The man who commanded Gaza and the West Bank from the last day of the Six Day War talks to Donald Macintyre in Tel Aviv Immediately after the Six Day War, 40 years ago, Shlomo Gazit was put in charge of Gaza and the West Bank. Today, the retired general is in favour of talks with Hamas, describes the road map as a "pretext" for Israel not to negotiate with the Palestinians, and thinks the idea that the US can or should veto a peace process between Jerusalem and Damascus is a "nonsense". At first sight Mr Gazit could be a classic military hawk. A tough, unsentimental man with 37 years in the Israeli Defence Forces behind him, he has never been slow in condemning Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet he enjoys the unique distinction of having, from the heart of the Israeli military, proposed in writing a Palestinian state exactly 40 years ago yesterday - 24 hours before the war had even ended. And he has never been more convinced than now that such a state, its negotiated borders based on those that preceded the war, and involving withdrawal from most of the West Bank Jewish settlements, remains the only answer to the conflict. Mr Gazit, who in June 1967 was head of the assessment department in military intelligence, says he remembers little of the day-to-day progress of the war. The reason is that on 5 June 1967 he strolled over to a jubilant air force command to be given reports of the spectacularly successful assault on Egyptian airfields - which arguably won the war on its first day. He also learned, however, that his 23-year-old nephew, Dan Engel, was one of the few Israeli pilots reported missing. "I spent the rest of the week in a kind of trance," he says. His grief did not stop him producing a remarkably clear-sighted - and, for the times, heretical - memorandum on 9 June that proposed "the establishment of an independent Palestinian state [without military forces] in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip". The Old City, holy to three great religions, and taken over by triumphant Israeli forces only 48 hours earlier, should "become an 'open city' with an independent status resembling the Vatican". The memo went to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, to Defence Minister Moshe Dayan and to Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. "Unfortunately, not one of them responded to the document," Mr Gazit would later write. "No discussion was held, nor was any action taken." For a man who spent much of his army service in intelligence, Mr Gazit has an unflinching awareness of its limitations. But it's not so much for the war itself as for the aftermath that Mr Gazit's experience and insights have been of such lasting value. He set out as far as possible to implement the charismatic Dayan's notion of an "invisible occupation" - one that was progressively undermined by the relentless growth of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, and of the military apparatus protecting them. While acknowledging that the post-war Israeli Labour government allowed that process to start, Mr Gazit blames Menachem Begin's Likud, which swept to power in 1977, for the policy of "creeping annexation". That paved the way for the 250,000 settlers in the West Bank today, and helped to "destroy any hope" of the 1978 Camp David accords leading to full Palestinian autonomy. "When Labour left office, there were maybe 5,000 settlers," he says. "Begin said, 'We're going to have 100,000.' I wish we [only] had 100,000 today." On the Oslo accords, the ex-general, who represented Israel in back-channel discussions with the Palestinians in the 1990s, says he is "not one of those who thought that Oslo was doomed from the very beginning". But he thinks that postponement of discussion of a final settlement until the end of a series of "confidence-building measures" was a "totally wrong concept". He adds: "If I wanted to reach an agreement I would say first, 'these are the principles of a final settlement'." The assassination of the Labour Prime Minister of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, by a Jewish extremist probably dealt the fatal blow to the Oslo process, he admits. But he also believes that "one of the biggest mistakes made by us" after Rabin's death was the assassination of the senior Hamas militant and bomb-maker, Yahiya Ayyash, in January 1996. It was followed by 60 Israeli deaths in four horrific suicide bombings over the next two months, hastening the collapse of Oslo and Shimon Peres's premiership. "Arafat told me he could not tell the extremists they had no right to avenge the killing of Ayyash," he says. Had Ariel Sharon not had his massive stroke in January 2006, Mr Gazit believes he would have realised that withdrawal from Gaza was not going to be enough to fulfil the demographic objective that had come to preoccupy him - ensuring a Jewish majority in the territory controlled by Israel. As a result, he thinks, Mr Sharon would have embarked on withdrawals from the West Bank. Where does Israel stand now? Four decades ago, the Khartoum Arab summit of August 1967 famously said "no" to negotiations, to recognition of Israel and to peace. Mr Gazit - now at Tel Aviv University's Institute of National Strategic Studies - is among those who have questioned whether the summit did torpedo peace hopes as absolutely as Israel has always claimed. However, he points out that in any case this year's Arab summit in Riyadh - which promised recognition of Israel in return for a withdrawal to 1967 borders - turned the three Khartoum "nos" into three "yeses". On top of that, he says, opinion polls show that a clear majority of the Israeli public want an agreement on a two-state solution. They realise that "small is beautiful, and that if Israel wants to survive as a Jewish state, we have to get rid of the territories". Nor does he see any problem in Israel talking directly to Hamas, elected to run the Palestinian Authority in January 2006, "not because I'm a lover of Hamas, but because you can't ignore it" - and because he believes that it is impossible to reach agreement without at least its tacit consent. In the veteran's view, "conditions are very ripe to reach an agreement" with the Palestinians, but as he wrote last week on the joint Israeli-Palestinian Bitterlemons website, the problem is weak leadership on both sides of the conflict. "It will be sad and painful if... yet more confrontations and more sacrifices... are required before we can fully reap the fruits of [the 1967] war." That said, Mr Gazit still believes that the Palestinian state he envisaged as the Six Day War continued to rage 40 years ago will happen. A man who has never bowed to the conventional wisdom of the moment, Mr Gazit declares that "ultimately, I'm very optimistic". Further reading: 'Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories' by Shlomo Gazit ( Frank Cass)
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By: Amira Hass
Date: 27/05/2013
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Slain Bedouin girls' mother, a victim of Israeli-Palestinian bureaucracy
Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them. In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B. The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories). In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long. The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.
