For the pragmatists of Labour Zionism, responsive to the constraints exercised by the Western powers on Israel's territorial expansion and sensitive to Western public opinion, the possibility of more land for Israel was bound to come up against the hard reality of Palestinian demographics and Palestinian resistance. To incorporate Palestinian population centres would alter the very fundamentals of the Zionist enterprise. To incorporate millions of disaffected Palestinians into some kind of "Greater Israel" would eventually transform the Jewish state into a bi-national state of Israel/Palestine. What was required is strict physical and political separation of Jews and Palestinians, the latter policed by the Palestinian National Authority, while at the same time keeping the structures of domination and inequalities intact. Indeed for the Palestinians, under Ehud Barak the current Labour strategy of peace negotiations has changed little the facts on the ground. Redeployment and withdrawal of troops in parts of the West Bank have only strengthened the long-standing Labour policy of seeking maximum lands for Jewish settlers while leaving Palestinian population centres outside of Jewish control.
In his election victory speech of 18 May 1999, Barak said that he would observe four "security red lines" concerning the peace process with the Palestinians: Jerusalem remaining under Israeli "eternal sovereignty;" no return to the 1967 borders under any circumstances; most of the West Bank settlers staying in settlement blocs under Israeli sovereignty; and no "foreign armies" west of the Jordan River. The basic thinking with regard to the territorial issue behind the negotiation strategy of Barak is "the Allon Plan Plus" of assuring the maximum land and the minimum number of Arabs - or an overwhelmingly Jewish state from the demographic point of view(1) - and this remains essentially the fundamental position of the Labour Party. It was the relatively moderate ex-president of Israel and a leading Labour politician, Yitzhak Navon, who declared during the 1984 general election campaign: "the very point of Labor's Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!"(2)
The current Labour government is against Israel's total withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders; against the Palestinian "right of return"; for the unilateral annexation of Arab Jerusalem; and for the preservation of most Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Indeed, after the Oslo agreements were signed, the then Labour government of Yitzhak Rabin did its utmost to strengthen most Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In 1995 the Rabin government allocated 330 million dollars for the completion of bypass roads connecting Jewish settlements to each other and to Israel proper. Moreover, in September 1994 Rabin had given the go-ahead for the construction of about 700 new homes at Giva'at Tal, part of Alfei Menashe settlement, situated three kilometres inside the West Bank.(3) In the spring of 1995 the same government approved the construction of 8,000 new housing units in the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, located at the centre of the West Bank and half way between Jerusalem and Jericho. A year later, in June 1996, the 4,000 persons of the Jahaleen bedouin tribe lost their legal battle in the Israeli High Court to keep land on which they had pitched their tents for decades. They were forced by the Labour government and the Israeli court to make way for 20,000 Jewish settlers who wanted to expand their Ma'ale Adumim settlement by confiscating Arab property.(4) Moreover, the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir revealed on 13 October 1995 that Prime Minister Rabin had instructed the Ministry of Housing to expropriate Arab land in order to expand the city limits of Jerusalem to the east, to unite it with Ma'ale Adumim.(5) According to Labour's plans, various fragments of the West Bank and most of Gaza, which already is administered by the Palestinian National Authority, eventually should be linked to Jordan, forming a Jordan-Palestine state. This was basically the Labour scenario: to partition the West Bank between Israel and Jordan-Palestine.
