New town may be death blow to hopes for Israel peace

[cali]

The sign in big, red Hebrew letters reads “Welcome to Mevasseret Adumim, the Harbinger of the Hills”. A three-lane road with roundabouts leads up the hill to a police station and street lamps line the flyover that links the new town to neighbouring Ma'aleh Adumim, one of the largest Jewish settlements in Israel.

There are no houses, cars or people in Mevasseret Adumim: it is a town laid out, waiting to be built. That is because international pressure has so far prevented construction from going ahead. The area is the last piece of open land linking Arab East Jerusalem to the West Bank and critics said that to develop it would bury the very notion of a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis.

According to reports in the Israeli media, the area has been earmarked for development under a secret accord between Binyamin Netanyahu, the new, conservative Israeli Prime Minister, and his ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

Better known under its old British mandate name, E1, it is the most controversial development project in the region, one that diplomats and observers warn will trigger the collapse of the weakened Palestinian Authority, or drive it into armed resistance again.

<snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6031894.ece

[cali]

1. Israel continues killing any possibliity of peace.

I don't see how anyone can see it differently at this point in time.

[sellitman]

2. It's either posturing or you are right. They have given up.

I hope it's just posturing but somehow I doubt it.

[cali]

3. Pretty clear it;'s not just posturing.

And Hillary and Obama need to step up.

[sellitman]

4. Both sides in this mess have to step up.

The Palestinians need to stop their Infada just as the Israelis need to hold off settlements.

There are no Angels in this dispute.

[Mosby]

5. it's a hard sell

The Israelis have made territorial concessions in the past that was not reciprocated in any way - I personally think they should suspend settlement construction but unless the Israelis see some sort of benifit it will likely continue especially given the coalition style of gov. in Israel.

[cali]

6. read the article.

this will kill any chance of a viable Palestinian state. The Israelis are the ones actively killing that chance.

[Mosby]

9. the areas in and around maale adumim

Are likely to be part of land swaps (afaik) so it's hard to see how this is a "deal breaker". If you recall they said the same thing about Har Homa more than 10 years ago, before CD2 and taba.

[Douglas Carpenter]

8. Sorry, but that is simply not true.

That is simply not true!! Israel has more than doubled the number of settlers since the Oslo Accord in 1993 and is still continuing to relentlessly expand settlements all the time!! And when Israel redeployed from Gaza they greatly exhilarated their settlement expansions plans in the West Bank while keeping control of Gaza's air, land and sea access


Israel withdrew the settlements from the Gaza - and doubled the settlement construction plans in
the West Bank - links:

Including a whole new settlement in the Jordan Valley. That's a long, long way from the Green Line. link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6210721.stm

There are approximately 450,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, (*now closer to 500,000)including East Jerusalem. According to B'tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, " the built-up area of the settlements in the West Bank covers 1.7 percent of the West Bank, the settlements control 41.9 percent of the entire West Bank".* http://www.btselem.org/English/Maps/Index.asp

-------------------------------------

Settlement expansion actually massively exhilarated after the signing of the Oslo Accord in September 1993 resulting in increasing the number of setters by approximately 90% by the time of the Camp David 2000 talks. They exhiliarated again following the Gaza redeployment.

New UN map charts West Bank reality
From the Financial Times of London:


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/728a69d4-12b1-11dc-a475-000b5df10621,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F728a69d4-12b1-11dc-a475-000b5df10621.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.democraticunderground.com%2Fdiscuss%2Fdu

snip:"Diplomats say the effect of the infrastructure changes would be to formalise the de facto cantonisation of the West Bank. Some 450,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and occupied east Jerusalem and settlements have grown by at least 5.5 per cent a year compared with less than 3 per cent among Palestinians."

---------------------

With the construction of massive new highways and expansion of the massive settlements surrounding Jerusalem...unimpeided access between a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank is becoming increasingly unlikely:



New segregated Road being built cuts off East Jerusalem and divides the West Bank

"The Americans demanded from Sharon contiguity for a Palestinian state," said Shaul Arieli, a reserve colonel in the army who participated in the 2000 Camp David negotiations and specializes in maps. "This road was Sharon’s answer, to build a road for Palestinians between Ramallah and Bethlehem but not to Jerusalem. This was how to connect the West Bank while keeping Jerusalem united and not giving Palestinians any blanket permission to enter East Jerusalem."

<snip>

"To Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer who advises an Israeli advocacy group called Ir Amim, which works for Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in Jerusalem, the road suggests an ominous map of the future. It is one in which Israel keeps nearly all of East Jerusalem and a ring of Israeli settlements surrounding it, providing a cordon of Israelis between largely Arab East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, which will become part of a future Palestinian state."