By: Phoebe Greenwood
Date: 27/05/2013
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John Kerry unveils plan to boost Palestinian economy
John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector. The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace. Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago. Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid. Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority". Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations. "Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."
By: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
Date: 27/05/2013
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Isolation Devastates East Jerusalem Economy
Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops. “All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive. Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him. “I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.” Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay. “It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.” He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?” Illegal annexation Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect. “After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote. Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation. Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. Extreme poverty Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower. While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line. “How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”. “Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked. “You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS. Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities. Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn. Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent. “Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found. Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population. To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones. It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services. “Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER). Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”
By the Same Author
Date: 20/01/2010
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How Israel Put the Brakes on Another Palestinian Dream
The West Bank scene is all too familiar: yellow cranes lifting boulders, bulldozers scooping up soil, drills transforming a hillside set in a biblical landscape of rolling olive groves. But this is not another Jewish settlement under construction. Small Palestinian flags wave from the bulldozers, a hint that this is a nationally significant project, the start of the first planned city in modern Palestinian history. "You are walking in downtown Rawabi," says site manager Maher Sawalha, burly and enthusiastic. Around him is empty brushland, dotted with hyssop and speckled with red anemones. But Mr Sawalha is not indulging in a fantasy: preliminary construction work on the town started last week, and it has a very detailed plan. But there is a hitch: Israel has yet to grant permission to build an access road, without which this town, intended to have a population of 40,000, will simply not be viable. But, for the time being, that does not stop the dream from being dreamed. "Where we are standing there will be retail stores, hotels, a cultural centre, restaurants, a theater and a cinema," says Mr Sawalha. "In another part of the city we will also have an open-air theatre ." This is the man who oversaw the building of the mausoleum of the Palestinian founding father, Yasser Arafat, in Ramallah, but he is convinced that Rawabi, 10 kilometres north of Ramallah and close to the Palestinian village of Atara and the Jewish settlement of Ateret, is more significant. While Israel has altered the West Bank beyond recognition since the occupation began in 1967, this is the first time Palestinians have taken matters into their own hands and tried to change the map. The Palestinian Authority is strongly backing the project. "It is very important for the Palestinians because we have a housing shortage and very high demand on housing that the cities are not capable of dealing with," says spokesman Ghassan Khatib. Rawabi is intended as a demonstration of how the Palestinians can take action – although peace efforts are stalled – to begin building their future state. And Rawabi will have Palestinian characteristics, says Bashar Masri, managing director of the Bayti Real Estate and Investment Company, which is overseeing the development. "It will have a lot of Western components and a lot of Palestinian components," he says. "Pushing a purely Western town will not sell here." Mr Masri, whose company is Qatari- and Palestinian-owned, is himself a mixture of Western and local, a Nablus native who speaks with an American accent. "We are for profit, that's for sure," he admits. "But taking the risk is motivated by the fact that I'm Palestinian and we need to build this nation." Most residents will be middle- income, he says. Every residential building will have underground parking, not the norm for Palestinians, and in contrast to the sprawl of Ramallah, everything in from kindergartens to electricity will be meticulously planned. But the town centre's design will evoke the old city cores of Jerusalem and Nablus, with narrow alleys made of stone or brick, for pedestrians only. The town will be divided into 23 neighborhoods that will feature "semi-private pocket gardens" so that residents will meet, and relationships will be forged and reinforced, says Shireen Nazer, a project architect. It is a feature in keeping with the Palestinian concept of the hara, or neighbourhood, where everyone knows each other. But the project is very much at the mercy of the Israeli authorities. Despite an easing of checkpoints since Benjamin Netanyahu took office last spring, Israel remains unwilling to allow the growth of some key projects. Security is clearly not the reason. The second Palestinian mobile phone operator, Wataniya, has been waiting for more than two years for Israel to grant the frequencies it needs to expand. Palestinian officials say they have been waiting 18 months for Israel to approve the paving of three kilometres of road for Rawabi that would cut through territory still under Israeli control. Despite Mr Masri's optimism, he is realistic about the most basic need. If the access road is not built, he says, at some point a decision will be taken to scrap the town. "It would be stupid to continue until it is totally completed if the road is not approved," he says.
