Editorial
The Israeli settlements: The other side of the fence

By Seth Mandel
Dec. 7, 2007

Two weeks prior to the Annapolis Mideast peace conference, an Israeli newsman took the opportunity to lecture a Princeton University audience on what he thinks is the main obstacle to peace: Israeli settlements.

The lecturer was Akiva Eldar, the senior military correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz newspaper, and it wasn't a bombshell: It was classic Eldar.

There are a few points of his that must be corrected or clarified however, if our readers are going to get a balanced, accurate understanding of the issue.

First, Eldar intentionally used and repeated the phrase "separation wall." A clever speech device created by anti-Israel propagandists trying to paint Israel as an apartheid state, and peddled unabashedly by people like Jimmy Carter, the "separation wall," thankfully, does not exist.

What does exist, however, to the benefit of both Israelis and Palestinians, is part of a proposed security fence. Elder should visit it -- he would then see that it is a chain-link fence. Does the chain-link fence around your backyard or the local Little League ballfield constitute a "wall"?

More than 97 percent of the planned security fence is made up of chain-link fence. Less than three percent would be concrete.

The only walled sections were erected along the "Cross-Israel" Highway 6. That section of the highway is susceptible to sniper fire from the towns of Tulkarem and Qalqiliya, which is why a wall was built next to the road.

Additionally, the effects of this fence, as I mentioned briefly in a previous news report, are quite clear: According to the Israel Security Agency, between September 2000 and the erection of the first portion of the security fence in August 2003, 73 terrorist attacks were carried out from the West Bank, killing 293 Israelis and wounding 1,950.

Between August 2003 and the end of 2006, West Bank-based terrorists carried out 12 such attacks, killing 64 Israelis and wounding 445.

The fence speaks for itself.

Elder also told his audience that the Oslo Accords were based on the premise that Israel would be abandoning its presence in the West Bank, but instead settlement expansion continued. He might not have said that if Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated prime minister who led during the Oslo years, were still alive.

Here is what Rabin himself told the Knesset in 1995, just before his murder, about borders: "We will not return to June 4, 1967 lines."

And about settlements, Rabin said: "We committed ourselves before this Knesset not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim government and not to hinder building for natural growth."

Eldar's disrespect to Rabin aside, his grandstanding attempt to dress up anti-Zionist revisionism in the masquerade of historical scholarship hit its peak with this question: "Is it still possible to correct this mistake and save the Zionist dream?"

If by "mistake" he means somehow make it so that retroactively the Arabs never forced Israel to fight an existential defensive war in 1967, then the answer is no, it is not possible -- not yet anyway.

One thing needs to be made clear here: The argument over whether settlements are an obstacle to peace should never be used interchangeably with the argument over whether the settlements are legal.

If the old adage is true, and everybody is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts, then the first argument is open year-round; the latter, however, is not.

The British Mandate states that the government "shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land." The Mandate included what is now called the West Bank, but of course historically is Judea and Samaria.

Further, the Mandate made it quite clear that only its sovereign heir could renounce the provisions and privileges contained therein. Israel is the Mandate's only sovereign heir, and it has not revoked the Mandate.

This was etched in legal confirmatory stone by Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on The Hague's International Court of Justice. He wrote that since "The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land", calling the settlements "illegal" has no basis in international law.

Schwebel also wrote: "Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

In other words, since Jordan's military control of the West Bank between 1948 and 1967 was recognized by the international community as an illegal occupation, Israel has the "better title" to that land; Israel, according to international law, has by far the best (and possibly only) claim to the West Bank.

So, settlement of the West Bank is not a "mistake" disrupting the "Zionist dream"; rather, it is exactly what the British intended for the land they gave to fulfill the Zionist dream.

I am sure that Eldar has a more complex understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and, therefore, does himself and his newspaper a disservice by condescending to his audience.

But in oversimplifying the issue and laying the lion's share of the blame on mostly nonviolent Jews living in their historical homeland -- not to mention playing fast and loose with the facts -- Eldar does his audience and his people a greater disservice.