Israel's Settlement Freeze Is Over ... So What?

Ten months ago Israel agreed to a U.S. request (Washington never demands) for a freeze in new settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. What they got wasn’t really a freeze, more a slight cooling. They called it a moratorium. And that moratorium expired Sunday night. The press coverage was breathless, reporting every phone call between the various parties. Pundits analyzed the significance of which leaders were talking from which cities, who flew home and who remained in Washington. One interviewer asked me if it was important that Secretary of State Clinton had called Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just before the deadline. (It wasn’t.)

At the end of the day, the talks will almost certainly continue with or without a settlement freeze – but does that really matter?

Unfortunately, as long as these talks continue in their current framework – accepting as legitimate the vast disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians, and acting as if the two sides, occupying power and occupied population, somehow come to the table as equals – the answer is no. As long as the U.S. defines its “honest broker” role as providing unlimited financial, military, diplomatic and political support for Israel while offering only face-saving to the Palestinian leaders, and as long as the talks are not based on the requirements of international law – the answer will be no.  

It doesn’t matter whether this particular round of talks goes forward or not. (The last high-profile U.S.-brokered talks involving Prime Minister Netanyahu and leading to an agreement that was never implemented, were negotiated at Maryland’s Wye River in 1998 with PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat – and it wasn’t called the “Wye Bother” summit for nothing.)

The 10-month settlement moratorium that just ended was filled with loopholes: it only included new housing starts. It allowed continued building of many infrastructure projects, of housing that had already been approved, of anything that had already started – and it never applied to occupied Arab East Jerusalem. The “compromise” that will likely emerge in coming days will talk about putting off the question of settlements, and starting instead with borders – ostensibly an “easier” issue. It means that the first agreement will be on how much West Bank land – the 22 percent left of historic Palestine – the Palestinians must give up to official Israeli annexation before they can even talk about settlements. And it means that in the meantime, settlement expansion throughout Arab East Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank continues without restriction.

That’s the consequence of the U.S. approach to these peace talks: treat the two parties as if they were equals. Make both sides compromise. Make both sides recognize the legitimacy of the other’s position. All fine if the conflict is a border dispute between sovereign states. But when one side is an occupied people, dispossessed and divided, and the other side, the Occupying Power, is the strongest military force in the region and backed unqualifiedly by the most powerful country in the world, the call for “both sides” to “compromise” is a call for victory for the powerful, and defeat for the rights of the weaker side.

Ultimately, human rights and international law are at stake here. And the U.S. position has largely abandoned both.

As we have seen so many times before, if the talks are not grounded in international law and justice, there will be no peace. There may be the illusion of “the end of conflict” and a “Palestinian state” agreed to by leaders, but without real change on the ground. The “state” will be made up of non-contiguous Bantustan-like parcels of land, that taken together, amount to about 60 percent of the West Bank.  The Apartheid Wall will become part of the de facto “border,” meaning that the vast majority of Palestinian water resources (and about 10 percent of the land) remain under Israeli control. Gaza will remain besieged with Israel controlling coastal water and the skies above as well as all borders and entry and exit of all people and goods. And Israel will still control West Bank border crossings, air space and any link to Gaza. Jerusalem will remain under Israel sovereignty, with small pockets of Arab East Jerusalem and parts of the Old City provided with special status, but without Palestinian sovereignty. Palestinian refugees will be denied their legal right to return and compensation, and Palestinian citizens of Israel will continue to live under an officially discriminatory political system.