Date: 15/12/2009
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Gaza One Year on: The Aftermath of a Tragedy
Hilmi Samouni still hopes at some point – "inshallah" – to go back to his old job as a kitchen assistant in the Palmyra, Gaza City's best known shwarma restaurant. But unlike his 22-year-old brother Khamiz, who is working once again in a car paint shop, and his 20-year-old cousin Mousa, on a two-year accountancy diploma course at Al Azhar University, Hilmi, who is 26, found that he couldn't cope when he returned to the Palmyra after the war. "Everyone there was very supportive," he says, "but I couldn't do good work." Unlike Mousa, who also lost his parents, and Khamiz, Hilmi saw the bodies not only of his father Talal and his mother Rahme but also of his wife Maha, age 20, and their only son, six-month-old Mohammed, among the 21 killed in the shelling of the warehouse in which they had been ordered by Israeli troops to gather. It still bothers Hilmi that he has no pictures of any of them; they were burnt when the family home was fired on the day before. Now Hilmi mainly potters round the house, set amid devastated orchards and chicken coops in the southern Gaza City district of Zeitoun. The graffiti in English and Hebrew on the interior walls, left by the men of the Israeli army's Givati brigade, are the only relics of their two-week occupation of the building – a gravestone drawn beside the words "Gaza we were here"; "One down and 999,000 to go"; "Death to Arabs". Has the family deliberately kept the graffiti visible? "Yes, but anyway we didn't have paint to cover them," he says. One of Hilmi's duties is to help look after his dauntingly self-possessed 11-year-old sister Mona, who turns the pages of artwork inspired by her memories of the morning of 5 January 2009. "This is me cleaning the face of mother who is dead. This is my father who was hit in the head and his brains came out. This is my dead sister-in-law. This is my sister taking the son from my sister in law..." The warehouse shelling commemorated in Mona's artwork was one of the worst of many attacks on civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces between 27 December and 18 January. The Israeli military offensive had been a long time coming but still the multiple Saturday-afternoon bombing raids with which it began came as a surprise. The stated purpose was to halt the rocket and mortar attacks – 470 of which had spread undoubted fear through the border communities of southern Israel since an Israeli raid on Hamas ended an uneasy but largely effective five-month ceasefire in early November 2008. But if the timing was a surprise, the unprecedented ferocity of the onslaught on Hamas-controlled Gaza was even more so. More than two weeks into the war, the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni would boast in a radio interview that "Israel ... is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing". Whether, as Judge Richard Goldstone's UN-commissioned report on Operation Cast Lead charged, Israel "targeted" the civilian population, or whether, as some soldiers have since attested, the military simply subordinated the preservation of Palestinian lives to those of its own troops, the figures tell their own story of the extent to which "a country" went "wild". Though disputed by the military, exhaustive research by the respected Israeli human-rights agency B'Tselem put the total death toll at 1,387, of whom 773 were civilians. In the same period, four Israelis were killed in Israel by rocket fire, and nine soldiers in Gaza, four from friendly fire. Because the borders were closed, there was no flow of refugees out of Gaza of the sort that would have followed an equivalent onslaught elsewhere. That early-morning bombardment of Wael Samouni's half-finished warehouse – where some 100 of his extended family, including his young relative Hilmi, had been sheltering – is one of more than 20 events being investigated by the Israeli military police. Last month, pointing out that so far only one soldier has faced trial over his conduct of the war – for stealing a Palestinian's credit card – B'Tselem complained that since the Army itself was doing its own investigating, any indictments would be directed only against "the lower echelon" and that an independent inquiry capable of attributing blame to "senior officers" and government policy-makers in the "political echelon" was needed. Either way, there is no sign as yet of an investigation into a separate incident early the previous day, the first of the ground invasion. Israeli soldiers, their faces camouflaged in black, some with branches round their helmets, stormed into the house behind Hilmi's home, where his uncle, Atiya Samouni, a 46-year-old farmer, was taking refuge with his two wives and 15 children. The family say that the house's front door had deliberately been left open so the advancing troops would see there were children inside. According to their account, Atiya, who spoke some Hebrew, walked with his hands up to the open door of the children's room – where the family was huddled – to show himself to the soldiers who were by now in the adjacent living room. His four-year-old son Ahmad followed him, crying out "Baba, Baba" – "Daddy" – and Atiya told him: "Don't be afraid." But as Atiya started to speak to the soldiers he was shot dead. The troops then began shooting into the children's room, to screams from the adults of "katan" and "ktanim" – "little one(s)" in Hebrew. Five of the children were hit; Ahmad was shot twice in the chest, fatally. Eleven months later, the widowed Zeinat Samouni seems cheerful at first, pressing visitors with a hospitable smile to take one of the round flatbreads she is baking for the imminent Muslim festival of Eid al Adha in the one room she now shares with her seven surviving children. But she cannot stop crying as she describes how they left the house – and the body of her husband – with an older son carrying the heavily bleeding Ahmad to the house of another relative. As evening came, she gave Ahmad, his face now yellowing, bread dipped in water; "It was like feeding a bird," she recalls. The family called an ambulance but were told that it was too dangerous for it to approach the area. Ahmad died in the early hours of Monday morning. "If we'd been able to get an ambulance, I think he would be alive now," she says. Zeinat's daughter, 10-year-old Amal, carries everywhere in her pocket two worn photographs of her dead father and brother. "I want to look at them all the time," she says, almost a year after they were killed. "My house is not beautiful without