Why The Settlement Freeze Is So Crucial

Two days ago I posted on Facebook (à propos of a news item on Israel artists boycotting Ariel):

Israeli artists are acting as the conscience of their nation. “When two are holding onto a tallit — this one says, ‘It is all mine,’ the other says ‘It is all mine’ — they shall negotiate a division.” Forbearance regarding the occupied territories is essential to establishing a climate of trust under which negotiations can proceed. Israelis and Palestinians are at a delicate turning point. Every precaution must be taken for them to succeed. This should not be confused with a very different kind of boycott (by anti-Zionist elements) questioning Israel's legitimacy. These artists have Israel's (their own) interests at heart and deserve our support.

I have been asked for a clarification of this post. The rest of this post is an expansion and clarification of my Facebook posting.

When I read that over 100 Israel artists decided they would not perform in Ariel’s cultural center, I immediately felt a sympathetic rapport with them.

Let us consider the context of this declaration. For fully a decade, since the collapse of the Camp David peace talks and the Taba talks, Israelis and the PA have been avoiding peace negotiations (abetted by the neglect of the Americans during the Bush administration). However, before that time—and more recently—when there has been any hope of moving forward on negotiations, a major sticking issue has been that of the Israeli settlements in occupied territories.

Within the past year, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a temporary moratorium on settlements, at the urging of President Obama. The temporary moratorium is due to expire late in September, 2010. Abbas demands a renewal of the moratorium as a condition of continuing the peace talks that have resumed today (September 1). But Netanyahu’s right-wing Knesset supporters demand that it not be renewed. The issue is in doubt.

So what are the Israeli artists saying? They are saying that for them, it is more important to give peace negotiations with the Palestinians a chance, than to insist on Israeli settlers’ rights to continue to live and expand in the land that was occupied by Israeli forces in the defensive war of 1967. They are sending a message to Netanyahu: Do not regard the occupied West Bank as belonging to Israel by unilateral declaration, to do with whatever they want! Leave it on the table, so the Palestinians will feel that we are negotiating in good faith, and that the future of the land will be determined by the process of joint negotiation, not by unilateral actions on the Israeli side. Just as Ariel is part of the West Bank in dispute, so are the other settlements. By our refraining from performing in Ariel during this difficult and uncertain period of negotiating, we are saying to you: Keep your hands off those parts of the West Bank where the line of settlement has not yet advanced! Do not keep taking land away from the part of the pie that remains to be distributed. Do not destroy the chances for peace because of the settlers’ insatiable greed.

Underlying this are several other issues:

Who owns the land?

By what right is ownership of the land determined?

What is the big deal about a settlement freeze?

Is there a real chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians? What will determine the possibility of peace?

First of all, there are different points of view as to who owns the land. Hamas thinks that Moslems own “the land” (including everything between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, including Tel Aviv), by the principle of “dar al-Islam”: whatever land has once been conquered by the Moslem sword, must never again revert to non-Islamic ownership. Fundamentalist Orthodox ultra-Zionists believe that Jews own “the land” (again, including everything between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, including Jericho, Hebron, Nablus, and Jenin) because God promised it to Abraham and his descendants in Genesis, and that promise is irrevocable. Between Hamas and the ultra-Zionists, there can never be the slightest agreement. If either of their positions is taken as normative, then the Middle East is doomed to eternal war and peace is forever impossible.

Jewish law has a principle that is directly applicable to situations such as the one just dscribed: “If two persons are holding onto a tallit—the one says, ‘It is all mine’ and the other says, ‘It is all mine’—they shall divide it [50-50].” [Mishnah Bava Metzi’a 1:1] No Torah proof-text is cited as authoritative backing for this law, so we may count it among those rabbinic laws that are based on reason or common sense. What is the logical reason for such a law? The two parties each have entered a claim to 100% of the disputed article. But the claims are incompatible. It cannot belong all to Party A and all to Party B. If no objective reason can be brought to prefer A’s claim to B’s claim or vice versa, they must be regarded as logically equally probable. This translates into a 50% probability that A is right, and a 50% probability that B is right—and still no criterion for deciding that the one is all right or the other is all right. The just adjudication thus divides the disputed article 50-50, in accord with the 50-50 probability of validity of the respective claims.

