To return to the new Peace Now website click here.

Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher- March 22, 2010

Alpher answers questions about the long-range implications of the East Jerusalem housing construction crisis.

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst, co-founder and co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian internet dialogue bitterlemons.org and Middle East roundtable bitterlemons-international.org. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and a former senior official with the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for Peace Now or Peace Now.

Q. Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the East Jerusalem housing construction crisis and PM Netanyahu is in the US, what are some of the longer range implications of what transpired?

A. First, as seen from Israel, President Barack Obama's domestic situation appears to have constrained his capacity to react forcefully to what was clearly perceived as not only an Israeli slight to the vice president, but a blow to the peace process the administration seeks to advance. Note that Obama himself barely spoke out during the crisis and that the administration never seriously threatened any of the sanctions--financial, military--traditionally invoked against recalcitrant Israeli governments that are perceived to be damaging US interests. 

The Obama administration was busy with health care. And the clock is ticking on midterm elections that require the president to galvanize his Democratic support base. In this respect, this week's annual AIPAC convention, always an obligatory opportunity to celebrate US-Israel solidarity, came just in time from Netanyahu's standpoint. He'll return home to Israel after the administration witnessed a near-ritual demonstration of American Jewish and congressional support.

Second, the crisis may have introduced us to a new constraint on the administration's freedom to respond forcefully to Israel or exercise serious pressure: Iran. Biden's visit was originally intended as one of a series of administration "hand holders" (following upon an extraordinary series of visits since January 2010 by CIA Director Panetta, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen, National Security Adviser Jones and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Kerry) to ensure close Israeli-American coordination regarding Iran's nuclear program. The administration's Iran sanctions program is delayed, if not foundering. Israel's concerns are growing, and looking a year or two down the line it may appear to some Israeli decision-makers that Washington will ultimately not have answers for the Iranian military nuclear program.

This may give Netanyahu some leverage. He doesn't have to threaten a thing for the administration to suspect that if it pushes him too hard on the Palestinian issue and this leads to deterioration in US-Israel relations or even to the withholding of arms supplies, he and Defense Minister Ehud Barak might be more likely to consider a preemptive Israeli strike against Iran.

On the other hand, Israel needs at least a "yellow light" from the US to take military action against Iran. Hence the constraints work on Jerusalem as well.

Third, if the crisis seemed to provide an opportunity for the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank to foment widespread unrest in Jerusalem and elsewhere as a catalyst for heavier US pressure on Israel, that incentive appears to have largely dissipated. Palestinians are still recovering from the Israeli response to the last intifada, launched in 2000. While Palestinian Authority PM Salam Fayyad does seemingly encourage a "white" (i.e., non-violent) intifada, he undoubtedly realizes that his ambitious state-building project would be jeopardized by prolonged violence. Nor does Barak seek another armed confrontation. 

Hence, even the killing by the IDF of four Palestinian civilians in separate incidents in the West Bank over the weekend and ongoing Qassam fire from the Gaza Strip did not seem likely to provoke a serious new round of violence. It emerges that the last thing either Israel or the Palestinians wanted in the shadow of the Biden crisis was a genuine armed escalation. On the other hand, Palestinians undoubtedly concluded that Israeli settlement construction catches the Obama administration's attention much more quickly than Palestinian violence.

The West Bank-based Palestinian press fell into line with the call from Ramallah for a degree of restraint. Ashraf al-Ajrami wrote in al-Ayyam on March 17 that "Loss of control would drive us very rapidly back to square one. . . . Let our people take what happened in the Gaza Strip as a lesson and a moral, so that we do not destroy everything in a moment of anger." Even Jordanian ad-Dustour's Urayb ar-Rintawi, who usually allows himself to be more militant on these issues from Amman, cautioned that "before we call for a third intifada and rush into it, we must think of what we are getting into." 

Only the Hamas-affiliated www.palestine-info.info accused the PA of having "relieved the occupation and allowed it to isolate and pick upon the Holy City." True to form, the reaction in Gaza to the negotiations crisis and the ensuing Palestinian unrest in Jerusalem was to fire Qassam rockets at Israel, killing a Thai farm worker. 

Apropos Fayyad's state-building plan, it was one of the clear winners of this round. On March 19 the Quartet, meeting in Moscow, stated that it "continues to support the Palestinian Authority's plan of August 2009 for building the Palestinian State within 24 months as a demonstration of Palestinians' serious commitment to an independent State that provides good governance, opportunity, justice and security for the Palestinian people from the first day." While the Quartet also of course continues to endorse a negotiated two-state solution, this statement places its members, including the US, on track toward contemplating the possible issue of recognition of such a Palestinian state in August 2011 if negotiations fail.


Q. And PM Netanyahu? How significant are the gestures he offered the US and the Palestinians in order to end the crisis?

A. They are a mixed bag, some trivial, others potentially significant. A commitment to closer supervision by the Prime Minister's Office of the housing construction licensing process in East Jerusalem is not so much a concession to Washington as an internal political obligation for Netanyahu if he wants to avoid further surprises. And releasing a few hundred Fateh prisoners is easy when you are holding thousands, many of them for non-lethal offenses.