<snip>

"To me, this road is a move to create borders, to change final status," Mr. Seidemann said, referring to unresolved issues regarding borders, refugees and the fate of Jerusalem. "It’s to allow Maale Adumim and E1 into Jerusalem but be able to say, ‘See, we’re treating the Palestinians well — there’s geographical contiguity.’ "

Measure it yourself, he said. "The Palestinian road is 16 meters wide," or 52 feet, he added. "The Israeli theory of a contiguous Palestinian state is 16 meters wide."

"In the end, he said, “there is no Palestinian state, even though the Israelis speak of one.” Instead, he said, “there will be a settler state and a Palestinian built-up area, divided into three sectors, cut by fingers of Israeli settlement and connected only by narrow roads.”"

link to full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/world/middleeast/11road.html?_r=6&pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=22948d4799a34065&ex=1187496000&emc=eta1&oref=

---------------------


As appears from the map, while the built-up area of the settlements in the West Bank covers 1.7 percent of the West Bank, the settlements control 41.9 percent of the entire West Bank.

full PDF map: http://www.btselem.org/Download/Settlements_Map_Eng.pdf

other map of settlements from B'tsellem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

http://www.btselem.org/English/Maps/Index.asp

July/August 2002


The Myth of the Generous Offer
Distorting the Camp David negotiations


By Seth Ackerman

link:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113


The seemingly endless volleys of attack and retaliation in the Middle East leave many people wondering why the two sides can't reach an agreement. The answer is simple, according to numerous commentators: At the Camp David meeting in July 2000, Israel "offered extraordinary concessions" (Michael Kelly, Washington Post, 3/13/02), "far-reaching concessions" (Boston Globe, 12/30/01), "unprecedented concessions" (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). Israel’s "generous peace terms" (L.A. Times editorial, 3/15/02) constituted "the most far-reaching offer ever" (Chicago Tribune editorial, 6/6/01) to create a Palestinian state. In short, Camp David was "an unprecedented concession" to the Palestinians (Time, 12/25/00).

But due to "Arafat's recalcitrance" (L.A. Times editorial, 4/9/02) and "Palestinian rejectionism" (Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report, 3/22/02), "Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer" (Salon, 3/8/01). Yes, Arafat "walked away without making a counteroffer" (Samuel G. Freedman, USA Today, 6/18/01). Israel "offered peace terms more generous than ever before and Arafat did not even make a counteroffer" (Chicago Sun-Times editorial, 11/10/00). In case the point isn't clear: "At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an astonishingly generous peace with dignity and statehood. Arafat not only turned it down, he refused to make a counteroffer!" (Charles Krauthammer, Seattle Times, 10/16/00).

This account is one of the most tenacious myths of the conflict. Its implications are obvious: There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli army’s increasingly deadly attacks, in this version, can be seen purely as self-defense against Palestinian aggression that is motivated by little more than blind hatred.

Locking in occupation

To understand what actually happened at Camp David, it's necessary to know that for many years the PLO has officially called for a two-state solution in which Israel would keep the 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate (as Britain's protectorate was called) that it has controlled since 1948, and a Palestinian state would be formed on the remaining 22 percent that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). Israel would withdraw completely from those lands, return to the pre-1967 borders and a resolution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 would be negotiated between the two sides. Then, in exchange, the Palestinians would agree to recognize Israel (PLO Declaration, 12/7/88; PLO Negotiations Department).

Although some people describe Israel's Camp David proposal as practically a return to the 1967 borders, it was far from that. Under the plan, Israel would have withdrawn completely from the small Gaza Strip. But it would annex strategically important and highly valuable sections of the West Bank--while retaining "security control" over other parts--that would have made it impossible for the Palestinians to travel or trade freely within their own state without the permission of the Israeli government (Political Science Quarterly, 6/22/01; New York Times, 7/26/01; Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 9-10/00; Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, 8/9/01).

The annexations and security arrangements would divide the West Bank into three disconnected cantons. In exchange for taking fertile West Bank lands that happen to contain most of the region's scarce water aquifers, Israel offered to give up a piece of its own territory in the Negev Desert--about one-tenth the size of the land it would annex--including a former toxic waste dump.

Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new "independent state" would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called "bypass roads" that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.

Israel was also to have kept "security control" for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt--putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.

Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements, the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end. For at Camp David, Israel also demanded that Arafat sign an "end-of-conflict" agreement stating that the decades-old war between Israel and the Palestinians was over and waiving all further claims against Israel.

