Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy
This week I participated in an Intelligence Squared London debate speaking in favour of the following motion: ?Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy. If settlement expansion continues, Israel will have no future?. Also speaking in favour of the motion was William Sieghart, Founder and Chairman of Forward Thinking. Opposing the motion were Dani Dayan, Chairman of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, and Caroline Glick, Senior contributing editor at the Jerusalem Post. (And you may be interested in the result of the debate as voted upon by the audience: before the debate 343 were in favour of the motion, 97 against, and 192 don?t know; after the debate 517 were in favour of the motion, 99 against and 31 don?t know.)
You can watch the video of the debate - or read my opening statement below.
Daniel Levy: Opening Statement [as prepared for delivery, shortened at podium]
I would like to thank the organisers of Intelligence Squared and everyone here for joining us tonight.
Monty Python?s The Meaning of Life ? a film ? contains a scene, an obese chap, a caricature of obesity really, Mr Creosote. He walks into a restaurant. Apparently he is a regular. He orders everything on the menu, and a jeroboam of Champaign. After all this the waiter offers him just a wafer thin mint, and after a momentary hesitation Mr Creosote consumes said mint. He promptly explodes.
That for me is the danger that settlement overreach poses to Israel. Eventually it will explode in our faces: just one more wafer thin outpost; just a little E1.
I will now devote my remaining remarks to those of you not familiar with Monty Python?s The Meaning of Life.
There is a certain very powerful logic to the idea that Israel as we know it simply cannot co-exist with the relentless continuation and expansion of settlements in the occupied territories, a policy in contravention of international law.?
It goes like this, imagine three sides of a triangle that make up Israel?s basic choices, basic dilemmas:
One is a state with a Jewish character drawn from, among other things, a clear majority of its citizenry being Jewish.
Second is an Israel that is a recognisably democratic state observing democratic norms, respecting democratic rights and adhering to international conventions; the things that invest that definition of democracy with meaning?
And third an Israel that has all the territory. The territory of the biblical home if you like, the territory now under its control. The territory across which settlements have spread.
But in fact, Israel can only have two of those three sides of the triangle.
It can be democratic and Jewish in character but not have all the territory.
Or it can have all the territory and choose to give up either its democratic character or its Jewish character ? for with the territory comes its inhabitants and they can either be accorded democratic rights or denied them.
It?s a relatively simple equation. So let?s go a little deeper.
There are those who do accept this basic premise but who would still oppose this motion. One might call this the ?chill out about settlements? camp.
It?s a line you may have heard, accepting the inevitability of a two-state outcome while claiming that settlements ?are just not a big deal?, exaggerated as an issue - that they can always be removed and that there are other bigger problems.
While I would certainly agree that from a two-statist perspective settlements are not the only problem, that other challenges exist - practical, historical, opposing narratives, security - challenges that are there to varying degrees on both sides.
However, if one is operating in a two-state paradigm, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the single most prohibitive factor to achieving that outcome is the settlement enterprise.
The single biggest driving force toward the indivisibility of this land is the settlements.
Even if the actual built up area of settlements is small, only circa 1%, the areas under settlement jurisdiction ? settlement municipal and regional councils, planning and zoning rules ? those constitute 42.8% of the West Bank.
Settlements help define Palestinian access or rather lack of access to land and other resources such as water and quarries and to freedom of movement.
This picture becomes even more stark if one factors in patterns of settlement and land expropriation in Palestinian East Jerusalem, closing that area off from the rest of the territory of a possible future viable Palestinian state.
And settlements define a cognitive map that people carry with them, encouraging the Palestinians and the world to give up on a two-state outcome or at least consider it a vanishing prospect.
Settlements then are the factor most likely to precipitate an abandonment of the feasibility of two-states.