them." Amal was also injured and says her head and right eye still hurt. But the psychological trauma for Amal is compounded by the fact that she ran off before her mother and siblings left the house after the shooting. Four days later, she was found, partly buried under rubble, dehydrated and in shock, one of 15 other survivors in the immediate area when Red Cross ambulances were finally allowed to get close enough to bring them out. At school, Amal's favourite subjects are Arabic and English. "I don't know much English, but I like it," says the girl, who wants to be a doctor when she grows up. Of Atiya's children with his other wife, Zahawa, the most affected is Kannan, now 13, who still limps from the gunshot in his left thigh. Before the war, he was a keen midfielder but he no longer plays football. For him, too, the impact has not only been physical, however. In the months after the shooting, he had nightmares – and was several times found crying in his sleep or shouting, "They want to shoot my father". "He won't go to the toilet on his own," his mother says, adding that he is easily scared – for example, by the sound of gunfire from a nearby Hamas police-training camp. Kannan, too, has a sketchbook – his drawing encouraged by the counsellor who saw him for four months after the war. It depicts the shooting of his father ... children frightened of aeroplanes overhead ... a destroyed Mosque. Even for the Samounis, however, life goes on. Kannan's family should soon be able to grow six rows of lettuces, peppers and tomatoes on a small plot of land, thanks to a Red Cross irrigation repair project – two wells were destroyed during the military occupation of Zeitoun. It's not enough produce to sell, as they had before, but it's a start. His cousins have also been lent an acre of land, producing olives, figs and vegetables. Down the road, 22-year-old Rami Samouni, whose brother Hamdi was killed by Israeli forces along with the 18,000 chickens in his coop, is helping to rebuild the destroyed house of his cousin Arafat. The rebuilding is partly funded by the 4,000-euro compensation from the Hamas government earmarked for anyone who lost their home in its entirety, along with $5,000 from the rival Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, discreetly channelled by the UN Development Programme to ensure that no political stigma attaches locally to its beneficiaries. Rami, who will graduate next year with an education degree from Al Azhar University, sees the reconstruction as a metaphor. "You have to have hope. If you consider yourself sick, you're going to be sick. You die if you don't rebuild. Our enemies want us to give up and stop life. We have to move on." Despite his talk of "enemies", Rami says more than once in our conversation that he would accept a solution based on the 1967 borders, with Israel and a Palestinian state existing side-by-side. Elsewhere, too, there is varied but pervasive evidence of the famous Gazan resilience, even where the damage is worst. A year on, there are few bleaker sights than the rubble still left by last winter's large-scale dynamiting and bulldozing of houses in the northern Gaza districts of Abed Rabbo and Atatra. All but a small minority of those made homeless by the war are renting homes or lodging with relatives. But in Atatra, where much of the destruction occurred during the last days of the war, a few are still living in tents. It seems to be the women here who are holding things together. The house of Arifa abu Leila, the 40-year-old mother of nine children, was destroyed after the family was forced to leave by Israeli soldiers. Now, under canvas, the family has only a hosepipe and a large plastic bowl for washing. She says the family never got the 4,000 euros from the Hamas authorities and muses the reason may be because her husband "used to be in Hamas but then he left it a long time ago". But when her husband Saleh arrives, he denies adamantly that he was ever in Hamas. Their neighbour, 30-year-old Majda Ghabin, has a significantly more positive reason for living in a tent. With the money he received for his house – destroyed after he was forced out of it, arrested by Israeli troops, and held in Israel for five days during the war – he has rehabilitated his land and invested in carrots, cheaper to care for than the strawberries he used to farm. "I thought it was better to keep working than to find another house," he explains. "That way I can make some money and maybe build a house in the future." Over in the Abed Rabbo district, east of Jabalya and closer to the Israeli border, the wreckage has even generated its own micro-economy. At 6.30 each morning, Saber Abu Freih and his 60-year-old mother Ghazala arrive at what was once their house, partly to sift – so far in vain – through the rubble to find the jewellery they left behind 11 months ago and partly to load a donkey cart with blasted masonry needed to make new breeze-blocks for small-scale construction. A day's work may bring around 100 shekels (£16) to be shared with his six brothers. "We are clearing the land, collecting stones that will be used for building at the same time," he says cheerfully. "We may only get 10 shekels [£1.60] a cartload. But what can we do?" Donkey carts like this one head for the nearby Al Shobaki concrete works to be ground down and made into building blocks. Here, the owner, Abdel Salem al Shobaki, succinctly describes the business spiral of his company since the works was started during the height of the Intifada in 2003 as "excellent to good to bad to unbelievable". The "bad to unbelievable" period, which began in mid-2007, reflects the recent political history of Gaza. Having won the 2006 electoral contest for control of the Palestinian parliament, to the consternation of just about everyone, possibly including Hamas itself, the militant Islamic faction rapidly found itself at odds, not only with Israel and the international community, which united in demanding that it recognise Israel as it had consistently failed to do, but also with the Fatah Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who unlike his political co-habitants had long renounced violence and long embraced the idea of a two-state solution. Despite the mounting tensions through 2006, exacerbated by the abduction of the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit and the ensuing military conflict, a short-lived Saudi-brokered coalition with Fatah was established in February 2007. In June of that year, however, the coalition broke down amid savage internecine fighting on Gaza's streets which was decisively won by