The West Bank and Sanctions

For decades, the United States and Israel have danced a well-choreographed pas de deux around the subject of the West Bank of the Jordan River.   Whenever a resolution came before the United Nations Security Council sanctioning Israel for planting colonies in these occupied territories, the United States would use its veto to scuttle the resolution.  Then behind the scenes, we would elicit promises to stop, or at least limit, settlement activity.  

The West Bank poses incredibly complex problems for Israel; historical, strategic, philosophical and existential.  They can't annex it without risking their identity as a democratic Jewish state; either Jewish citizens would become a minority of the electorate, or they would have to deny voting privileges based on ethnicity - neither of which is considered compatible with that identity.  There is a consensus among those whose goal is a just peace that there must be some form of a two-state solution, with side-by-side contiguous Israeli and Palestinian nations – divided approximately along the pre-1967 border, but integrating mutually agreed swaps of land.  At the best of times, this has reached a point where the only remaining questions were the details of which tracts go to which state.  This goal is shared not only by the international community, including the United States, but also by significant segments of the Palestinians and Israeli populations, who would be most directly affected.  Neither side’s extremists would get all they want, but in the view of those who seek justice, this is an exchange of ‘land for peace’.  

But there is powerful opposition to this, and always has been.  There are segments of Palestinian society who cannot be reconciled to losing any of their historical homeland – including the internationally-recognized territory of Israel.  And within Israeli society, there are those who dream of a ‘greater Israel’ that incorporates all of the West Bank.  Leaders from this segment of Israeli society have allowed, and in some cases, promoted the planting of colonies throughout the occupied West Bank.  Netanyahu is from this segment of society, and has promoted colonization at an unprecedented rate.  

Each of these colonies (often referred to as settlements) is surrounded by a broad ‘security perimeter’, and they are linked by a network of roads that Palestinians are not allowed to travel, or even cross, except at specified checkpoints.  What the people of this region are left with are isolated islands, with limited movement, within which they are always subject to unexpected, violent intrusion.  The humiliating conditions in these isolated enclaves in the West Bank closely resemble those of apartheid-era South African ‘homelands’.   

There is a virtual news blackout in this country about the conditions of this military occupation – so not surprisingly, there is little sympathy when a Palestinian acts out in defiance.  

Whatever the underlying conflict, it is made more intractable by the continued colonization of the West Bank.  Though Israeli politicians—even those like Netanyahu, who doesn’t mean a word of it—claim to seek a just negotiated settlement, these settlements make that impossible.  Palestinians sometimes use the analogy of two people sitting across a table, deciding how to divide up a pizza, as one of the people keeps grabbing slices and eating them.  It is Netanyahu’s intention to gorge until there is no pizza left to divide

This colonization of the West Bank is also promoted by arms merchants in the US and elsewhere, whose profits would be devastated by an emerging peace in this region.  The symbiotic relationship between them, American right-wing religious leaders, and the expansionist wing of the Israeli body politic forms an implacable barrier to any just settlement of this problem.  As has been evident this week, they respond in outrage even when the United States does not actively stand in the way of international recognition of the obvious problems posed by colonization of these occupied territories.