Which brings us to a variation on the ?chill out about settlements? theme. Namely, that the two-state model can accommodate any amount of settlement growth;
that the Palestinians will ultimately swallow any deal; any reduction of their territorial domain and contiguity; any infringement on their resource base, on their sovereignty, and even a state without Palestinian East Jerusalem. Taken to its extreme ? that they will accept a Bantustan like arrangement.
Let us not delude ourselves. The Palestinian leadership has accepted a mini-state on 22% of the land - the ?67 lines (even with equal land swaps) ? there is little room for further retreat. There is a point at which the aspiration for statehood under these circumstances become less attractive to Palestinians and the appeal of a one-state democracy carries the day.? This is true already for many Palestinians.
Settlements bring that day closer for many more.
But what if one is looking beyond the traditional two-state paradigm and thinking instead of alternative outcomes ? not at this stage a post-Israel one state model but variations on the two-state model ? for instance some form of confederation or a solution involving Jordan or a Belgium-style model?
Settlement policy also serves to reduce the prospects for any of these ideas. Will a Palestine Jordanian option or a Palestine that is part of a confederation be any more willing to base itself on atomised islands of land without resources or development potential, surrounded on all sides, with security arrangements still exclusively dictated by only one community?s needs.
Please, dream on.
There is a reason that two-former Israeli Prime Ministers ? Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak as well as Israel?s most prominent cultural icon Amos Oz and many others have spoken of an approaching reality of South African style apartheid.
?And yet, I am quietly confident that these arguments will not be the focus of our debate today. I?m not inclined to believe that Messrs Glick and Dayan will tell us that if the Palestinians were to do X, Y, Z ? then they would be willing to evacuate settlements and withdraw. I guess they are not ready for this kind of a deal under any circumstances, so excuses of Palestinian lack of partner and such like are irrelevant.
But let?s not make this too easy on ourselves.
Let?s for a moment step outside this comfortable paradigm.
What if I am getting it all wrong? What if, like the toy shop, ?SETTLEMENTS R US?; that there is no difference between pre-67 and post-67 Israel, inside the Green Line and beyond the Green Line; that far from destroying Israel, settlement policy simply encapsulates the essence of what Israel is.
After all, Ramat Aviv and Tel Aviv University were built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis. Beersheba was Bir Saba; the list could go on, and on. So is it one continuous settlement policy that is the same whether it is in what we like to call democratic Israel or in the Occupied Territories.
I can certainly understand that from a Palestinian?s experience such distinctions might well appear to be a little arbitrary and not very relevant. And? a Palestinian might have rather less interest in whether Israeli is destroying itself or not as compared to say whether Palestinian rights and freedoms are able to be exercised or not. We have no Palestinian speakers here on the podium tonight, so that is not a debate we are set up to have. I do hope the organizers will present Palestinian perspectives in a future debate. Neither Mr Sieghart nor myself are Palestinians or are here as Palestinian advocates, and despite their attachment to Palestinian land, it is a role I would suggest neither Messrs Glick nor Dayan are cut out to play.
But there is of course such a perspective held within the Israeli-Zionist discourse. That Israel equals settlements.
What?s not to get here?
After 45 plus years of a settlement push, of a logic that if we return to Zion then of course we settle Hebron and not just newly created Tel Aviv.? As Palestinian-Israeli Knesset Member has argued of Israel?s design ? it is a democratic state for its Jewish citizens and a Jewish state for its Palestinian citizens.
Such a definition of Israel may sound more coherent, more compelling even more honest. ?And perhaps therefore our debate is rendered meaningless.
There is one problem though, and it is extremely relevant to our motion tonight.
That this is not how Israel has defined itself. Israel calls itself a democracy, a Jewish and democratic state; it enshrines these principals in its declaration of independence. It is a signatory to international charters and conventions that enshrine these principles. It is this Israel that has embedded itself in the community of nations, and in the hearts and minds of Jews across the world. It is this Israel that carries legitimacy. And it is also this Israel that has been recognized by the PLO and by the Arab states with whom we have peace, and conditionally by the entire Arab League.