Violence or negotiation?

The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, the Palestinian leader's "response to the Camp David proposals was not a counteroffer but an assault" (Oregonian editorial, 8/15/01). "Arafat figured he could push one more time to get one more batch of concessions. The talks collapsed. Violence erupted again" (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). He "used the uprising to obtain through violence...what he couldn't get at the Camp David bargaining table" (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/21/00).

But the Intifada actually did not start for another two months. In the meantime, there was relative calm in the occupied territories. During this period of quiet, the two sides continued negotiating behind closed doors. Meanwhile, life for the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation went on as usual. On July 28, Prime Minister Barak announced that Israel had no plans to withdraw from the town of Abu Dis, as it had pledged to do in the 1995 Oslo II agreement (Israel Wire, 7/28/00). In August and early September, Israel announced new construction on Jewish-only settlements in Efrat and Har Adar, while the Israeli statistics bureau reported that settlement building had increased 81 percent in the first quarter of 2000. Two Palestinian houses were demolished in East Jerusalem, and Arab residents of Sur Bahir and Suwahara received expropriation notices; their houses lay in the path of a planned Jewish-only highway (Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 11-12/00).

The Intifada began on September 29, 2000, when Israeli troops opened fire on unarmed Palestinian rock-throwers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding over 200 (State Department human rights report for Israel, 2/01). Demonstrations spread throughout the territories. Barak and Arafat, having both staked their domestic reputations on their ability to win a negotiated peace from the other side, now felt politically threatened by the violence. In January 2001, they resumed formal negotiations at Taba, Egypt.

The Taba talks are one of the most significant and least remembered events of the "peace process." While so far in 2002 (1/1/02-5/31/02), Camp David has been mentioned in conjunction with Israel 35 times on broadcast network news shows, Taba has come up only four times--never on any of the nightly newscasts. In February 2002, Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz (2/14/02), published for the first time the text of the European Union's official notes of the Taba talks, which were confirmed in their essential points by negotiators from both sides.

"Anyone who reads the European Union account of the Taba talks," Ha'aretz noted in its introduction, "will find it hard to believe that only 13 months ago, Israel and the Palestinians were so close to a peace agreement." At Taba, Israel dropped its demand to control Palestine's borders and the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians, for the first time, made detailed counterproposals--in other words, counteroffers--showing which changes to the 1967 borders they would be willing to accept. The Israeli map that has emerged from the talks shows a fully contiguous West Bank, though with a very narrow middle and a strange gerrymandered western border to accommodate annexed settlements.

In the end, however, all this proved too much for Israel's Labor prime minister. On January 28, Barak unilaterally broke off the negotiations. "The pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted," Ben-Ami said (New York Times, 7/26/01).

Settlements off the table

In February 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon has made his position on the negotiations crystal clear. "You know, it's not by accident that the settlements are located where they are," he said in an interview a few months after his election (Ha'aretz, 4/12/01).


They safeguard the cradle of the Jewish people's birth and also provide strategic depth which is vital to our existence.

The settlements were established according to the conception that, come what may, we have to hold the western security area , which is adjacent to the Green Line, and the eastern security area along the Jordan River and the roads linking the two. And Jerusalem, of course. And the hill aquifer. Nothing has changed with respect to any of those things. The importance of the security areas has not diminished, it may even have increased. So I see no reason for evacuating any settlements.


Meanwhile, Ehud Barak has repudiated his own positions at Taba, and now speaks pointedly of the need for a negotiated settlement "based on the principles presented at Camp David" (New York Times op-ed, 4/14/02).

In April 2002, the countries of the Arab League--from moderate Jordan to hardline Iraq--unanimously agreed on a Saudi peace plan centering around full peace, recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders as well as a "just resolution" to the refugee issue. Palestinian negotiator Nabil Sha'ath declared himself "delighted" with the plan. "The proposal constitutes the best terms of reference for our political struggle," he told the Jordan Times (3/28/02).

Ariel Sharon responded by declaring that "a return to the 1967 borders will destroy Israel" (New York Times, 5/4/02). In a commentary on the Arab plan, Ha'aretz's Bradley Burston (2/27/02) noted that the offer was "forcing Israel to confront peace terms it has quietly feared for decades."

[LeftishBrit]

7. Sad. I don't think peace and people like Bibi and Lieberman go together

Hoping that the Israelis - and the Palestinians - will get better leadership than they do at the moment; before things become even more fucked up than they are already!