How Clinton and the Democrats Made Possible Israel's Settlements Expansion

President Barack Obama has inherited a difficult challenge in pushing Israel to end the expansion of its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. With the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu categorically rejecting the idea of a freeze and with Democratic-controlled Congress ruling out using the billions of dollars of U.S. military aid to Israel as leverage, the situation remains deadlocked.

Along with many Israelis and other supporters of Israel, Obama recognizes that these settlements are one of the chief obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace. Given that Israel cannot be secure unless the Palestinians are also given the right to a state of their own and that a viable Palestinian state cannot be created as long as Israel continues colonizing Palestinian land on the West Bank, Obama sees a settlement freeze as critical.

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign policy dilemmas facing the new administration, however, the Democrats cannot blame Obama's challenges primarily on the legacy of George W. Bush. In the case of the Israeli settlements, much of the blame belongs to former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats who helped facilitate Israel's dramatic expansion of its West Bank settlements in the 1990s.

The Purpose of the Settlements
Although the 1967 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, then controlled by the Kingdom of Jordan, was initially justified to create a "buffer zone" to protect Israelis, it soon became apparent that the actual goal was to expand Israeli territory.

With enough Israelis living in sizable developments throughout the occupied territory, so went the reasoning, the demographics would be altered so as to make it impossible for a contiguous Palestinian state to emerge. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan acknowledged that although the settlements did not help Israel's security situation, they were still needed, since "without them the IDF would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population."

Ariel Sharon, who prior to becoming prime minister served as the housing minister in earlier right-wing governments overseeing settlement expansion, bragged in 1995 that these settlements were "the only factor" that had prevented then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from agreeing to withdraw from the occupied territories entirely as part of the 1993 Oslo Agreement.
Sharon, who has been praised as a peacemaker by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders, expressed his pride in the fact that this had "created difficulties" in the negotiations with the Palestinians. Indeed, had Israel's Labor governments not had to worry about the domestic political consequences from such a withdrawal as a result of these illegal settlements, there would probably have been peace years ago.

Now with right-wing parties dominating Israeli politics and nearly a half-million Israeli settlers on land that was to become a Palestinian state, it will be even more difficult.

The Palestine Authority -- including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, his Fatah party, and the Palestine Liberation Organization -- have already recognized exclusive Israeli control of 78 percent of Palestine, yet the Israelis have insisted on expanding their control over much of the remaining 22 percent through this colonization drive. While the Palestine Authority has administration over the majority of the West Bank's Palestinian population, Israeli occupation forces still control much of the land in between these towns and cities, with hundreds of checkpoints severely restricting the movement of people and goods within the West Bank, in order to protect these settlements. Clashes between right-wing settler militias, often back by the Israeli army, and local Palestinians are common.

These settlements and the swathes of territories connecting them to each other and to Israel divide the Palestinian-controlled territory into 43 noncontiguous cantons separated by Israeli checkpoints, thereby making the creation of a viable Palestinian state virtually impossible. Indeed, this appears to be the principle reason for Israel's colonization drive and why so many U.S. officials have supported it.

It is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention for any country to transfer its civilian population onto lands seized by military force. A landmark 2004 ruling by the World Court underscored the obligation of signatories such as the United States to make a good-faith effort to enforce such international legal obligations on countries with which they have influence, but Democratic congressional leaders joined President George W. Bush in denouncing the decision. Furthermore, under U.N. Security Council resolutions 446, 452, 465 and 471, Israel is explicitly required to withdraw from these settlements, but successive Democratic and Republican administrations -- with support of congressional leaders of both parties -- have blocked the United Nations from enforcing these resolutions.

A History of Inaction
As part of an annex in the 1978 Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin promised a five-year settlement freeze. When the Israelis resumed construction after only three months, President Jimmy Carter refused to hold Begin to his promise, even though Carter acknowledged that these settlements were illegal and the United States was given the role of guarantor of the peace treaty. This was not the last time the Israeli government would promise to freeze settlements only to break that promise with the knowledge that the Democratic leadership in Washington would let them get away with it.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush insisted on a settlement freeze as a condition to granting a controversial $10 billion loan guarantee to Israel. In response, leading members of Congress -- including the leading candidates for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination -- attacked Bush from the right by calling on the president to grant the loan guarantee unconditionally.

These predominantly Democratic critics claimed that the loans were to be used for housing for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that none of the money in the loan agreement was actually earmarked for such purposes and Israel had thousands of unoccupied housing units then available, even in the city of Beersheva, where most of the recent immigrants were initially being settled.

Indeed, the Israeli government acknowledged that the loans were more of a cushion than anything vital to the economy. Despite this, Democratic leaders like Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, insisted that Bush was "holding Soviet Jews hostage" and challenged the administration's assessment that expanding Israeli settlements was an obstacle to peace.

