Israel's Settlement Stalemate: Is There No End in Sight?

By William Pfaff, Truthdig. Posted July 1, 2009.

Netanyahu was scheduled to meet on Thursday in Paris with former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy on Middle Eastern affairs, but the meeting was canceled by the American side (reported the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth), and Mitchell returned to Washington. The White House unofficially made it known that there would be no further meetings with Netanyahu until there was a real settlement freeze.

Now this is all very well, in principle a long-overdue restoration of justice and realism to American policy on Israel and Palestine, but what follows? Would the American position on a settlement freeze be enforced with financial or political sanctions if the Netanyahu government refused to yield?

Netanyahu was elected in order to defy the United States on the colonies and on Palestinian statehood. Since few sensible people in Israel wish to alienate Washington, the Netanyahu government, again in principle, might be brought down by American sanctions.

What then? The settlement movement, which has gone on now for some four decades, has become integral to the Israeli perception of national destiny and national security. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the Palestinian sector of Jerusalem now approaches a half-million. The settlements with their connecting roads, security installations and outposts dominate some 40 percent of the West Bank territories.

Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington, sympathetic to the Palestinians, writes in the foundation’s most recent newsletter that merely a freeze in settlement construction would require Israel to “undo the system by which the military establishment, the legislative and executive arms of the state, settlers, and public, private, and supranational communal organizations collaborate in the encouragement and expansion of settlements.”

Major elements in the state administration, defense forces, planning and budget agencies, and security programs and practices, plus the incentives to individuals and business to develop the settlements, would have to be undone.

Aronson concludes that even a real freeze would require “an undertaking so complex and requiring an Israeli political decision so profound that no Israeli government would undertake [it] except as a result of a broader decision to terminate [the entire occupation of the Palestinian territories].”

That is wholly impossible without a huge, internationally guaranteed reconstruction of the security relationships of Palestinians, Israelis and the surrounding Arab states, which is all but unimaginable. But then what is imaginable? Going on as things are? Clarification of Obama administration policy is essential.

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