And unless and until Israel re-defines itself as I don?t know, let?s say the Jewish Empire of Greater Israel ? until then, it is against this standard that the question of whether Israel is destroying itself with settlements must be judged.
Still you may say, come now, you are splitting hairs, what you just described ? that undemocratic over-reach Greater Israel of settlements is the real Israel
I am not willing to concede that just yet. I acknowledge Israel is an imperfect democracy, I want full equality for all citizens including the 20% of Israelis who are Palestinian, and to fight for a better democracy and one that comes to terms with what happened in ?48 and is confident and mature enough to openly address the Naqba with the Palestinians.
But none of these things can coexist with a settlement project whose very existence is undemocratic and denying of another people?s freedoms. Make no mistake; settlements are also the number one driver of Israel?s current democratic recession. The wave of anti-democratic and discriminatory legislation and stirrings of recent years.
First, because over time it becomes impossible to sustain a democracy on one side of the Green Line and impose a non-democracy on the other. And secondly because the very maintenance of this illegal occupation and the need to justify it is serving to shrink the space for democracy and dissent at home.?
Of course, there might be a caveat, an opening here. Can?t Israel just have all the land, confer rights on all the people and be a democracy, ?a bi-national democracy - a higher % of Jews, a lower % of Jews, no big deal, it?s the 21st century after all.
It is true, such an outcome cannot address either Palestinian or Jewish national aspirations - aspirations which led me to Israel and whose purchase on the dreams of Israelis and Palestinians remains strong and very understandable. It can also not ignore Gaza.
And don?t get me wrong ? a single state democracy is not the worst option, certainly not if the choice is narrowed to being between an ethnocracy or a democracy.
But in terms of this motion tonight, that too would be the destruction of Israel as we know it.
And finally this, and I want to be careful not to turn the ?Oy Vey? dial up too high, but the settlement policy is a driving factor in Israel endangering itself not just in the sense of defining what Israel is but in a very real physical sense. ?
Settlements constitute a genuinely high risk strategy for the security and well-being of Israel and Israelis. Quite simply, how does this story of the overreach that settlements represent, how does this end well?
Let?s just look at this for one moment;
In a new Arab reality in which democratic enfranchisement has come to the fore;
a reality in which technological gaps including Israel?s qualitative military edge are closing over time;
in which Israel is so dependent on the US;
in which Pal non-violent civil disobedience protests are gathering steam;
also in which armed uprisings against oppression have received regional and international support in Libya and in Syria and elsewhere;
and with Israel losing its legitimacy and experiencing a brain drain at home.
In such a reality are settlements the way forward, or are they the most dangerous manifestation of over-reach. Do they contribute to Israeli security or threaten to push us over the edge?
Is this our only future, and is it really a viable future, to live by the sword in perpetuity?
Settlements are what make pragmatic, realist policies most difficult for Israel to pursue.
I know, I know, I can see the speech bubbles coming out of peoples? heads.
na?ve, naive, naive, na?ve
That this is defeatist talk
If we ended the settlements would the Arabs really accept us?
They opposed us before ?67, after ?67, etc?
We cannot live in peace?
To me, that is the real defeatism, to believe there is no better future.
Are the Palestinians uniquely intolerant, uniquely impossible to make peace with; are we uniquely destined to be enemies for ever? I would argue, that this view is a-historical, a misreading of reality and more than a little bit prejudiced.
Unique, permanent unreasonableness does not apply to Palestinians or Muslims, and it does not apply to Jews or Israelis.
If we remove the casus belli, the burning humiliation of today and tomorrow, will everything still be dictated by the events of yesterday and history? Both peoples can be forward looking.
And to support this motion is not about poking Israel in the eye or to demonize every settler.
To support this motion is to send a message that settlements are taking us to a point of no return, that this is not a smart strategy for Israel?s future.
Thank you.
Source: http://ecfr.eu/blog/entry/israel_is_destroying_itself_with_its_settlement_policy
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