Strange bedfellows opposed to Israel’s new land grab

When US President Donald Trump presented his grand design for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with a beaming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his side, the one objection to his plan that he could not have expected was from the Jewish settlers’ movement.

This US administration is the first in the history of Israel’s 53 years of occupation of the West Bank to legitimise the unilateral annexation of swaths of land there. It is also the first administration to formally recognize the right of Israel to annex territories it occupied in 1967, by last year supporting Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the entire Golan Heights. One would have expected the settlers’ movement to be pleased with Netanyahu’s intention, backed by a big majority in the Knesset, to annex the vast majority of the 132 Jewish settlements and with it 450,000 settlers, in a flagrant violation of international law and the will of the international community. But settler leaders who have been tirelessly demanding annexation are now leading a campaign against both Trump’s so-called peace plan and Netanyahu’s annexation bill.

Counterintuitive? Maybe. Surprising? Not really, if you follow the evolution of the debate in the settlers’ movement from its humble beginnings immediately after the 1967 war until now. Ideologically, this movement has not changed its core belief that the entire West Bank, and Gaza for good measure, belongs to the Jewish state. What has changed and intensified is their greed, which derives from their success in imposing their views on Israeli society. As they have consistently stated, there is no difference between Tel Aviv or Haifa and Hebron or Nablus when it comes to the rights of Jews to settle and live, and to apply full Israeli control and sovereignty. But there is an element in both Trump’s peace plan and Netanyahu’s annexation ambitions which undermines the dream that unites the messianic and apartheid-minded segments among the settlers — and also scares them. In both plans there is acknowledgement that, whatever the settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, a border will be drawn in the West Bank between Israel and a Palestinian territory that will not be under the Jewish state’s control. And, heaven forbid, the US plan explicitly mentions an independent Palestinian state.

Ironically, these settler leaders who operate under the umbrella organisation of the Yesha Council, which comprises the Jewish local authorities in the occupied West Bank, are mirroring the most extreme elements of Palestinian society who have also rejected the two-state solution.  However, they differ from those Palestinians in that they are not only the most persistent and efficient lobby groups in the history of Israel, but also one of the most successful, having hijacked the political discourse. They also enjoy active support in some segments of the Jewish diaspora and among other supporters of Israel who believe they are the true manifestation of modern Zionism — those who will ensure that there is only one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and that it is a Jewish one. They are not bashful about their aspiration, publicly stating their aim of doubling the settlements’ population to 1 million as a tool to prevent a Palestinian state, while developing modern infrastructure that benefits Jewish communities but, as experience has shown, not their Palestinian neighbors.

 For decades almost everything has worked for the settler project, and they have exploited it to the maximum. The Oslo peace process, instead of reaching its goal based on a two-state solution, is stalled and beyond revival. Instead of a peace agreement followed by reconciliation and coexistence, violence broke out between the two communities in the early 2000s when such an agreement seemed to be within reach. Furthermore, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, followed by Hamas winning the elections there and taking control, provided two kinds of ammunition for the settlers — a security objection and an emotive-primal one.

Politically, they successfully spread the notion that the peace process has encouraged Palestinian violence, as was their argument in the case of the withdrawal from Gaza. No complex analysis or argument, only simple fear mongering. Equally, they created an image of themselves as pioneers, the advancing new frontier of Zionism who are putting their lives at risk for the sake of the security of the country, and the preservation of the Jewish way of life where the nation’s forefathers lived 2,000 years ago. Deplorably, they are reducing the Palestinian people, who have lived there for many generations, to invisible beings who do not belong and are a security threat.

This alleged status quo serves the settlers perfectly by enlarging their communities and gradually legalizing those outposts that even the Israeli government considers illegal, and by this ensuring that a viable, contiguous Palestine will never materialize. But both the Trump and the annexation plan are now interfering with the settlers’ objective of irreversibly altering the situation in the West Bank, and this has caused them to panic. It is exposing the settlers for who they really are — warmongers, spoiled by generous public and private funding, and protected by Israel’s powerful security forces. It exposes their readiness to do all they can to drag both nations into a protracted conflict until the Palestinians either succumb to their apartheid plans, or face another wave of expulsions. Neither the Trump plan nor Israeli annexation will lead to a peace based on a two-state solution, nor are they genuinely intended to. However, in the settlers’ minds, the demarcation of borders within the West Bank and limiting the expansion of the settlements is a death sentence for their messianic dream. Their rhetoric has recently turned more vitriolic since their representatives in the Yemina party were excluded from the new coalition government and have no say in the corridors of power.

If annexation takes place in the way it is shaping up to, it will be Washington that has the last word, not the settlers. However, in one of the ironies of this protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict, both those who believe in a just and fair solution and those who do not, such as the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, are opposed to annexation, albeit for diametrically opposite reasons.

• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations at Regent’s University London, where he is head of the International Relations and Social Sciences Program. He is also an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House.@YMekelberg