Israel’s Settlement Problem

According to Haaretz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just proposed a nine-month freeze on the construction of new West Bank settlements, after meeting with George Mitchell. The freeze, apparently, ”is a confidence-building measure that must be matched by reciprocal steps from the PA and Arab states.”

While I certainly don’t oppose the idea of a freeze on settlement construction, I wonder what the Israelis feel they would need to see from the Palestinian Authority in order to move forward on other, incredibly thorny, “final-status” issues like Jerusalem and refugees. In other words, what are these “reciprocal steps”?

The two biggest points, from Netanyahu’s perspective, seem to be

the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state and that any agreement explicitly declare the conflict over and bar any further claims.

But if Fatah goes so far as to both explicitly recognize Israel as a Jewish state and explicitly renounce any further territorial claims, I wonder if more radical groups - like Hamas or Hezbollah (soon to be part of the Lebanese cabinet) - will simply declare Fatah not to represent the Palestinian people and negate any moves toward peace. This wouldn’t be a particularly new move on their part, after all.

Driving my cynicism, I think, is this quote from Netanyahu’s press conference:

The goal…is ‘to strike a balance’ that would meet the settlers’ basic needs while also enabling peace talks to resume.

If he’s simply talking about building schools or hospitals in settlements that already exist and whose existence can somehow be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, then there’s no problem and I’ll retract my cynicism. (That second point, incidentally, is such a huge IF that I can’t imagine I’ll really ever have to retract my cynicism.) But if the balance he means to strike involves creating some new settlements in the West Bank, I fear we’re right back in the same boat and the peace talks he’s hoping to resume will grind to another halt (with the added problem of confirming that Netanyahu wants to have his cake and eat it too, all at the expense of the Palestinians).

The existence of these settlements poses an amazingly complex problem for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I’m not sure, in the end, that a nine-month freeze on new construction really does much to resolve that problem.