Israeli settlements at core of conflict

On his short helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the West Bank, President Barack Obama is flying over sprawling Jewish settlements — a reminder of Israel’s ongoing construction on war-won land in defiance of much of the world and a major hurdle to renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Palestinian officials say Mahmoud Abbas’ main message to Obama, as the two met yesterday, was that the Palestinian president can’t return to talks on drawing a border between Israel and a future Palestine while Israel unilaterally shapes that line through accelerated settlement expansion.
At the same time, Palestinians doubt Obama is willing to spend the domestic political capital required to pressure Israel to halt construction — something he briefly tried at the beginning of his first term, before backing down when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resisted.
In a joint news conference with Netanyahu late Wednesday, the US president didn’t mention settlements at all when asked about the lack of progress during his first term toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Instead he suggested a low-key approach, saying he came to hear from Abbas and Netanyahu and that “it is a hard slog to work through all these issues.” But with settlements growing steadily, time for a partition deal may be running out, Israeli settlement monitors and European diplomats have warned.
“We are reaching the tipping point,” said settlement watcher and Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer.
“A year from now, if the current trends continue, the two-state solution will not be possible. The map will be so Balkanized that it will not be possible to create a credible border between Israel and Palestine,” he said.
Palestinians also argue that after two decades of intermittent negotiations, the contours of an agreement have widely been established and that it’s time for decisions, not endless rounds of diplomacy. They suspect Netanyahu is seeking open-ended negotiations to give him the diplomatic cover for more settlement-building, while being unwilling to make the needed concessions.
Netanyahu has said he is willing to negotiate the terms of a Palestinian state. He reiterated Wednesday, with Obama by his side, that he is ready to return to talks, but also said there should be no “preconditions” — his term for the Palestinians’ insistence on a settlement freeze.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has adopted a tougher starting position for negotiations than his predecessors.
He refuses to accept the 1967 frontier as a baseline for border talks and says he will not relinquish East Jerusalem, an area Israel expanded into the West Bank and annexed immediately after the 1967 war.
Since that war, Israeli governments have built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, creating a ring of settlements that increasingly disconnects its Arab-populated core from the rest of the West Bank. Some 200,000 Jews now live in East Jerusalem, almost even with the Palestinian population in the city, which overall has about 800,000 residents.
In recent months, the Netanyahu government has approved construction plans for thousands more settlement apartments on Jerusalem’s southern edge that would further isolate Arab neighborhoods in the city from the West Bank.
European diplomats warned in an internal report last month that if the current pace of settlement activity on Jerusalem’s southern flank continues, “an effective buffer between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem may be in place by the end of 2013, thus making the realization of a viable two-state solution inordinately more difficult, if not impossible.” The Palestinians say settlements are a major obstacle. Mainly, they cannot envisage a final peace settlement while their state is cut off from Jerusalem and does not include any of the city.
“We will tell President Obama, ‘come solve this problem’,” Abbas aide Nabil Shaath said of Thursday’s meeting.
“We will explain to him our position and we will tell him we hope he can see by himself the situation on the ground ... This (Israeli) government does not want the two-state solution and considers the negotiations to be over how much land they will take from us,” Shaath added.
It’s not clear if the new Israeli government sworn in on Monday — although its makeup is more centrist — will change course from the outgoing one which was heavily stacked with settlers and their supporters.
The main coalition partner of Netanyahu’s rightist Likud Party is the centrist Yesh Atid, which has called for a resumption of negotiations but whose leader, Yair Lapid, says Israel must keep all of Jerusalem.
The third largest party, the Jewish Home, opposes Palestinian statehood and wants to annex 60 percent of the West Bank.
Henry Siegman, a leading critic of Israeli policy in the American Jewish community, said he believes Obama is fully aware of the corrosive effect of settlements. Time for a deal is slipping away and Obama cannot make do with four more years of just managing the conflict, he said.

n The Associated Press