The exact terms of partition of the land of Israel/Palestine has been the subject of international negotiations since 1936, when the first partition plan was proposed. It is not my purpose to go into the precise terms of a just partition. The Israelis and Palestinians came close enough at Taba in 2001 and the positions of that conference are in many people’s view the best starting point for further negotiations. In principle, the arrived-at settlement should give scope for each of the two nations—the Israeli and the Palestinian—enough land and control over resources to govern its own destiny.

So what is the big deal about a settlement freeze?

The practice of the maverick settlers who set up new settlements at the blink of an eye goes back to a practice of the Zionist Jews in the late 1930s. It has been called “creating facts.” In the 1930s, the Palestinian-Arab leadership, under Haj Amin Al-Husseini (the chief instigator of the 1929 riots and later an accomplice of Hitler), was pressuring the British to freeze the Jewish presence in Palestine at its then-current level. The Jews were understandably under pressure to maximize the extent of their land-possession as much as possible, so that in the event of partition, they would have enough land for a viable state. They would put up a watch-tower and stockade wall in the course of a day in order to lay claim to a new site and render it defensible, after which they could fill in the rest of the buildings at leisure.

The methods of extending claim to Jewish land are pretty much the same now as in the 1930s. But the circumstances have changed drastically. For one thing, the majority of the land-holding in the 1930s was Arab; today the position is reversed. For another thing, the Arabs in the 1930s never talked or negotiated with the Jews; today, some do and some don’t. Moreover, it is not the British who are custodians of the territories; it is primarily the Israelis themselves.

The biggest factor of difference is tied up with the question: Who owns the land? And there is a difference of opinion here between the settlers and the world community, with the Israelis themselves of divided mind between the two. The settlers who are expanding the settlements believe that of right, all the territories (or at least all of the territories not yet occupied) should belong to the Jewish people. They are staking out the land, tract by tract, on behalf of turning that hypothetical claim into a “fact on the ground,” so that (presumably) once the claim is reinforced by settlement and direct occupation, it will never be revoked but the land will always remain Jewish. That is the whole primary motivation behind the radical portion of the settler movement.

But if negotiations are to take place, and if those negotiations are to be taken seriously, then any land of the West Bank not already put in an exception class by the Taba negotiations (primarily the Etzion Bloc, the Ariel Bloc, and Greater Jerusalem) is on the table, in escrow so to speak, with its ultimate disposition to be determined by the negotiations. Some would go so far as to say, this disputed land presumably belongs to the Palestinians—it was agreed to be part of their domain by the 1949 cease-fire, and everything that has happened since then (the 1967 and 1973 wars, plus the intervening expansion of Jewish settlements) does not change that status. But without going even that far, we should at least stipulate: the status of this land is to be determined by negotiation.

Thus, the settlers, by expanding the settlements at this stage, are taking land with status “to be determined by negotiation” and marking it as “Jewish land.”

That is like moving the goal posts during a time-out.

If the status of the land to be negotiated is being changed while negotiations are pending or in progress, then whoever is doing that (or allowing or condoning it) is not taking the negotiations seriously. That is what is such a big deal. That is why it makes perfect sense for Abbas, Fayyad, and the other PA representatives to make a continued freeze on settlement expansion a precondition for going ahead with the negotiations.

And that is why the Israeli artists are boycotting Ariel, saying they will not perform there as long as the negotiations are a factor, and as long as the Israeli government is acting as if it will let the settlement freeze lapse, thus putting the negotiations (and peace itself) in peril. They are trying to deliver a wakeup call to the Netanyahu government, saying: “If you want your negotiating partners to take you seriously, you are going to have to adopt a ‘hands-off’ policy to the very thing that is being negotiated, until the negotiations have completed their course and its disposition is properly, legitimately decided by both parties in conjunction.”

Is there a real chance that this round of negotiations will lead to peace? I don’t know. It depends on the actions and words of both sides. But I do believe that it is our obligation to do everything that is in our power to give them the best possible chance. And continuing the settlement freeze indefinitely for the course of the negotiations is what common sense dictates, to show good faith with the other side, to demonstrate by our actions that we take the negotiations in all seriousness.

That is what the Israeli artists are trying to say by their boycott. And that is why I agree with them wholeheartedly, and consider them the conscience of Israel today.