Israel Update for June 2009

While welcoming most of the American President's remarks, Israeli government officials were less than enthused by his insistence that a Palestinian state must arise next door to Israel's main urban centers in the next few years. Some worried that his pledge to "personally pursue" this goal makes objection to such a state on any basis a seeming personal slap in Obama's face-not something Israeli leaders are eager to do, given that the US is clearly Israel's most important ally. His repeated use of the word "Palestine," as if such a named state had historically existed, was also unsettling to some officials.

President Obama's statements about the over 150 contested Jewish communities scattered around Jerusalem and in other parts of Judea and Samaria, Judaism's biblical heartland, were even less welcomed by Israeli officials and Jewish residents of the contested areas. The US leader stated that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He maintained that "this construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace," adding forcefully "it is time for these settlements to stop."

Fixation

Various Israeli politicians, even some from opposition parties, said the American leader's remarks demonstrated that he is fixated on the settlement issue even though it is hardly the main component in the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict. They also noted that while the Israeli government formally accepted the Bush administration's "Road Map" peace proposal in 2004, its leader, Ariel Sharon, also unequivocally stated that it would not be unilaterally implemented by Israel.

In other words, until the Palestinians fully comply with their Road Map obligation to halt all violence against Israeli civilians and soldiers and formally recognize Israel's right to exist in the region, a full scale settlement building freeze will not be ordered by the government. Given that hundreds of Palestinian rockets have landed on Israeli cities and towns since 2004, that soldiers have been kidnapped and killed, and that dozens of terror attacks have occurred, it is fairly clear that the Palestinians are violating "previous agreements" in a manner that is far more egregious than natural growth expansion in some contested settlements.

Many politicians and pundits also noted that no completely new settlements have been authorized by any Israeli government since the Road Map peace plan was unveiled, although internal growth in or right next to existing communities has been allowed. The construction has mainly occurred in suburban communities near Jerusalem like Ma'ale Adumim and Efrat, designed to accommodate growing families and new residents moving from more expensive homes in Israel's increasingly congested capital city.

If the issue of Jewish settlements was really the main bone of contention in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, then why did the Palestinians react to Israel's 2005 painful demolition of twenty one communities in the Gaza Strip and four in northern Samaria with intensified violence, asked several commentators. Others said that President Obama missed an opportunity to say to the Palestinians, as George W. Bush had done, that some border adjustments will need to be made, especially around Jerusalem, if some 300,000 Israelis living on disputed land that the Palestinians claim as their own are not to be uprooted from their homes. "You cannot resolve one refugee problem by effectively creating another one," said one Likud party legislator.

Netanyahu Responds

Prime Minister Netanyahu decided to respond to the increasing pressure from Washington by delivering his own Middle East policy speech. Speaking before an audience at Tel Aviv's conservative Bar Ilan university on June 14, the speech's main headline was his conditional acceptance of Obama's "two state solution" proposal, in other word the establishment of a Palestinian state. But the Premier again repeated Israel's long held consensus that no Palestinian refugees or their offspring will be allowed to return to ancestral homes inside of Israel as part of any final peace deal, but should instead be directed to live in the nearby Palestinian state.

The conditions that the veteran Likud party leader placed on such a state were immediately termed deal killers by Palestinian Authority leaders. Netanyahu declared that any Palestinian state must be fully demilitarized, and this status must be accompanied by "international ironclad security guarantees" that such a state will remain unarmed. He added that Israel would maintain the right to conduct periodic flyovers to check security conditions on the ground.

"If we receive this guarantee regarding demilitarization and Israel's security needs, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, then we will be ready in a future peace accord to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state."

PA leader Mahmoud Abbas said earlier in the month he would never agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, given that the country already has a substantial Arab population that lives side by side with majority Jews. And certainly the radical Hamas movement will never do so.

On the emotive issue of Jerusalem's future, PM Netanyahu repeated the traditional Likud party position that Judaism's holiest city on earth will never again be divided, nor become the capital of a Palestinian state. "Jerusalem "must remain the united capital of Israel," he declared, a statement that also brought a quick rebuke from Palestinian leaders.

Zionist Public