Hamas, who seized control in Gaza. Abbas "sacked" the Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, leaving the putative future Palestine split between the West Bank under his own control, and Gaza under that of Hamas. And Israel imposed a total economic siege which at a stroke halted Gaza's once- vibrant manufacturing and agricultural sectors – which often exported to Israeli trading partners – by closing the borders to all but the inward passage of basic humanitarian goods. It is a policy for which Gaza's population of 1.5m has been paying the price ever since. Among much else, it left Mr Al Shobaki short of a crucial commodity that he used to import regularly from Israel. Ever since June 2007, he says, he's had "4,000 tons of gravel but no cement". Then two months ago, Mr Al Shobaki – who says he actually pays 15-20 shekels (£2.40-£3.20) for a good cartload of war rubble – was finally able to procure enough cement to start the works going again, thanks to the tunnels through which it is smuggled from Egypt. Gazans are often sceptical about the quality of Egyptian cement – a joke doing the rounds is that a new Hamas-affiliated mosque on Gaza City's beach road has remained uncompleted because the imams are holding out for Israeli cement. But the real problem is the price. Mr Al Shobaki pays 1,400 shekels (£220) a ton for Egyptian cement through the tunnels – compared to the 380 shekels (£60) or so he paid when the crossings were open and it came from Israel. "First I'd like to see reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas," he says, "and then I'd like to see the crossings open. Anyone who says that the Israeli economy and Gaza's are not connected is stupid. They are one economy." Nevertheless, the tunnels have allowed him to restart production – though at next-to-no profit. For most Gazans, they are now the only tangible contact with the outside world. A large tent city stretches along Gaza's southern border in Rafah, on the old Philadelphi Road which until 2005 was the Israeli-controlled no-man's land between Egypt and Gaza. Overlooked by the watchtowers of Egyptian security rising above the border fence on the south side and the apartment blocks raddled by Israeli shelling from the years of the Intifada on the Palestinian side, the tents protect the entrances to hundreds of smuggling tunnels. These tunnels have served as Gaza's lifeline since June 2007 – and have continued to do so despite the almost-daily Israeli bombing raids during Operation Cast Lead and the 117 deaths of workers, mostly from natural tunnel collapses, in the past year. Now the tunnels are among the Israeli Air Force's retaliatory targets of choice every time a Qassam rocket is launched into southern Israel in breach of the undeclared but – most of the time – effective ceasefire. Today, as the late-November sun sets over the Mediterranean to the west and a solitary F16 flies high overhead, an earthmover has been at work for several hours beginning the repairs to a tunnel entrance destroyed that morning. Surveying the wreckage, tunnel worker Abu Yusef recalls that he once earned 300 shekels (£48) a day as a gardener in Israel when the crossings were open, and would willingly do so again rather than risk his life for a third of that. "If there was other work, I wouldn't look at a tunnel again," he says. One of the wrecked tunnel's owners, who answers only to the name of Abu Hassan, estimates that it will cost almost £40,000 to repair the tunnel but it will – eventually – be worth it. Reeling off the goods he transports through the tunnels – "clothes and food, Galaxy chocolate, empty cola bottles, biscuits" – he acknowledges: "It will take me five months to cover the repair costs – before I would have done it in a month." For business is down, largely because the market is saturated by the tunnels themselves. Supervising the arrival of a bamboo consignment and explaining that his tunnel also handles "clothes and sheep", Mohammed, a 27-year-old from Khan Younis, says "it's not like it used to be – there are a lot of products in Gaza. Gaza is full of bamboo." Every diplomat familiar with the area believes that Hamas is actually benefiting from the tunnel economy created by the siege. It's not just the 10,000 shekels (£1,600) each operator has to pay the Hamas-controlled Rafah municipality, ostensibly for "regulation and health and safety" – but which has not prevented 32 children and young people under the age of 18 being killed in the tunnels this year. One prominent Gaza businessman says that Hamas also brings in consumer goods through its own secret tunnels – the ones Israel believes it uses to import weapons – and then enlists tame traders to distribute the goods and share the profits with the faction. All of which can only make a mockery of the idea that the Israeli-imposed blockade hurts Hamas rather than the civilian population. Thanks to the tunnels, the shops are fuller than at any time since June 2007, probably making the gift exchanges at this year's Muslim festival of Eid al Adha a little cheerier than last year, with plentiful Egyptian goods – at least for those who can afford to buy. A good imported box of chocolates costs around 150 shekels (£24) compared with just 60 shekels (£10) when it came from Israel, a sweater three times its old price of 50 shekels (£8). But this year's Eid also signified something else: a deep reluctance on the part of many Gazans to wallow in their post-war grief and loss. True, a livestock trader in Jabalya estimated that only 35 per cent of Gazan families would be able to afford one of the traditional sheep for Eid – Sudanese, Libyan or Egyptian this year because imported through the tunnels. But in the vibrant pink feathers and the cloth flowers sported in the hair by perfectly turned-out little girls in the ruins of Atatra, or the parties of young middle-class Gazan women – their heads stylishly covered – crowded into the fashionable seafront Al Deira hotel, you could see a determination to make the best of the festival. The celebratory mood was certainly reinforced by the hope of an imminent prisoner exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit – and the prospect, whether bankable or not, that it would be followed by Israel's at-least-partial lifting of the siege. But what neither the Eid celebrations nor the constant if costly flow of consumer goods through the tunnels can disguise, however, is the scale and impact of Gaza's de-development. Jadwat Khoudary, one of Gaza's most prominent businessmen, points out that even in "normal" times – without the present dire need for massive post-war