Netanyahu's agreement that the indirect talks Senator Mitchell is initiating can discuss not just procedural issues but substance as well--as long as actual agreements are left to direct discussions--is ostensibly a more significant concession. Exactly how this will work in practice, however, is not clear. Indirect Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have never been tried. Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas enter them with huge gaps separating their positions. It seems unlikely that indirect talks will be able to narrow these gaps. That leaves Netanyahu's right-wing coalition relatively unconcerned that its hard-line positions will be compromised. Unless, of course, Mitchell, whose task in managing these indirect talks becomes potentially more important with the addition of substance, gets very creative.

Netanyahu also committed to ease the economic blockade of the Gaza Strip. This could conceivably be an opening to ending Israel's counterproductive economic warfare against 1.5 million Gazans. But that's probably wishful thinking. More likely, ongoing rocket fire from Gaza will provide a good excuse for backing out of this commitment.

To make sure his coalition is behind him, Netanyahu declared on the eve of his visit to Washington that housing construction for Jews in East Jerusalem would continue unabated: there is no difference, he noted, between building in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv. This was not good news for the administration. However, in Ramallah Nabil Shaath, who runs foreign affairs for the Fateh movement, suggested after meeting Mitchell that Netanyahu had given a quiet undertaking to restrict housing construction in Jerusalem. If that is the case, and if this time Netanyahu sticks to his word, this could help ease the PLO into the indirect talks.

Reminder: the very partial freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank ends in September. Netanyahu and his ministers are busy telling the settler public that construction will resume then with a vengeance.


Q. Apropos reminders, how did we get into this Jerusalem construction mess in the first place? How was the border of expanded Jerusalem determined?

A. In June 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank in the Six-Day War, Arab Jerusalem as defined by the Jordanians who lost the battle was tiny, consisting of the Old City and a few surrounding neighborhoods. Had Israel annexed Jordanian Jerusalem, the issue of Jewish neighborhoods would not exist (the issue of the Holy Basin area would, of course, continue to be at the center of controversy).

The Eshkol government's decision to create a united Jerusalem and annex areas to the east, north and south of the green line was political. Its primary objective was to ensure Israeli control over the Wailing Wall and the Holy Basin (Mount of Olives, Silwan), access to the Temple Mount (which remains to this day under Muslim control except at times of emergency) and a reasonable land link to Mount Scopus, which had been an Israeli enclave from 1948 to 1967. There was also a security motive. Eshkol sought to safeguard outlying areas of West Jerusalem that had been subject to Jordanian sniper fire during the previous 19 years.

The drawing of a new municipal boundary was placed in the hands of a five-man committee dominated by senior IDF officers. They were told to hurry; IDF Intelligence, where I served at the time as an officer, assessed that any day the United States and Soviet Union would deliver an ultimatum for Israel to withdraw from the territories captured in the war. This assessment was based on the behavior of the great powers after the 1948 and 1956 wars; in the 1967 case it turned out to be unfounded. But no one knew that in June; it was assumed that we would soon be told to withdraw back to the old reality of hostility and perpetual sniper fire around Jerusalem. It was believed that annexation of expanded Jerusalem by the Knesset would provide the government with a bargaining chip for holding on to a safer capital city.

Look at any map of "United Jerusalem" and you will see the result. In order to protect West Jerusalem and the Old City core of East Jerusalem from sniper fire, it was decided to annex the next ridge of hills in each direction: north, south and east. The ridge to the east, in particular (Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives) would give the IDF a degree of tactical control over the entire terrain sloping down to the Jordan River and Dead Sea. The "finger" of Jerusalem to the north was added when then Mayor Teddy Kollek, recalling the siege of 1948, demanded that the airport of Kalandia be attached for purposes of resupply at time of war. By the by, the Arab villages in these directions found themselves attached to a city they had never been a part of.

Needless to say, Jerusalem has never since been under siege or sniper fire. Nor is it likely to in any final status agreement with the Palestinians. All the assumptions that informed the redrawing of the city's municipal boundaries proved unfounded, yet no one has done anything about it. 

The tens of thousands of non-Jerusalemite Arabs attached to the city in 1967 now number around 250,000 and approach 35 percent of the city's population. The Kalandia airport has been rendered useless by urban sprawl from neighboring Ramallah/al-Bireh. Jewish neighborhoods on the surrounding ridges, with names like Ramat Shlomo, Har Homa and Pisgat Zeev, threaten to cut the Arab city and its population off from the surrounding West Bank, rendering final status agreement virtually impossible. Those 250,000 Arabs add to the demographic threat to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Most live in villages like Jebel Mukabbar, A-Ram and Sur Bahir, now physically attached to the city and separated from the West Bank to which they naturally belong by the security barrier.

Thanks to this poorly conceived annexation map and its aftermath, Ramat Shlomo is just the tip of the iceberg of intractable Jerusalem issues separating Israelis and Palestinians.