During and after the signing of the Oslo agreements, Israel, under both Labour and Likud, continued to expropriate Palestinian property, "de-Palestinise" occupied East Jerusalem and expand Jewish settlements in and around the city. Under the cover of the "peace process", Israel has been able to maintain and even strengthen its structure of domination over the Palestinians. The Oslo agreements themselves have reaffirmed the dispossession and exile of the Palestinian refugees, the fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a whole. The cutting edge of Israel's post-Oslo policies have been shown most sharply in the settlement and Judaisation policies in and around Arab Jerusalem. The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem has recently issued a report stating that since 1967 Israel has confiscated nearly 25,000 dunums of Arab land in East Jerusalem and has established 40,000 residential units on this land for the exclusive use of the Jewish population.(6) In recent years, Israel has been seeking speedier ways to expand Jerusalem's parameters and to thin out its Arab population. After the June 1967 occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem, the Arab population of the city was not given Israeli nationality. Arab Jerusalemites were considered as "permanent residents" and were allowed to carry "Israeli ID cards of East Jerusalem", but they were not eligible for obtaining Israeli passports nor for voting for the Knesset. Apparently, there are about 200,000 Arabs today who hold Israeli ID cards of East Jerusalem. One-third of these do not live in the city, but reside in the West Bank. In recent years thousands of families have lost the right to remain in Jerusalem because, Israel claims, they have chosen to live outside the city's boundaries. Israel has continued to tighten its grip on the Arab sector of Jerusalem, strictly forbidding entry to the residents of the West Bank. Israeli practices of denying Palestinians building permits and levying high municipality taxes are also driving thousands of Palestinians out of the city in search of a more affordable place to live. Israel's "ethnic cleansing" policy in East Jerusalem has been widely reported in the Israeli press. They talk about "ethnic cleansing" in Jerusalem, the well-known Israeli journalist, Danny Rubinstein, commented recently in Haaretz, and B'Tselem has described the strategy as "quiet transfer".(7)
The combination of an unjust "peace process", the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements and repeated closures of the West Bank and Gaza have continued to take their toll on the Palestinian economy. Throughout the post-Oslo years, from 1993 to 2000, Palestinian life has got progressively worse. There were more Jewish settlers moving into the West Bank, more land seizures to build bypass roads for Jewish settlements, a Palestinian National Authority responding to Israeli demands with more human rights violations. Under the Barak government, permission has been granted to convert 40 temporary outposts into permanent settlements. And in recent weeks clearance has been given by Israel's Defence Ministry for the construction of another 1,400 housing units in the settlement, and the drafting of new zoning and construction plans for the settlements.
The Zionist pragmatic camp sees the "peace process" helping to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, secure within the framework of peace agreements with its neighbours. Six years into the "Oslo process" many Israelis - according to recent opinion polls - believe there will be a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. However, judging by the continuous and relentless expansion of Jewish settlement throughout the West Bank and in greater Jerusalem and the enormous power asymmetry between Israel and the Palestinians, the most likely outcome of this "peace process" would be the transformation of Israel's direct military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza into some kind of "informal empire". For Labour the post-Oslo agreements do not preclude the annexation of over one-third of the West Bank and greater Jerusalem. This outcome is unlikely to result in bringing an end to the occupation and of decolonising the West Bank and Gaza; it will not solve the Palestinian refugee problem or provide some sense of justice for the Palestinians. A mini-Palestinian state, created in two-thirds of the West Bank and Gaza-controlled by, and dependent on, Israel could not absorb the Palestinian refugees of the occupied territories along with refugees from Lebanon and Jordan and elsewhere.
Notes
1.Cited from Yeruham Cohen, Tochnit Allon [The Allon Plan] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad Press, 1973), p.13.
2. Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), p.340.
3. See Meed (London), 7 October 1994, p.16.
4. See Shyam Bhatia in The Observer, 9 June 1996, p.19.
5. See Haim Baram in Middle East International, 23 June 1995, p. 4. See also Sarah Helm, "West Bank to be snared in a net of highways," The Independent, 12 December 1994.
6. Cited in Shaml newsletter (Ramallah), no.17 (July 1999), p.6.
7. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/4773/cve-h.html
*Dr Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and the author of several books on the Arab-Israeli conflict. His new book Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, 1967-2000, was published by Pluto Press in July this year. To order a copy, email Pluto Press or place the order through their website.
© 2000 Nur Masalha