[Ariel Sharon is a master of manoeuvres, writes Lindsey Hilsum (excerpted from New Statesman, 15 August 2005). While the world watches the withdrawal from Gaza, he is creating and expanding settlements in more strategic areas. Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News]
THE feint is an old military trick – the general sends a section of his forces to distract the enemy, so the battalions heading for the real target meet little resistance. Watch out for the feint in the Middle East in the coming week. Television news all over the world will show dramatic scenes of Israeli settlers in orange T-shirts being forced to leave the Gaza Strip, in what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls a “painful sacrifice” for peace. Thirty-two thousand soldiers and police are being sent to remove 8,200 settlers, by force if necessary. Viewers will see Jewish settler women dragged kicking and screaming from land Israel has occupied since 1967.
But Sharon is an old general, a master of manoeuvres. While we are reporting the demise of the Gaza settlements, he is presiding over the creation and expansion of settlements in more strategically important areas, where few are watching. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 3,981 new “housing units” are under construction in the occupied West Bank. At the same time, the Israeli government is building apartments and infrastructure on the outskirts of Jerusalem, to consolidate its hold over the city both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital.
A wall is currently being built around a hugely expanded Jerusalem that will thrust into the West Bank, almost dividing in two the main territory of any future Palestinian state. Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem are being surrounded by Jewish settlements, cutting them off from the West Bank and making it impossible for East Jerusalem to become a Palestinian capital. And while new Jewish settlements are under construction, some Palestinian houses in the heart of historic Arab East Jerusalem are threatened with demolition. After Israel was created in 1948, an armistice line, known as the Green Line, divided Israeli West Jerusalem from Arab East Jerusalem. In the 1967 war, Israel seized East Jerusalem and the adjacent West Bank from Jordan, which had previously had jurisdiction. While Israel occupied the West Bank, recognising that one day it might have to return the territory to the Arabs, it annexed East Jerusalem, arguing that not only had it won the city in battle, but also God had named Jerusalem as the sole and indivisible capital of the Jewish state. A new report, The Jerusalem Powder Keg, by an independent think-tank on conflict, the International Crisis Group ( www. crisisgroup.org), charts how the Israeli government has gradually expanded the area defined as “Jerusalem”. Now that the world is concentrating on events in Gaza, the city limits are being pushed back even further. Municipal boundaries drawn in 1993 already encompassed newly built Jewish settlements, which many Israelis regard not as encroachments on occupied land, but as mere neighbourhoods in their capital, Jerusalem. The Israeli government is now going a step further, creating a “Jerusalem envelope”, which will requisition another 60 square kilometres of the West Bank. This will include the rapidly expanding settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, and – it hopes – the corridor to the north-west known as E1, which links Ma’ale Adumim to the city centre.
According to Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, “Current activity around Jerusalem to link up Jewish West Bank settlements to East Jerusalem will not only undermine chances for a viable two-state solution, but create an explosive mix that will imperil the very security Israel says it is trying to guarantee.”
Roughly 200,000 Palestinians will remain within the Jerusalem boundary. A further 55,000 will be excluded. There are already stories of families that find they live on one side of the wall, while their place of work or children’s school is on the other. Whereas driving between the West Bank town of Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, to Bethlehem, to the south, would take 20 minutes if you could go through Jerusalem, it will take at least an hour and a half on roads beyond the new wall. (That’s not including the time spent at Israeli military checkpoints.)
None of this is accidental. By unilaterally surrendering Gaza, Israel has seized the initiative, and bought itself international goodwill and time.
“We were stuck, so we decided to change the strategic equation,” explained an Israeli general. Whatever the talk about the “road map to peace”, after withdrawing from Gaza, there will be little pressure on Israel to negotiate on Jerusalem or anything else. The onus will be on the Palestinians to prove to the world that they can run Gaza. The Israelis will sit back and wait for them to mess it up. If the Palestinian Authority fails to stop Hamas from lobbing missiles into Israel, or if the factions fight among themselves in Gaza, creating a “failed state” before there is any Palestinian state at all, it will be more reason for Israel not to negotiate.
“The significance is the freezing of the political process,” said Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass, in an interview last year so frank that his boss tried to distance himself from the remarks. “When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. In effect, this whole package that is called a Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.”
As the Gaza disengagement proceeds, the louder and more violent the protests by the settlers and their supporters, the better it is for Sharon. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun explained it to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper: “Sharon needs national trauma to impress upon the Israeli public and the international community that it is impossible to do this again.”
The Palestinians, and left-wing Israelis, hope that the settler movement will be undermined: that it will be “Gaza first”, not “Gaza last”. But Sharon has made it as clear as he can, without embarrassing his American friends, that the purpose of the disengagement is to secure the future of most of the 235,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and the 180,000 living in and around Arab East Jerusalem. q