TORONTO, 9 June 2003 — When it became evident that the Israeli Army could seize Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and the adjoining West Bank during the 1967 Six-Day War, Labor Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was apprehensive.
“Even if we take the West Bank and Old City,” he said, “we will eventually have to leave them.”
Now, almost 36 years after Israel occupied the West Bank and the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appears to have come to the same conclusion.
Sounding more like a peacenik than a former general, Sharon astonished critics and supporters alike over the weekend. “We don’t like the word,” he declared, “but this is occupation. To keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and bad for the Palestinians.”
Since Sharon has devoted much of his career to championing the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, his language and apparent change of heart have spawned skepticism, both at home and abroad.
The most cynical view suggests that although he has publicly signed on to the notion of a Palestinian state — which to be viable would displace hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers — Sharon did so only because he believes that Palestinian extremists will torpedo the current momentum.
“What is great about Sharon is that even today ... he can still spin everybody like a top,” political commentator Chemi Shalev wrote in the newspaper Maariv.
Sharon’s defenders respond that concerted US pressure and a rapidly growing Palestinian population, expected to double in the next 20 years, have combined to turn him into a realist.
Either way, it’s clear that while assorted Labor and Likud governments have espoused different views of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, the one constant has been a steady growth of the Israeli presence since Eshkol initiated the occupation.
He was succeeded as prime minister by Golda Meir, whose view of a Palestinian homeland was summarized in her 1969 remark: Before the creation of Israel in 1948, she said, the Palestinian people “did not exist.”
During the Meir era, Israeli settlement in the Palestinian territories was security-oriented rather than ideological, seen primarily as a bulwark against Arab hostility. That emphasis shifted in the 1970s, with the ascendance of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), who viewed their presence in the territories as a God-given right.
It was during those years, while holding the agriculture portfolio under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, that Sharon began taking a lead role in settlement growth. Throughout the 1980s, the pattern continued. Settlements sprouted like mushrooms in the West Bank, while hundreds of Palestinian homes were demolished. And nothing changed with the ultimately abortive Oslo accords of 1993, intended to produce a Palestinian homeland.
Between the signing of that agreement and the onset of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the number of Jewish settlers approximately doubled, to about 200,000.
Today the numbers are at a record high.
The West Bank is home to about 220,000 Jewish settlers. Most live in roughly 150 heavily guarded settlements, and 500 to 1,000 more live in the 100 or so so-called outposts, two-thirds of which have been built since Sharon became prime minister two years ago.
Add to that about 180,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,000 more in the densely packed Gaza Strip. For Geoffrey Aronson of the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, which closely tracks settlement growth, the core puzzle for Israel has barely changed since 1967.
“What do you do if you want the land but you don’t want to rule the people?”
As things stand, Aronson is not optimistic that a viable Palestinian state is even on the distant horizon.
Rather, he foresees the creation of a series of Palestinian enclaves. One or more would be in Gaza, but most Palestinians would be confined to perhaps half of the West Bank, separated from Israel by the billion-dollar “fence” now under construction, much of which is east of the “Green Line” that delineates the West Bank.
“What I think we’re seeing today is the opening final chapter in Israel’s policy of de facto annexation,” he said. “The decision has been made. You squeeze Palestinians into the heartland, which is historically where the problems have been.”
