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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - September 12, 2005

Q. Why did Abu Mazen claim Israel had not withdrawn from all of the Gaza Strip? Q. Is someone dealing with West Bank settlers who want to be evacuated?

Q. Why did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) suddenly remember last week to claim that Israel had not really withdrawn from all the land of the Gaza Strip?

A. Abbas stated last week that Israel continued to occupy Palestinian lands in the northern and eastern Gaza Strip. In so doing, he reiterated earlier claims by Mohammed Dahlan and others that were systematically refuted by Israel. These are lands awarded to Egypt in the 1949 armistice agreement negotiated at Rhodes. A year later they were transferred to Israeli rule by Egypt (then occupying the Strip) in a territorial exchange agreement. Israel received the land that is today Erez and Nativ Ha'Asarah to the north of the Strip in exchange for a larger stretch of land added on to the Strip to its east. The border alteration was recognized by the United Nations, which deployed its troops along the altered boundary prior to 1967. When Israel and the PLO agreed on maps for the 1994 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the PLO did not challenge these new lines.

Why, then, did Abbas suddenly decide to revert back to the 1949 armistice lines, just as Israel was completing its withdrawal from the Strip? One tactical explanation is that he fears an outbreak of violence by Palestinians in the Strip that he won't be able to control, and is preparing a territorial excuse--a kind of Palestinian Sheba Farms (the territory on Israel's northern border that is claimed by Lebanon even though it belongs to Syria, and that serves as Hizballah's excuse for heating up the border region periodically). Another is that he was pandering to his own extremists, in effect confirming the argument of some Israeli hawks that the Palestinians will never be satisfied with Israeli territorial withdrawals and will always demand more. This impression also tends to strengthen the hand of those Israelis who actually prefer a unilateral determination of the borders by Israel, without trying to reach agreements with the Palestinians that, they fear, are either unattainable or will end up being broken.

Neither explanation corresponds with the Abu Mazen that most of us know. If the issue now goes away, Abu Mazen's statement can be treated as an anomaly. But if Palestinians now try to turn Erez and Nativ HaAsara into a territorial rallying cry, they will be doing serious damage to their cause. They can much more convincingly prove that the occupation is not over by referring to some 50 percent of the West Bank.


Q. While everyone pays attention to Gaza, Israel has withdrawn from an area of the West Bank more than twice as large. What security issues does the IDF now face there?

A. The first issue is how to define Israel's status vis-a-vis the area under discussion: was this an act of disengagement, or merely the evacuation of four settlements? Israel does not claim that the status of the northern West Bank is now identical to that of the Gaza Strip, nor, since that area is adjacent to the rest of the West Bank with its areas A and B, is such a definition required. But this is also not area C; Israeli civilians are not allowed in. Conceivably, if there are no security incidents in the area, IDF forces may enter only for the occasional patrol, and to ensure access to route 60, the main north-south axis in the West Bank. The question is, how will Israeli actions be defined when the IDF enters in force due to Palestinian terrorist activity or even to stop infiltration by disgruntled settlers from further south who want to reestablish their presence in the evacuated territory.

A second issue is the security of the remaining settlements in the northern West Bank that are closer to the green line than those four settlements that were removed. Henanit, Shaked and Reihan are close enough to have already been included in the security fence. Not so Mavo Dotan and Hermesh, both of which will continue to require a large security investment. Some residents of these two settlements have already asked to be compensated and evacuated as well; were they removed the area falling under Palestinian control could be enlarged considerably.

Yet another issue of particular interest to Israel is the deployment and movement of Palestinian security forces in the area evacuated. In theory, there are now no restrictions on that movement, and to the extent the Palestinian forces are successful in maintaining order and preventing terrorism, Israeli units will have little reason to enter. But this is the Jenin area, and Jenin has been one of the two centers of terrorist activity (along with Nablus) in recent years. One negative possibility is that the line defined by the security fence, which in many places is coincidental with the green line, will now witness greater friction between Israeli forces and Palestinian terrorists, or simply demonstrators.

This brings us to the issue of passages: how and where will people and goods cross the de facto border between northern Palestine and Israel, when there are no settlers on the Palestinian side but the passages are not, as in Gaza, defined as international transit points. Ultimately, Israel does plan to turn the West Bank security fence passages into something akin to international border crossing points. But this will only happen when the fence is completed (latest target date: end of 2006) and a solution is found for the settlers living beyond it, inside Palestine. Meanwhile the international community, which is helping to finance the crossing points in the hope that they will regularize passage and render it more efficient, insists that all such points be located on the green line.


Q. What about those West Bank settlers who live beyond the fence and want to be evacuated? Is someone dealing with this issue?

A. Not the Sharon government; PM Sharon has declared that there will be no additional unilateral disengagements in the West Bank. While that may be little more than an electoral maneuver to win back votes from the right, it seems highly unlikely that anyone will address this issue at the governmental level during the coming year. If and when, in the coming months, Sharon does feel pressured enough to take additional action regarding the settlements, he will presumably address the issue of the "illegal" outposts that he pledged to President Bush to remove. Unlike the case of settlement removal, Sharon does not need a Knesset or even a Cabinet decision to move against the outposts, a few of which are barely smaller in size and population than the smallest settlements removed from Gaza and the West Bank.

One Home, an NGO dedicated to providing answers for settlers seeking to leave their settlements immediately, claims that 160 settler families living beyond the fence have joined, and that its surveys show some 20,000 settlers are interested in receiving compensation and leaving as soon as possible (50,000-70,000 settlers are estimated to be located beyond the fence in around 60 settlements, assuming the fence eventually attaches Ariel and Maaleh Adumim to the green line.) MK Avshalom Vilan (Meretz/Yahad), one of the organization's founders, intends to introduce legislation in the Knesset in the fall session creating a mechanism for evacuating those settlers who are interested. Other prominent members of One Home include Dalia Rabin and MK Colette Avital, while Alon Pinkas, former Israeli consul-general in New York, is one of the founders.

One of the tell-tale warning indicators for settlers living beyond the fence has been a sharp drop in the value of their homes, in some cases by two-thirds, since the route of the fence was determined. And one of the characteristics of those suddenly anxious to leave is that they are largely secular, "quality of life" settlers. They hail from the length of the West Bank: from Hermesh, Movo Dotan, and Karnei Shomron in Samaria to Teneh-Ofarim in southern Judea. Teneh-Ofarim's population is notable: 66 of the community's 83 families have reportedly signed a petition asking for evacuation and compensation from the government.

An attempt to legislate an early solution to the plight of these settlers will almost certainly become part of the broader controversy pitting Sharon against Binyamin Netanyahu within the Likud, and threatening to plunge the country into early elections. Accordingly, the chances of passing such a measure in this Knesset appear slim. Private efforts to begin "creating facts" in the form of additional settler withdrawal and compensation, including some schemes hatched abroad, would appear to have a better chance of success in the coming months.