Sharon will evacuate 17 West Bank settlements

The speaker of the Knesset announced yesterday that Prime Minister Sharon intends to evacuate 17 settlements in the West Bank, including one inhabited by a government minister, Avigdor Lieberman of the National Union party bloc. Said Speaker Reuvin Rivlin (Likud),

"When Sharon talks of painful concessions, he is referring to a concrete plan that he has already discussed with some of the settlers. Sharon has accepted the fact that if we want to live within borders that enable the Palestinians passage that does not go through our territory, a number of settlements will have to be evacuated," Rivlin said.

Rivlin said that when Sharon became prime minister, and earlier, in talks he had with former prime minister Ehud Barak, he had earmarked 17 settlements for evacuation. "Arik made it clear a number of times that their evacuation is necessary if we are to reach some agreement. Today there are small territorial divisions. They will be united and joined. Joining them will require the evacuation of about 17 settlements," Rivlin said.

Rivlin said that after hearing of Sharon's plans, he decided he could not serve as a minister in his cabinet. "When he offered me a minister's portfolio, I preferred to be Knesset speaker. I told him openly: Arik, we are now on a course of inevitable collision. I cannot release myself from my faith. I will not convert my religion," Rivlin said.

So, on the face the settlement pullback seems positive (and you will see it as such on NBC News) and indeed, it represents a nudge towards reasonable peace, but, as the man says, the point of this is acheiving a semblance of territorial contiguity, not addressing one of the central Palestinian concerns (and justifications for armed action): the continuing process of annexing the West Bank, and legitimizing those annexations. "Temporary borders" could be a euphemism for "legitimizing annexation." Yes? Graham Usher suspects it's possible, because Sharon is still Sharon:

Strategically, Sharon's acceptance of the roadmap marks another stage in his protracted efforts to shift the destination of the conflict away from "an end to the occupation that began in 1967" (in Bush's words) to the establishment of a "provisional Palestinian state with certain aspects of sovereignty" (in Sharon's). According to the roadmap the provisional state is due to come into being in 2004 but more likely at the end of Sharon's watch in 2006. Nor is Sharon's commitment to Palestinian statehood rhetorical; it is practical and being built.

In early March -- when the world was distracted by Iraq -- Sharon quietly announced that the security barrier currently carving out chunks of Palestinian farmland near the northern West Bank border will go east, severing the central West Bank region from its Jordan Valley hinterland. In April he mused that mammoth Jewish settlements like Ariel that lie 20 kilometres within the West Bank would eventually be "on our side of the fence".

If so, these walls would cage the emerging "Palestinian entity" into three disconnected cantons in the north, centre and south of the West Bank, covering about 42 percent of its territory but hosting most of its two million or so denizens. This is the "occupation" Sharon wants to end: Israel's occupation of the Palestinian "people", not the occupation of the land and resources that is their patrimony.

"The provisional Palestinian state is a new term for Sharon's old strategy for achieving a long-term interim agreement," says PA Labour Minister Ghassan Khatib. "We know that if we get trapped in this phase we won't be able to move to the final status phase -- there is no chance Sharon will allow this. We also know that the provisional state will be autonomy in effect but occupation in practice. Only it won't be called autonomy -- it will be called statehood and Israel would be let off the hook."

Of the many reservations Palestinians have about the roadmap, the provisional Palestinian state idea is perhaps the gravest. They are aware from bitter experience that Israel's provisional arrangements have a habit of becoming permanent borders.

The big question, of course, is what Bush, a Christian, will do about the West Bank and its particular religious/social/security structure. Are we looking at a return to the 1948/67 border, or the attempted annexation of large swaths? Time will tell...

Posted by HongPong at June 3, 2003 02:39 AM
Listed under Israel-Palestine .