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Words are powerful - Thoughts shape - Ideas have consequences

Sean Gannon

Journalist - Irish & Israeli Affairs
Posted May 2, 2005

Ma’aleh Adumim Myths

Disappointingly, George Bush used the occasion of Ariel Sharon’s visit to his Crawford ranch on April 11th to add his voice to the international sound and fury surrounding Israel’s settlement policy. While publicly the President spoke in generalities, urging the Israeli Prime Minister “not undertake any activity that contravenes road map obligations or prejudices final status negotiations” (which he explicitly stated meant “no expansion of settlements”) privately he voiced his specific objections to the recently Israeli-approved E1 plan – a construction project which aims to link the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim to the city of Jerusalem with 3,500 new housing units.

However, the current condemnations of the E1 plan are misplaced, being based more on uncritical acceptance of the Palestinian propaganda machine’s outpourings on the subject than an objective assessment of the realities on the ground.

For instance, the plan’s critics tirelessly repeat the claim that it will compromise the territorial contiguity of any future Palestinian state by cutting off the Northern from the Southern West Bank but this is demonstrably false. True, the development of the area between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem will hinder the through passage of Palestinian traffic there although tunnels or overpasses will be constructed to prevent major detours. But those claiming that this amounts to a bisection of the West Bank ignore the fact that the territorial waist remaining between Ma’aleh Adumim and the Jordan river will be 21kms at its widest and 15kms at its narrowest. For the PA to dismiss this as inadequate is egregious hypocrisy given its longstanding demand for a full Israeli return to the Green Line which would leave Israel with a territorial neck of 15kms in the Northern most populous part of the country.

Furthermore, while accusing Israel of attempting to render unviable its future state by carving its territory into cantons and ‘bantustans’ the PA, in objecting to the E1 plan, hypocritically seeks to deny territorial contiguity to Israel through the territorial isolation of Ma’aleh Adumim which, as the Palestinian leadership privately accepts, will remain under Israeli control as part of any final deal. The future annexation of the major settlement blocs by Jerusalem is today being presented as a unilateral American-Israeli decision but in fact it was accepted in principle as a solution by the Palestinians as far back as the Stockholm talks of May 2000 and was actively negotiated during the subsequent summits at Camp David and Taba. While the addition of Ma’aleh Adumim (which just three miles from Jerusalem and with a population of 32,000 is in essence more a city suburb than a settlement) to the list for annexation proved contentious at these talks, its inclusion was accepted in what Ehud Barak recently described as “many other exchanges of ideas” and it is explicitly slated for annexation in the Geneva Accord which the late Chairman Arafat called “a brave initiative which opens the door to peace” and talked of adopting as the official Palestinian peace plan. Therefore, to argue that Ma’aleh Adumim must remain unconnected to Israel is to argue for its effective cantonisation. This is in fact happening by stealth through the creeping expansion into the E1 area of Jerusalem Arab neighbourhoods like Anata and extra-municipal villages like A-Zaim.

Also untrue is the contention that construction in the E1 area will seal off East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Access will still be available though neighbourhoods such as Abu Dis, Hizma and Anata while a planned by-pass linking Jerusalem with Bethlehem and Ramallah will further facilitate travel.

President Bush’s implication at Crawford that Jerusalem’s approval of the E1 plan contravenes the Roadmap is also wrongheaded. True, Phase One does call for a freeze on “all settlement activity including natural growth,” but given that Ma’aleh Adumim is destined to remain Israeli, ‘activity’ there does not prejudice the final outcome of negotiations. Nor, for that matter, does natural growth (presently frozen) in settlements outside it and the other major blocs; either these will be annexed as part of a final deal or they will not and the construction of housing within them is irrelevant in this regard.

The fact is that the Roadmap’s Phase One demands regarding the settlements are no more than a flawed attempt to assuage a Palestinian leadership which has fetishised the issue to the extent that Ahmed Qurei last month described it as “a kind of terror against the peace process and against the Palestinian people.” Indeed, there is implicit support for this position in the Roadmap which in an effort to make reciprocal the demands of Phase One calls for the parallel “dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure” and the “dismantling of settlement outposts constructed since March 2001” and for the freezing by Arab states of “public and private funding … for groups supporting and engaging in … terror” be accompanied by the freezing by the state of Israel of “all settlement activity including natural growth.” The result is that settlement concessions by Israel within this context can only be interpreted as a quid pro quo for a cessation of terrorism, a sort of ‘no bombs, no bungalows’ arrangement which equates the building of houses with the taking of lives. In light of this, Ariel Sharon was quite correct to insist, as he did to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in May 2003, that he would deal with the settlement issue on “a separate track” to the Roadmap.

And this he has done. July 20th will see the evacuation of settlements in Gaza and the Northern West Bank, a move generally interpreted as the beginning of a wider process of withdrawal from lands in which Jewish communities have an historical, moral and a clear legal right to reside. What greater sacrifice can be expected of Israel in the interests of peace?

© Sean Gannon 2005 Reprinted with Permission

Seán Gannon received his degree in history from University College Dublin and works as a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Israeli affairs, publishing mainly in Ireland, Britain and Israel. He is currently preparing a book on Ireland's fraught relationship with the state of Israel since 1948 examining the influence of Catholic theological concerns on the controversy over Ireland’s recognition of Israel as a State in the 1940s and 1950s. He is also writing - Ireland for A New Extremism: The politics of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which is a forthcoming study by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London. He is a prominent advocate for Israel, being a featured writer with the Israel Hasbara Committee and chairman of the Irish Friends of Israel, a media response group which endeavors to correct the bias and error in the reporting of the Middle East conflict in Ireland.