A Real Plan
Former Sens. George Mitchell and Warren Rudman and their colleagues from Turkey, Norway and Spain deserve real applause for their work on the so-called Mitchell report, meant as a blueprint to restart the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The document is a masterwork of clarity and sober judgment. It is judicious and diplomatic, sometimes drawing back from the sharp conclusions that plainly flow from its analysis (its assessment of the impact of Ariel Sharon's provocative excursion to the Temple Mount, accompanied by 1000 armed policemen, is one such delicacy). Yet while seeking not to irritate, it never ducks the core issues that underlie the increasingly dangerous conflict.
The report's implications are more vexing to the Sharon government (but perhaps not to most Israelis) than they are to Palestinian aspirants for statehood. Once it affirms the obvious need for a cease-fire, it alights quickly on the topic of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Here Mitchell and his colleagues align themselves squarely with virtually every American peace initiative since the 1970s. They quote Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who called the settlements "contrary to international law" and an impediment to peace; they cite President Reagan calling for an immediate settlement freeze, as he noted that the settlements diminish the prospects of a fair peace, and George Bush's Secretary of State James Baker, who called the settlements the biggest obstacle to peace. They quote former President Clinton, who explicitly denounced any action that would be seen as preempting the outcome of Israeli-Palestinian talks, while again making a specific reference to the settlements as such a preemption.
During this entire 20-plus year period, Israel has continued to build more settlements on Palestinian lands, to the point where some 200,000 Israelis now live on the territory that?if there is to be a peace settlement?will become a Palestinian state. Israeli governments of both the right and the left have built them. The number of settlers has nearly doubled since the Oslo agreements a decade ago; the Israeli group Peace Now notes that in the three months since Sharon came to power, Israel has established 15 new settlements on the West Bank.
The settlers are a barrier to peace in part because they prevent a real Palestinian state from forming, separating one Palestinian village from another with tangles of Israeli roads and security checkpoints while gobbling up scarce water supplies. Often the settlers are ultranationalists, whose worldview would, in most Western countries, consign them to membership in the lunatic fringe. Zealots for Zion, Robert Friedman's invaluable study of the West Bank settlement movement, quotes Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg's testimony before an Israeli court, after his yeshiva students went on an armed rampage though the West Bank town of Kifl Harith, killing a 13-year-old Palestinian girl. "It should be recognized that Jewish blood and a goy's blood are not the same. The people of Israel must rise and declare in public that a Jew and a goy are not, God forbid, the same. Any trial that assumes that Jews and goyim are equal is a travesty of justice." Israel's settlement movement arms such people and places them right in the middle of Palestinian efforts to achieve political self-determination.
But, some say, so what if the settlements are an obstacle to peace? Why should Americans care who rules the West Bank? Surely it is less important than the oil fields of the Gulf, or Europe or Japan. One reason is that Israel is the world's major recipient of U.S. financial and military assistance, and the U.S. is viewed throughout the Middle East (indeed, throughout the world) as Israel's partner. If Israel makes peace with the Palestinians and creates circumstances where the Arab world can benefit from the extraordinary Israeli scientific and technical acumen (and perhaps more importantly, from the Jewish state's traditions of scholarship, free inquiry and self-criticism), then the American-Israel tie is something that Americans could wear with pride, anywhere in the Middle East. But if the U.S. is seen simply as the underwriter and enabler of an occupation that is nearly universally reviled as brutal, unjust and against international law, American interests will suffer, in the Middle East and elsewhere.
A second reason is domestic peace in the U.S. The Jewish Forward recently reported an alarming arson attack on a Jewish student center at the University of California at Davis, inaugurating a nasty battle between Jewish and Arab-American students. No one was hurt, but the incident seems like the proverbial firebell in the night, an augur that the blood feud over the Palestine Mandate lands is being brought to American soil.
A third reason of course is simply an American aspiration for justice.
The Sharon government claims to "accept" the Mitchell report even as it rejects its core proposals about the settlements. Tel Aviv says it will continue to build them, under the slippery concept of "natural growth." Most commentators believe George W. Bush isn't likely to push the Mitchell plan very hard. He is reluctant to risk any sort of showdown with the American Israeli lobby. Perhaps he recalls that conflict over the same settlement issue did considerable political damage to his father. But if Bush fails to pursue the work of Mitchell and his colleagues, it may prove the most short-sighted of decisions.