First, Israel was allowed to hold on to some West Bank territory, a clear U-turn in American policy. Now Israel can also build more West Bank settlements, a clear breach of the American-sponsored road map. For fear of compounding Ariel Sharon’s political troubles at a time when he is battling hard-liners, and as President Bush is reluctant to criticize Israel during his re-election campaign which is counting on support from supporters of Israel these days, the Bush administration has become exceptionally accommodating to Israel. The result is a situation that Israel is taking maximum advantage of.
Until now the US position has been that all Israeli settlement activity should be frozen. Washington has for decades pressed Israel to dismantle settler outposts and curb settlement expansion. But when Israeli announced last week that 1,000 building tenders would be issued for subsidized apartments for settlers, Washington not only failed to criticize the plan but, over the weekend, signaled its approval for the growth of some Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It was a political turnabout aimed at helping Sharon. The building announcement was an attempt to defuse resistance from rebels in Sharon’s Likud Party who have been angered by a bid to bring the opposition Labor Party into the government to boost Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan. But it failed, and the party dealt Sharon a humiliating rebuff last week.
But Washington’s help was on the way. The administration is justifying its support for the construction of new houses in some settlements by claiming such housing will not extend into underdeveloped parts of the occupied territory and that the houses will be built within existing settlement boundaries.
That is either a deliberate attempt to mislead or wishful thinking. During the past three years, the Israeli Ministry of Housing, under the messianic settler-minister Eifi Eitam, licensed the construction of thousands of settler units throughout the West Bank to create facts on the ground and to kill once and for all the two-state solution. This month, Eitam resigned, replaced by a double, a pro-settler Likud hawk, Tsibi Livni, who has issued thousands of tenders of a massive expansion to be carried out under the pretext of meeting housing needs resulting from natural growth.
The plan to quit the Gaza Strip and uproot 21 Jewish settlements there, along with four others in the West Bank, is strongly opposed by the Likud settler lobby that believes the withdrawal is tantamount to “rewarding Palestinian terrorism.” Sharon’s defeat last week attests to the lobby’s tenacity; however, the prime minister, with or without Labor, still plans to go ahead with the pullout while simultaneously having no qualms about making the most of the US campaign. In April, Bush assured Sharon that if he carried out his disengagement from Gaza, Israel could count on retaining parts of the West Bank with some large settlements. Now Bush has gone a step further. And Sharon is milking Bush for all he’s worth before the elections and possibly before a new face takes over in the Oval Office.