reconstruction – Gaza's daily requirement was for around 1,500 tons of cement. The expensive cement coming through the tunnels amounts to around 150 tons, enough for a relatively few individual families to repair their war-damaged homes. And he gives a striking example of Gaza's Alice in Wonderland economics from one of his companies, which unlike many hundreds of others has – just – managed to keep going. It used to manufacture flexible foam, used in mass-produced cushions. But because the chemical raw materials are no longer available from Israel, the firm is now producing just 5 per cent of what it did, cutting and shaping ready-made flexible foam imported through the tunnels. He has laid off more than 200 workers; most of those who found jobs went "either to the Hamas internal police, the [regular] police, the [Hamas-run] Ministry of Works or muncipalities belonging to Hamas. How can I blame them if I cannot pay them salaries?" he says. We are talking on the eve of the Eid in his popular – but now, in the late afternoon, empty – beachfront restaurant. "Why do you think there's no one here?" he asks. "Because most people are fasting before the Eid. Twenty years ago, only 1 per cent would have done that. Now it's about 90 per cent." Although Hamas had issued no edicts on this issue, Khoudary believes the phenomenon results from messages handed down from the mosques since Hamas came to power. He sees this, and the similar turn-round in those going to the Mosque to pray regularly, as evidence of the Islamic Hamas's "credibility in the street" – one which the winter war of 2008-09 has done nothing to diminish. Certainly you can see the weakening of secularism on Gaza's streets. More women are covering their heads; there is a greater sprinkling of them wearing the once rarely-seen nakab, the garment covering the whole face except for the eyes. And the greatest internal pressure on Hamas is not Fatah, which has been effectively repressed in Gaza, but from more extreme Islamist groups. To Khoudary, these developments are the function of what he calls "a mental siege" in which lack of contact with the outside world is turning Gaza inwards. To take a single example, there has been a complete halt to the once-steady flow of many hundreds of students a year, often to pursue postgraduate studies, abroad or in Israeli universities. Now Israel has used the closure to stop students even travelling to the West Bank, let alone to Israel or foreign countries. Thanks to the tunnels, says Khoudary, and provided you can afford it, "you can order anything you want in 36 hours. But the mental siege is the most dangerous and harmful siege." He asks why Israel fosters a climate which in the long run will encourage extremist groups "worse than the Taliban". "Israel is so stupid," he says. "They are punishing the wrong people." No one here has done more to try to ease this "mental siege", within the constraints of total closure, than John Ging, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) director of operations and the man responsible for the education and welfare of Gaza's almost one million refugees. Ging, a former Irish Army officer, is a brave man; he was at the UNRWA headquarters when its warehouse was destroyed under Israeli white-phosphorus shelling attack during the third week of Operation Cast Lead. In March 2007, when lawlessness in Gaza was at a peak from which it has now declined thanks to Hamas policing, Ging's UN convoy was ambushed and 18 bullets fired into his armoured vehicle by Palestinian gunmen seeking to abduct him. Two months later, one of his bodyguards was injured when a UN school he was visiting came under fire. Even more extreme elements within Hamas – though never the de facto Hamas government itself – have issued threatening critiques of the highly successful summer games UNRWA ran for 250,000 children, of Ging's warning to UNRWA's Palestinian staff to leave their politics at the door when they come to work, and – most recently – of his bold determination to include holocaust studies in the UNRWA school human-rights curriculum. Yet what gives Ging his high credibility in Gaza is his tireless championing of the civilian population in the face of what he repeatedly calls the "failed and flawed" policies of isolating it. The end of the war, he says, left Gazans "worse than before" because of the "unfulfilled hope" that it would also mark the end of "that era of collective punishment ... that had been their daily life for so long". For the war had at least finally generated an international realisation "that it was the civilian population that was paying a devastating price not only in loss of life but [also] in their living conditions". But rather than an end to isolation, Ging says, the traumatised Gazans have seen that "daily life continues to deteriorate and, as they listen and they read of more talk of war, they see the peace process is in further peril". Ging acknowledges that this is not a "typical human emergency" made visible by "emaciated bodies and an overwhelmed medical service" – though he points out that 80 per cent of Gazans are dependent on food aid, that the medical services are overloaded but somehow coping, and that the water and sewage infrastructure is on the brink of crisis with 80m cubic litres of raw sewage pumped daily into the Mediterranean, 80 per cent of the drinking water below WHO minimum standards and 60 per cent of people with only irregular access to water. Instead, he says, "the problem here is the destruction of a civilised society and what the impact of that will be for the solution to this conflict". As a man for whom belief in international law is a driving passion, he has sought to combat this trend with a human-rights curriculum in UN schools which is anything but routine, less than a year after a war about which the Goldstone report accused mainly Israel but also Hamas of war crimes. Ging is convinced about the positive response of Gazan civilians. "You only have to talk to them," he argues, to know that "they are not terrorists, they are not violent people. They are deeply civilised people ... not withstanding the provocative nature and injustice of their circumstances." Their aspirations are not, he says, "vengeance or revenge or violence or destruction – their aspirations are the same as any civilised person on this planet. They want the space to live, basic fundamental freedoms of human rights. They understand the difference between right and wrong and sanctions against those who are in violation of the law, but their claim – which I fully support – is that the innocent should not be