Israeli Settlements: Legitimate, Democratically Mandated, Vital to Israel’s Security And, Therefore, in U.S. Interest

(Washington, D.C.): The past few days
have seen an escalating effort on the
part of past and present U.S. government
officials to challenge the government of
Israel over its declared policy of
strengthening settlements in the disputed
territories around Jerusalem, elsewhere
in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
On Sunday, eight former American Cabinet
officers — including former Carter
Administration Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance and National Security Advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Bush
Administration Secretary of State James
Baker — wrote Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to oppose his settlements
policy which Dr. Brzezinski described as
“inimical to the peace process and
even dangerous.” During the Carter
years, Israeli settlements were called
“illegal” and
“illegitimate.” During the
Bush-Baker period, they were described as
“obstacles to peace.”

Clinton Administration policy-makers
were clearly delighted with the letter
(so much so as to raise suspicions that
they may have encouraged its
preparation). One unnamed “senior
American official,” who insisted on
remaining anonymous, told the New
York Times over the weekend,
“What [the authors] propose is quite
consistent with our own view of the
problematic nature of settlement
activity.” The letter “is
balanced, but clearly with a certain
amount of concern, and the concern is
warranted.”

Then, yesterday, President Clinton
used his press conference with European
Union leaders to join the fray. Agreeing
with a questioner’s characterization that
Israeli settlements are “absolutely,
absolutely” an “obstacle to
peace,” he urged Israel not to take
steps that would “preempt the
outcome of negotiations.” This focus
on process, however, belies an implicit
objection to the substance of
Israel’s policy: Israeli
settlements make it more difficult for
the Jewish State to surrender territory
Yasir Arafat and his supporters hope to
transform into a sovereign Palestinian
state.

Settlements Work

But that is precisely what settlements
have been intended to do under both
Labor and Likud governments. Indeed,
in the decade that followed the 1967
Six-Day War, no one in the Israeli body
politic — whether from the Left or the
Right — believed, as the Arabs
maintained, that it was illegal
for Jews to live in the territories.
During this period, the Israeli Left
envisioned essentially partitioning the
West Bank. Following a scheme known as
“the Allon Plan,” Labor
governments put settlements in places
deemed of strategic value (primarily in
the Jordan valley) href=”96-T130.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
and hoped to turn the rest over to
Jordan.

For its part, the opposition Likud
believed that the disputed territories
should be retained indefinitely. The
principal debate was over the prudence of
relinquishing areas deemed to be
strategically dispensable and
particularly those that had large Arab
populations. But both major
Israeli political parties were adamantly
opposed to the creation of a Palestinian
state in these areas. As Yitzhak
Rabin put it in his memoirs
published in 1979:

“Although Labor and Likud
differ in their views on the solution
to the Palestinian question, we
both oppose in the strongest terms
the creation of a Palestinian
‘mini-state’ in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip, first and
foremost because it cannot solve
anything….The leaders of the PLO
have declared — and I believe them
— that they view such a ‘mini-state’
as but the first phase in the
achievement of their so-called
secular, democratic Palestine, to
be built on the ruins of the State of
Israel.” (Emphasis added.)

And in the Spring of 1980, Shimon
Peres wrote in Foreign
Affairs:

“…Interlocutors who claim
that Arafat may be satisfied with a
less ambitious goal, namely that
Israel withdraw to the pre-June 1967
borders, that it abandon East
Jerusalem, and concede the
establishment of a Palestinian army,
may not realize that they
sponsor a scheme that would prejudice
Israel’s capacity for self-defense
and would leave it without defensible
borders.

“A PLO state on the West Bank
could never settle the problem of the
Palestinian refugees. The open space
of Jordan could. A PLO state
would prolong, not end warfare; it
would build a base for the
continuation of the struggle, not
work for reconciliation.“
(Emphasis added.)

True Then, True Now

In the wake of the intifada,
however, Labor became more enthralled
with the notion that land could be traded
for peace. After it returned to power in
1992 (on a platform that rejected
negotiations with the PLO and pledged to
oppose the creation of a Palestinian
state), the Rabin-Peres government
quickly became frustrated when this
policy failed to produce peace. As
documented by Douglas J. Feith, a former
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and
founding member of the Center for
Security Policy’s Board of Advisors, in
the March 1996 edition of Middle East
Quarterly, Labor’s response was to
adopt a policy of unilateral
withdrawal.

