Israel’s Netanyahu Juggles Violent Settlers and Hostile Palestinians

Much has been written today in Israel-Palestine about the violence and vows to keep building by settler groups on the West Bank, following the Israeli government’s announcement of a 10-month partial freeze of certain construction there – a moved supposedly aimed at inspiring peace, not vigilantism.

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Dramatic photo on Time.com today depicts West Bank settlers clashing with Palestinians who were evicted from their Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, home by soldiers. [Credit: Muammar Awad/AP

It’s true that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been sending mixed messages, undermining his “freeze” when, almost immediately after announcing it, his government approved 84 additional new buildings and 28 schools, along with 900 new housing units in Gilo. Then he met with settlers wearing “I’m thawing the freeze” T-shirts, at which he called them “brothers” and appeared to give them encouragement: “You may demonstrate, protest and express your opinions.” Israeli military leaders expressed concern that the settlers will attack Palestinians; it hasn’t helped, however, that soldiers at an organized, international weekly protest at the separation wall at Nil’in have been firing live bullets and just shot a protestor in the abdomen.

West Bank settlers, seen here on a Palestine mountaintop they want to control, have turned their violent protests toward Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Writing in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan doesn’t think the signals are mixed:

In my judgment, these are not the actions of a government seeking peace or trying to work things out constructively with an ally. And when you look back and see the constant building and settlement in the West Bank, uninterrupted for two decades, you see that there is no way Israel will ever give this land up, and has no sense of how humiliating and provocative this policy is to the people it needs to negotiate a future with.”

Still, I’m not giving up hope in Netanyahu’s huge step toward making peace, and if the intransigent Palestinian leadership would take moves to recommence the peace process, the world will find out whether he really meant it yesterday when he said at a cabinet meeting, “It is clear who wants peace and who rejects peace. The state of Israel wants peace in the clearest possible fashion.”

With an active peace process, Netanyahu would be under intense pressure to extend the building freeze. Will we ever get there, given the escalating conflicts between the half a million Israeli settlers and the native Palestinians? The latest: In El-Bireh, an ancient town of 35,000 in the West Bank near Ramallah (it figures in Jewish and Christian history)  settlers petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to stop a football stadium (financed largely by European govenments) that is almost completed. The court has issued a stop work order pending review of the issue. Though this seems a  local issue, the stadium is a big source of Palestinian international pride, and how this gets decided – and if the occupying power will follow or defy its own court – could have a big effect on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Similarly, the 900 new units approved for Gilo are a bigger issue than they seem – like an iceberg in the West Bank desert: According to Orly Nir of the Israeli NGO Ir Amim – which works on zoning and settler-related issues in greater Jerusalem –  the 900 units are only the vanguard of more than 20,000 homes and apartments that the right-wing Israeli government and its settler-connect planners have on the books to fill up what’s left of the open space between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. All of this space is east of the 1967 “green line.”

It’s not too late to stop these provocations, if the U.S. can successfully push for one of the plentiful peace plans on the shelf, among them the sensible “Clinton parameters.“ [h/t to Bernard Avishai.] As Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israeli, notes in the Los Angeles Times: “The vehicle [for peace] already exists in agreements the Israelis and Palestinians have previously signed.”

Sound policymaking, this. But a lot depends on Netanyahu’s personal integrity and vision of what he wants to put on his shelf: A medal from the settlers’ Yesha Council, or a Nobel Peace Prize.

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