sanctioned." Like Jadwat Khoudary, Ging is fearful however of the extremism that the "devastatingly" negative conditions of Gaza threaten to breed, including among school pupils. "How do we motivate them to achieve their academic potential when their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters have no job and no prospect of a job? They listen every day to rhetoric, very destructive, which capitalises on their physical experience which is very negative – and tries to attach that to violent activity as being the way out of those circumstances." UNRWA, says Ging, aims to counter that through education. But, he adds, "the most important support is to change the circumstances". The UN Girls' Preparatory School A in Zeitoun, the very neighbourhood where calamity overtook the Samouni family, helps to illustrate the point. Three of its pupils were killed during the war, 25 injured and many more were made homeless by the destruction. Late last month, it staged a varied day of activities to reinforce another Ging initiative – one that perhaps would not go amiss in many British schools – the Respect and Discipline programme. They ranged from a parade – "We call it 'military' because we want the discipline of soldiers without the violence," explained teacher Soha Sohoor – to a playlet set in court in which teenage girls acted the parts of a female lawyer, teacher, doctor, engineer and housewife successfully defending themselves against a judge's draconian anti-woman ruling. Afterwards, four articulate 14-year-olds discussed issues ranging from domestic violence and the impact of the winter war to the determination of all four to go to university. All said they favoured a two-state solution based on 1967 borders. Shaima Remlawi, who is learning English, wants to be an international interpreter but also sees herself campaigning for women's rights – particularly against early marriage and fathers who discourage their daughters from completing their education. "I will not marry until I am more than 20," she declared. Afrian Naim wants to be a journalist, "so I can give the message of the Palestinians all over the world." Islam Aqel wants to become both a professor and a "novelist who can write books that everyone can read." And Ahlam Al-Haj Ahmed said: "I want to be a journalist writing about the sufferings of the Palestinian people. But I want to be effective in society, to be a member of the PLC [the Palestinian Parliament], not in Fatah or Hamas but as an independent, so I can tell the others when they are doing well and when they are not doing well." It's hard not to be impressed with these girls, brimming with healthy ambition. But hard also not to wonder – without that "change in circumstances", an end to Gaza's siege, mental and physical – how long it will be before their dreams crash into irrevocable disappointment. "It's urgent that we change," says Ging. "Because time is against us. A whole generation is growing up."
Date: 27/08/2009
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Pressure Israel by Acting First
Salam Fayyad is certainly doing his best to dominate the headlines ahead of his Israeli counterpart’s visit to Europe. As Benjamin Netanyahu met with Gordon Brown to discuss faltering peace talks yesterday, the world was atwitter over the Palestinian prime minister’s stated intention to declare a “de facto” Palestinian state within two years. For an Israeli premier under pressure from both the United States and at home and attempting to overcome a resurgence of anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe, Mr Fayyad’s announcement could not have come at a worse time. That, of course, is the point. The Palestinian prime minister’s 65-page plan outlines the steps necessary to create a Palestinian state in all but name. But it is aimed more at pressuring Israel than providing a how-to-list for a functioning state. The current stand-off over settlements threatens to derail peace talks before they even begin. This does not seem to bother Mr Netanyahu much, at least not enough to give way to Washington’s demands for a “freeze” in settlement construction. Perhaps Israel calculates that it can simply outlast the Obama administration and that a combination of Israeli intransigence coupled with Palestinian fecklessness and Arab inaction (all too common components in the peace process) will eventually turn the US Congress against Barack Obama’s peace plan. This outcome is a possibility and the strategy has worked before. But Mr Fayyad’s message on Monday was that the Palestinians will not be able to be blamed if the peace talks fail. Most notably, Mr Fayyad said that the Palestinian Authority (PA) would focus on bolstering the capabilities of its already much improved security apparatus. Under British and American stewardship the Palestinian security forces slowly are becoming competent professionals. Under the road map to peace, guaranteeing Israel’s security is a key requirement of the Palestinians. If the PA can accomplish this through the fielding of an effective police force, then Israel will have little excuse for their continued refusal to live up to their side of the bargain: a withdrawal from occupied areas and a complete freeze on settlement expansion. Israel often has sought to create “facts on the ground” to the detriment of the Palestinians. Now Mr Fayyad seeks to do the same to Israel by assembling all the necessary components of a functioning state with Israel the only barrier to attaining that goal. The Palestinian prime minister stopped short of threatening a unilateral declaration of independence that Yasser Arafat so favoured. Mr Fayyad’s “West Bank first” strategy will not result in a proper Palestinian state, but it also will be more effective in its subtlety than Arafat’s brasher tactics. This is a shot across Israel’s bow, one that it will no doubt grab its attention, and it will greatly serve US-led efforts to move Mr Netanyahu’s government along a more productive path to peace. Mr Fayyad is not corrupt and is eminently competent, both of which make him stand out among his peers in the PA. Israelis and the rest of the world may believe Mr Fayyad is capable of achieving what he says he wants to do, which would place additional pressure on Mr Netanyahu’s already divided coalition government. It is a clever move that puts Israel once again on the defensive, but it must be followed by progress, or the peace process will once again fail its promise.
Date: 30/05/2009
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The Big Question: What are Israeli Settlements, and Why are they Coming Under Pressure?