“Seeing that he could not
insist on a secure peace while
bringing the occupation to a prompt
end, Rabin decided, fatefully, that
the latter took priority. This was an
historic and radical departure.
Labor’s slogan for decades after all,
was Land for Peace — not Unilateral
Withdrawal, not Land for Nothing, and
not Land for Your Assuming Our
Burden.

“This new logic meant
accepting [then-Deputy Foreign
Minister Yossi] Beilin’s
characterization of the territories
as ‘a burden and a curse.’ It meant
abandoning the demand for a credible,
non-terrorist Palestinian Arab
negotiating partner. It meant
initiating withdrawal before a peace
settlement. And it meant leaving open
the possibility that the final
settlement would lead to the creation
of a Palestinian state.”

The implications of such a dramatic
policy shift by the last Rabin-Peres
government for Israel’s settlements
policy were profound. As Mr. Feith put it
in his Middle East Quarterly essay
entitled “Withdrawal Process, Not
Peace Process”:

“The ‘peace process’ is more
accurately called the ‘withdrawal
process.’ ‘Ending the occupation’ and
relinquishing responsibility are the
key goals; peace is not. If
peace develops, all to the good. If
it does not, the process moves
forward regardless. [During the last
Labor government,] Israeli officials,
to be sure, continue to negotiate and
sign agreements with the PLO, to
ascribe importance to their terms,
and to demand that the PLO comply
with the agreements. But
their main concern is that
enforcement of PLO pledges not
interfere with the withdrawal.

“This applies to all PLO
promises — whether about amending
the covenant, preventing or
condemning terrorism, respecting the status
quo in Jerusalem, abjuring
belligerent rhetoric, or extraditing
terrorists suspects. The
[Labor] government highlights the
benefits of peace, but it intends to
complete its withdrawal plans whether
or not there is peace.”
(Emphasis added.)

Such a policy was widely admired by
those like James Baker, Cyrus Vance,
Zbigniew Brzezinski and the State
Department’s Arabists. They tended to see
withdrawal as the sine qua non of
the “peace process.” By
definition, anything that impeded
withdrawal was an impediment to that
process. And, since Israeli settlements
were, by design, intended to make
withdrawal more difficult, they were
impediments. For this reason, among
others, the last Labor government enjoyed
the overt support of the present American
administration and like-minded officials
of previous administrations.

The unilateral withdrawal
policy was ultimately rejected by the
Israeli people, however. In the
election last May, Benjamin Netanyahu
campaigned on a platform of peace with
security. A key element of his vision of
security was preserving — and even
expanding — Jewish settlements in the
disputed territories to help ensure that
the territories would remain under
Israeli control. While the overall
electoral majority that voted for Mr.
Netanyahu was narrow, the Jewish
population rejected the Rabin-Peres
withdrawal policy by an electoral
landslide (i.e., by a 56-44% margin).
Since what is at issue is a fundamental
aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict that
may determine the future survival of the
Jewish State, that margin is relevant,
even though under Israeli democracy, Arab
votes count just as much as do those of
Jews.

Israel Has a Legitimate
Claim to the Territories

What is more, Israel is at
least as entitled as the Palestinian
Arabs to settle in the lands of the
disputed territories. In an
earlier, seminal article entitled “A
Mandate for Israel” which appeared
in the Fall 1993 edition of The
National Interest, Douglas Feith
convincingly argues that the Palestine
Mandate adopted by the League of Nations
— which “secured Jewish rights to a
homeland and to ‘close settlement’ in
Palestine” — provided international
recognition of the Jews’ claim to
territory there. He notes that:

“…[Although] the Mandate
distinguished between Eastern and
Western Palestine…it did not
distinguish between the region of
Judea and Samaria and the rest of
Western Palestine. No event and no
armistice or other international
agreement has terminated the
Mandate-recognized rights of the
Jewish people, including settlement
rights, in those portions of the
Mandate territory that have yet come
under the sovereignty of any state.
Those rights did not expire
upon the demise of the League of
Nations, the creation of the United
Nations, or the UN General Assembly’s
adoption of the 1947 UN Special
Committee on Palestine plan for
Western Palestine.”

