In his meeting with Vice President Joe Biden last week, Israeli
President Shimon Peres is
reported to have said that “ending natural growth in
settlements was a non-starter” and, in his own words, that
“Israel cannot instruct settlers in existing settlements not to
have children or get married.”
If it sounds like a gag, it’s real. “Natural growth” was
officially made an issue in the “Performance-Based
Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” promulgated by the U.S. State
Department in 2003 under the auspices of the Quartet (consisting
of the U.S., the EU, the UN, and Russia). That document, as part
of the Palestinian and Israeli sides’ responsibilities under
Phase I of the roadmap, states that “GOI [Government of Israel]
freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of
settlements).”
Just a year ago, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
three other ministers from the Quartet
expressed “deep concern at continuing settlement activity and
called on Israel to freeze all settlement activity, including
natural growth.” Peres — who, it should be stressed, is a dove
and no enthusiast of settlements — was presumably fielding a
similar appeal from Biden when he tried to remind him of
elementary biological reality, and, moreover, of the fact that
Israel is not a Chinese-style dictatorship.
Indeed, these days almost all Israeli settlement activity in the
West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, is of the natural-growth variety
(which, it must be confessed, includes building new houses for
growing families). The days when Israel assertively built new
settlements in the territories in defiance of U.S. wishes are
gone. The result, though, of settlement activity — including
“natural growth” — going back to 1967 is that today a total of
about 300,000 Israelis live in the West Bank.
Of those, about two-thirds live in the “large settlement blocs.”
In his April 14, 2004,
letter to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
then-President George W. Bush stated that:
As part of a final [Israeli-Palestinian] peace settlement,
Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should
emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with
UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the
ground, including already existing major Israeli population
centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final
status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the
armistice lines of 1949.
That sets out U.S. policy — and, one might add, moral and
practical sanity — pretty clearly: ejecting those 200,000 people
in the “major population centers” is not in the cards, whatever
their “natural growth.”
And what about the other 100,000? Most of these live in areas
beyond the security fence, and most of them are the more
ideological type of settlers who feel a strong religious
attachment to Judea and Samaria. Of these, the newly appointed
Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren — also, by the way,
no particular enthusiast of settlements —
writes this month in Commentary:
The creation of Palestinian government, even within the
parameters of the deal proposed by President Clinton in 2000,
would require the removal of at least 100,000 Israelis from
their West Bank homes. The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis
from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF troops — the largest
Israeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — and
was profoundly traumatic. And unlike the biblical heartland of
Judea and Samaria, which is now called the West Bank, Gaza has
never been universally regarded as part of the historical Land
of Israel.
No, with a final Israeli-Palestinian agreement nowhere in sight,
and with the removal of all those settlers having become a
practical impossibility, it looks as if the roadmap’s, Rice’s,
and Biden’s worst nightmare — that Israelis will keep living in
these places, and keep, if I may be blunt, having babies — is
going to come true.
Which brings us, of course, to the moral issue that has long been
obscured and forgotten: why would “peace” entail the forced
expulsion of at least 100,000 people, and even if a sovereign
Palestinian entity were to arise in the West Bank, why would it
have to be Judenrein?
That it has, for the most part, been bipartisan U.S. policy for
decades — notwithstanding America’s own religious and
ideological roots in the Bible and the Land of Israel — to bow
to the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim demand for a
Judenrein Judea is what leads top American officials to
accost Israel about “natural growth” without realizing that they
thereby trample the most fundamental human, or at least Western,
norms.