Why are we asking this now? Because the US administration appears to be serious about getting Israel to freeze Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank. Previous US administrations said they wanted a freeze but in practice allowed Israel to continue with at least some building. How did the settlements come about? In the aftermath of Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War, which left it in control of Gaza and the West Bank (as well as the Golan Heights) successive governments gradually allowed, and eventually effectively managed, the creation of more and more civilian Israeli communities in occupied territory. Several forces converged to encourage this growth: religious Zionists and others on the ideological right who believed in a greater Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean and that the West Bank – or Judaea and Samaria, as they invariably call it – had been "liberated" by the Six Day War; elements in the military establishment who believed it would enhance Israeli security; and politicians who believed that it made sense to grab as much territory as possible for Jewish residents, to improve Israel's bargaining position in any future peace talks. What exactly constitutes a settlement? Typically settlements are thriving communities – anything between several hundred to several thousand in population size. The biggest, Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, is a town of 30,000 with its own large shopping mall, schools, recreation centre and mayor. Most are rural, though exceptionally around 800 heavily protected settlers actually live in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron. Around 280,000 Israeli citizens now live in 121 West Bank settlements – excluding Arab East Jerusalem, home to another estimated 190,000 Israelis, many in large neighbourhoods and apartment blocks built up since the 1967 war. Was this process legal? The most straightforward answer is: in international law no and in Israeli law yes. Oddly, one of the first people to say that it would be illegal in international law was Theodor Meron, the legal adviser to the Israeli foreign ministry immediately after the Six Day War. In secret advice which went to the then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol he argued that it contravened various conventions prohibiting the settling of civilians on occupied territory. Meron, who went on to become one of the world's most eminent international jurists, has never wavered from that view. The US has been somewhat equivocal over the years about the legal position. But the large majority of Western countries (including Britain), the UN, and the International Court of Justice, which restated its view in a 2004 advisory opinion on the military's separation barrier, say that settlements are illegal, whether in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. And the 2003 Road Map, with the backing of the US, called for a total freeze on settlement construction. Israel's government and judiciary, however have never accepted that view. Does this apply to the settlement 'outposts' that people are talking about? No. Most of these are blatantly illegal even under Israeli law (even though various government departments often covertly help them, for example by providing electricity and water). Which is why Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Ehud Barak say they will actually do something about (some of) them. A typical outpost is a collection of mobile homes on a ridge some way from an existing settlement, and can be the way a future settlement starts, or an existing one expanded. A 2005 government report by Talia Sasson – commissioned by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – excoriated ministers for not dismantling 22 outposts in particular. But neither his government nor that of Ehud Olmert did anything about it, with the exception of nine houses in the single outpost of Amona. Anti-settlement activists have long called for the outposts to be dismantled but they will worry that Netanyahu intends to try and mollify the Americans by dismantling the outposts while continuing growth in the settlements themselves. Why do the Palestinians and now the US see that as a problem? Settlements have already made it considerably more difficult to envisage a Palestinian state, not least because the huge apparatus of roads, military infrastructure and protected land that services them – an estimated 40 per cent of the West Bank in all – which helps to cut the occupied territory into separate cantons and often swallows up Palestinian farmland. Second, opponents of settlements argue that they have had a profoundly negative effect on the peace process, put at its most extreme by Amos Elon, the Israeli writer who died this week and in 2002 wrote: "Imagine the effect on the peace process in Northern Ireland if the British government continued moving thousands of Protestants from Scotland into Ulster and settling them, at government expense, on land confiscated from Irish Catholics..." Inevitably that effect is magnified the more they are allowed to grow. Which is why Palestinian President Abbas, who saw President Obama yesterday, has been arguing he won't negotiate with Israel until there is a freeze. What's Israel's answer to all this? First, they say that the long-term fate of settlements is a matter for negotiations with the Palestinians. The Olmert government said that it would not build new settlements and would only expand existing ones, especially in those blocs which they hope will fall to Israel in any future final-status deal with the Palestinians. Netanyahu, who has also said he will build no new settlements, would ideally like a similar understanding with President Obama to that Olmert apparently had with George W Bush. He has also pointed out that the Israeli government did remove the settlements in Gaza in 2005 (against his own opposition, as it happens) and argues they are not getting enough credit for this. The Netanyahu government says it is seeking to ensure "natural growth" or – in the latest parlance "normal life" in the settlements by ensuring that the children of settlers can find somewhere to live in their home communities when they marry. Will the US agree? That's not yet clear, but the indications – not least from Hillary Clinton, in some fairly blunt remarks she made in Washington on Wednesday – are that they will not. They seem more serious than the Bush administration at pressing the longstanding view that settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prejudices the prospect for peace negotiations. What they may try to do is to persuade some reluctant Arab states to "reward" a settlement freeze and other steps by conceding some gradual "normalisation" with Israel – for example, visas for Israelis and overflying rights for El Al planes, in return. In the meantime, Netanyahu is under pressure from his own right-wing coalition to continue with the settlements, but that argument might not cut too much ice with Washington. After all, if he were to fall, Tzipi Livni is waiting in the wings. Are the settlements a key obstacle to peace? Yes... * Creating 'facts on the ground' will make a Palestinian state impossible to realise. * Mahmoud Abbas refuses to negotiate unless there is a freeze – which Netanyahu is not prepared to grant. * Settlers are too entrenched a constituency ever to allow an Israeli government to make peace anyway. No... * Obama will persuade Netanyahu to call a halt to settlement construction which will allow peace talks to start. * Gaza disengagement showed that settlements can be removed. * Settlers would leave if Israel withdrew military protection, and non-ideological ones could even become Palestinian citizens.
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