Mr. Feith also cites Professor Eugene
V. Rostow — a distinguished
international legal scholar who, as Under
Secretary of State during the Johnson
Administration, helped draft UN Security
Council Resolution 242 — as having
concluded that “Judea, Samaria and
the Gaza Strip constitute portions of the
Palestine Mandate trust territory that
have not yet been allocated to a
sovereign.” As Mr. Feith observes:

“It is not necessary,
however, to decide whether the
Mandate and all its institutions
remain in full effect for these
territories in order to conclude
that, since Britain’s resignation as
Mandatory, no event
has legally terminated or superseded
the right of Jews to settle there, as
derived from the ‘historical
connection of the Jewish people with
Palestine’ recognized in the
Mandate.” (Emphasis
added.)

The Bottom Line

Israel is fully entitled to
expand existing settlements or build new
ones in the disputed territories.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is to be
commended for resisting intense
international pressure in order to engage
in the former and to reserve the right to
undertake the latter after final status
negotiations have been completed. By so
doing, he is engaging in the
well-established Israeli practice of
strengthening its physical position in
strategic regions, increasing Israel’s
self-defense capability and
undergirding U.S. interests in the region
by enhancing the security of America’s
most reliable and powerful ally in the
Middle East.

Importantly, Mr. Netanyahu is,
in the process, also honoring the
commitments that earned him his mandate
over a candidate who promised more of
what amounted to unilateral withdrawals
without enhanced security. The majority
of Israelis understood that the policy
they preferred might make it more
difficult to realize further peace
agreements with Arafat. They remained
persuaded that the creation of a
Palestinian state would be inimical to
Israeli interests and, to the extent that
Israeli settlements in the disputed
territories constitute an obstacle to
such an outcome, a democratic polity has
freely adopted the Netanyahu policy.

It behooves the United States
to respect this sort of democratic choice
and to refrain from statements that can
only encourage the inflammatory rhetoric
exhibited by Yasir Arafat — who
called last week on Palestinian Arabs
“to firmly confront with all
possible means the Israeli settlement
aggression in order to defend the
land.” American interests will be
very badly served if Arafat and Company
conclude that their threats of renewed
violence on a scale as great, if not
greater, than the recent Temple Mount
tunnel episode will be rewarded. href=”96-T130.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

Even if the United States were willing
to ignore the will of the Israeli people,
to disregard the legitimacy of Israel’s
right to modify or build settlements in
the disputed territories and to remain
indifferent to its own interests
in the Jewish State’s ability to defend
itself, President Clinton and like-minded
former officials would be on weak ground
to decry such Israeli construction —
unless they also insisted that all Arab
construction in the territories halt, as
well.

After all, if Israeli building in the
West Bank amounts, as the President put
it yesterday, to “preempt[ing] the
outcome of something both sides have
agreed…should be part of the final
negotiations,” it stands to reason
that so must Arab building.
By the estimate of Mr. Netanyahu’s
Director of Policy Planning and
Communications, David Bar-Ilan, the Arabs
“have more than 10 times the number
of buildings under construction [in the
territories] than those approved for the
[Jewish] settlers.” While it may
suit the likes of James Baker and Cyrus
Vance — no friends of Israel — to
ignore Arab efforts to “change the
facts on the ground,” such a double
standard must not be made a basis for
U.S. policy in the Middle East.

– 30 –

1. Interestingly,
a study performed in 1967 for the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, which concluded
that Israel could not safely surrender
the territories it acquired during the
Six-Day War, judged the high ground of
the Samarian mountains overlooking the
Jordan valley were the more strategic
points. Since those sites tended to be
inhabited by Palestinian Arabs, however,
the Allon Plan opted to stake an Israeli
claim via settlements to the less
valuable but uninhabited lowlands in the
valley.

2. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Summit Postmortem:
If Only Clinton Were Half as Resolute as
Netanyahu in Safeguarding U.S. Interests
in the Middle East ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_96″>No. 96-D 96, 3
October 1996).