which has allowed the Obama administration to question their existence and validity, even if such commitments were made. Thus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told George Stephanopoulos on June 7, 2009, during a broadcast of ABC's This Week: "Well, that was an understanding that was entered into, so far as we are told, orally. That was never made a part of the official record of the negotiations as it was passed on to our administration. No one in the Bush administration said to anyone that we can find in our administration...."

President Bush's deputy national security advisor, Elliot Abrams, has been partially supportive of Weisglass' claim. He wrote in the Washington Post on April 8, 2009, that the U.S. and Israel negotiated specific guidelines for settlement activity, but they were never "formally adopted." On its part, Israel nonetheless felt that it had committed itself, despite the lack of any signed agreement, so that it largely adhered to those guidelines for over five years. According to Abrams, the formula succeeded in creating a situation whereby "settlement activity is not diminishing the territory of a future Palestinian entity."

The Settlements and Israel's Ultimate Borders

Prior to 1977, U.S. criticism of Israeli settlement activity was largely muted. During that period, much of this activity seemed to be confined to areas like the Jordan Valley, where there were compelling strategic arguments for Israel to retain them. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had been sympathetic with Israel's claim for defensible borders during the first Rabin government.

The escalation in strong U.S. statements against Israeli settlements after 1977 was not only due to the Carter administration's determination that settlements were illegal, but also due to its demand that there be a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it captured in the Six-Day War. At the same time, as Israeli settlement activity moved beyond the initial parameters that existed prior to 1977, U.S.-Israeli disagreements over this issue intensified.

When the U.S. again became more flexible over Israel's eventual retention of certain West Bank territories, settlement activity did not prove to be a major cause for bilateral tensions. Thus, when President George W. Bush sent Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a letter on April 14, 2004, acknowledging that, at the end of the day, Israel would obtain defensible borders as well as the large West Bank settlement blocs, Washington and Jerusalem were able to conduct a quiet but useful dialogue, as noted earlier, over the parameters Israel should follow in any settlement activity it undertakes.

The Obama administration's current focus on Israeli settlement activity - including natural growth - raises a number of questions. If the U.S. is concerned that Israel might diminish the territory that the Palestinians will receive in the future, then the Obama team could continue with the quiet guidelines followed by the Bush administration and the Sharon government.

Given the fact that the amount of territory taken up by the built-up areas of all the settlements in the West Bank is estimated to be 1.7 percent of the territory, the marginal increase in territory that might be affected by natural growth is infinitesimal. Moreover, since Israel unilaterally withdrew 9,000 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the argument that a settler presence will undermine a future territorial compromise has lost much of its previous force.

The U.S. and Israel need to reach a new understanding on the settlements question. It is clearly an overstated issue in the peace process. Legally and diplomatically, settlements do not represent a problem that can possibly justify putting at risk the U.S.-Israel relationship. It might be that the present tension in U.S.-Israeli relations is not over settlements, but rather over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank that the Obama administration envisions.

For example, it still needs to be clarified whether the Obama administration feels bound by the April 14, 2004, Bush letter to Sharon on defensible borders and settlement blocs, which was subsequently ratified by large bipartisan majorities in both the U.S. Senate (95-3) and the House of Representatives (407-9) on June 23-24, 2004. Disturbingly, on June 1, 2009, the State Department spokesman, Robert Wood, refused to answer repeated questions about whether the Obama administration viewed itself as legally bound by the Bush letter. It would be better to obtain earlier clarification of that point, rather than having both countries expend their energies over an issue that may not be the real underlying source of their dispute.

Dr. Dore Gold, Israel's ambassador to the UN in 1997-99, is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and author of Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Regnery, 2003), The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Regnery, 2007), and The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West (Regnery, forthcoming fall 2009).
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taken from : B'NAI ELIM (http://bnaielim.blogspot.com/)

Israel Matzav: Lieberman v. Clinton on 'settlements'

Lieberman v. Clinton on 'settlements'

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a real knockdown dragout on Wednesday afternoon over Israeli 'settlement' building.

Let's go to the videotape and I'll have more below. The 'fun' starts with the very first question at the 4:10 mark and it runs until about the 10:30 mark when they move on to Iran.

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Israel Matzav: Lieberman v. Clinton on 'settlements'

Israel Matzav: Most Israelis oppose 'settlement freeze,' won't dismantle 'settlements'

Most Israelis oppose 'settlement freeze,' won't dismantle 'settlements'

A survey by Maagar Mochot published in Haaretz on Friday reveals that 56% of Israelis are outright opposed to President Obama's demand for a 'settlement freeze' and nearly two thirds are not willing to dismantle 'settlements' as part of a 'final solution' to the Israeli-'Palestinian' dispute or are willing to dismantle only a few 'settlements.'

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Israel Matzav: Most Israelis oppose 'settlement freeze,' won't dismantle 'settlements'

Israel Matzav: Some historical facts about Israeli 'settlements'

Some historical facts about Israeli 'settlements'

Former UN ambassador Dore Gold has written an issue brief on US policy regarding Israeli 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria. While I urge you to read the whole thing, I believe that some of the historical facts he cites may come as a surprise to some of you.

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Israel Matzav: Some historical facts about Israeli 'settlements'