In this second of a four-part series addressing the main points of the Mideast roadmap, Muna Hamzeh examines the lack of a clear Palestinian strategy to fight Israel's settlement policy In yet another public relations coup, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has managed to convince western public opinion that as part of implementing the roadmap for Mideast peace, he is willing to offer the Palestinians "painful territorial concessions" by agreeing to dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001. Never mind that the nearly 94 illegal outposts in question are mostly uninhabited caravans that settlers -- with the full backing of the government and military -- established on hilltops adjacent to existing and thriving settlements that Israel never plans to dismantle. Never mind that the dismantling of these outposts would in no way hinder Israel's control over the vast majority of occupied Palestinian land. The fact remains that Israel continues to forcibly confiscate Palestinian land, illegally build settlement bypass roads as well as expand existing settlements. And by doing so, Israel would automatically deem any future Palestinian "state" totally non-viable and lacking in any significant geographical contiguity. The fact also remains that Israel continues to illegally confiscate West Bank land to complete construction of a 250 mile-long separation wall that would not only directly harm 210,000 Palestinians in 67 towns and villages but would turn travel from the north to the south West Bank into a nightmare for ordinary Palestinians. At some point in their history, the Israelis might come to realise that the price of maintaining an expansionist settlement policy in the illegally occupied territories poses more of a threat to the very future of the Israeli state than making serious territorial concessions in exchange for peace. Furthermore, the Israelis might also realise that sustaining settlements built on illegally occupied territory has placed an immense economic burden on Israel without achieving the desired security that Sharon promised his people. Indeed, in the first quarter of 2003, the Israeli Knesset Finance Committee approved $29 million for settlement projects. This expenditure comes at a time when the Sharon government has asked the US for an additional $12 billion in new economic and military aid to help uplift a troubled economy. Whether the Israeli public brings any pressure to bear on its government to make serious territorial concessions remains an internal Israeli matter. It is up to the Israelis to ask themselves some deep existential questions about the long-term virtues of keeping the settlements and how this would impact the very future of their country. For their part, the Palestinians have a completely different set of questions to ponder. Any avid observer of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict knows that Palestinian human rights and other organisations have done a fairly good job at documenting Israel's expansionist settlement policy and making it available online, among other places. The Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem comes to mind, as does the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, and many others too numerous to list here. But what Palestinian non-governmental organisations and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have failed to do over the years is to create a clear and comprehensive strategy aimed at fighting Israel's settlement policy. Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem, for instance, who have been exposed to extreme harassment and pressure by Israeli settler groups to leave their homes have rarely ever received the necessary support that might enable them to hold on to their property. For how can an elderly Palestinian woman be expected to fend off armed settlers, backed by armed troops, without receiving any form of support that goes beyond the empty rhetoric that PA officials are so good at offering before rolling TV cameras. Furthermore, West Bank farmers who have been threatened with land confiscation have experienced immense difficulties in trying to obtain assistance from the PA to protect their land. In addition, Palestinians who have sold their land to Israelis have quite often gone unpunished. In other cases, some Palestinians who were arrested by the PA for selling land to Israelis have been released from prison after paying protection money. As early as 1992, if not before, the then Tunis-based Palestinian leadership was amply aware of Israel's Greater Jerusalem plan aimed at expanding Jerusalem's boundaries and building large Israeli settlements. Back then, Palestinian experts obtained the blue-prints of this plan and exhorted the Palestinian leadership to create a strategy with which to fight the Israeli agenda. Back then, these experts feared that Israel would forever change the realities on the ground and thus guarantee the outcome of any future negotiations on the fate of the Holy City to their favour. The alarm bells were not heeded back then and today, the Palestinians find themselves in a situation whereby there is little land in the West Bank, or Jerusalem, for that matter, to negotiate the Israelis over. As one former Palestinian diplomat bitterly put it, "you can blame the Israelis for 20 per cent of the predicament we find ourselves in today, and blame ourselves for the remaining 80 per cent." Indeed, the Israelis have never made their expansionist settlement plans a secret. In fact, you could always count on the Israelis to devise a plan and then carry it through, even if decades pass before the opportunity arises to do so. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have failed to devise a feasible strategy with which to slow down, if not stop, Israel's expansionist policies. Sometime in the late 1990s, a Palestinian land owner in Bethlehem approached every Palestinian ministry he could think of to try and get financial aid to help him cultivate his strip of land. The Israelis had been threatening to confiscate his property and he believed that if he cultivated his land, the Israelis just might leave him alone. Yet the same ministers who have managed to build ostentatious mansions in the occupied territories -- the mansion of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas overlooking Jabalyia refugee camp in Gaza is but one example -- have failed to help ordinary Palestinians hold on to the very land that these ministers are negotiating over. There is no doubt that the Palestinians today are facing the biggest threat to their existence since the 1948 War. With both Washington and Jerusalem run by notoriously right-wing governments that might be around for four more years, it is very likely that by this time next year, the Palestinians might have no land on which to establish their state. The alarm bells should therefore toll for all those who want to heed their call.