Under pressure from the Democrats -- who then controlled both houses of Congress -- as well as incipient Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton, Bush capitulated and approved the loan guarantee with Israel in July 2002, getting the Israelis to only limit new construction to the "natural growth" of existing settlements. By the following year, however, it became apparent that Israel, with the acquiescence of the new Clinton administration, interpreted this restriction so liberally that the number of new Israeli colonists in the occupied territories grew faster than ever.

Indeed, this infusion of billions of dollars worth of U.S.-backed loans were critical in enabling Israel to embark on the dramatic expansion of Israeli settlements in the coming years.
When the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993, the Palestinians pressed to address the settlements issue immediately. The Clinton administration, however, insisted that such discussions be delayed. By putting off such a fundamental issue as the settlements as a "final status issue," the United States gave the Israelis the ability to continue to create facts on the ground even as the peace process slowly moved forward.

Clinton knew this would make a final peace agreement all the more difficult, yet at no point did the administration insist that Israel stop the expansion of Jewish settlements and confiscation of land that the Palestinians and others had assumed was destined to be part of a Palestinian state.

It is only because of these settlements that the boundaries for a future Palestinian state envisioned by Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the July 2000 summit at Camp David took its unviable geographic dimensions, which forced Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to reject it. Barak, with the support of Clinton, insisted on holding on to 69 Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where 85 percent of the settlers live.

Furthermore, under Barak's U.S.-backed plan, the West Bank would have been split up by a series of settlement blocs, bypass roads and Israeli roadblocks, in effect dividing the new Palestinian "state" into four noncontiguous cantons, requiring Palestinians and much of the country's domestic commerce to go through Israeli checkpoints to go from one part of their state to another.

In addition, according to this proposal, Israel would also control Palestinian water resources in order to give priority of that scarce resource to the settlements.

There is little question that the failure of Camp David could have been avoided had Bill Clinton used his considerable leverage to halt the settlement expansion at the start of the peace process. Even top Clinton administration officials like Robert Malley have acknowledged that the United States had not been tough enough on Israel for its settlement drive, and this failure to do so was a major factor in the collapse of the peace process.

Despite this, in October of that year, the U.S. House of Representatives, with only 30 dissenting votes, adopted a Democratic-sponsored resolution that claimed that Israel had "expressed its readiness to take wide-ranging and painful steps in order to bring an end to the conflict, but these proposals were rejected by Chairman Arafat."

Pelosi to this day insists that Barak had made "a generous and historic proposal," and Howard Berman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, claimed during committee hearings that Arafat's rejection of Barak's proposal was indicative of the Palestinians' determination "to destroy Israel." In the view of congressional Democrats, then, if you refuse to accept the large-scale foreign colonization of your country, you are not interested in peace.

Subsidizing Colonization
Clinton did not just tolerate the expansion of settlements, he actually encouraged it. Under pressure from peace and human rights groups, Bush had attached a provision to the 1992 loan-guarantee agreement requiring the president to deduct the costs of additional settlement activity from the $2 billion annual installment of the loan.

In October 1993, the U.S. officially announced to Israel that there would be a $437 million deduction in the next year's loan guarantee due to settlement construction during the 1993 fiscal year. However, State Department Middle East peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross (whom Obama has appointed to a key State Department post addressing regional issues) immediately let the Israeli government know that the United States would find a way to restore the full funding. Within a month, Clinton authorized Israel to draw an additional $500 million in U.S. military supplies from NATO warehouses in Europe.

A similar scenario unfolded the following year: After deducting $311.8 million spent on settlements from the 1995 loans, Clinton authorized $95.8 for help in redeploying troops from the Gaza Strip and $240 million to facilitate withdrawal from West Bank cities, based on the rather dubious assertion that it costs more to withdraw troops than to maintain them in hostile urban areas.

Clinton explicitly promised the Israelis that aid would remain constant regardless of Israeli settlement policies. What resulted, then, was that the United States began, in effect, subsidizing the settlements, since the Israelis knew that for every dollar that they contributed to maintaining and expanding their presence in the occupied territories, the United States would convert a loan guarantee into a grant.

Over 100 settlements lie outside what most observers consider could realistically be annexed to Israel under a mutually acceptable peace plan. Between the Oslo II accord in September 1995 and the start of final-status talks in March 2000, successive Israeli governments were envisioning maintaining all but the most isolated of these settlements, which would restrict the territory of a Palestinian state into a series of noncontiguous cantons.

Following Arafat's rejection of that strategy and the subsequent outbreak of violence in Israel and the occupied territories that fall, Clinton and Barak largely abandoned this strategy by December, belatedly expressing an openness to reducing them to a much smaller number of settlement blocs. Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the next few weeks came close to producing a final peace agreement, but with George W. Bush assuming office in the United States and Ariel Sharon become prime minister in Israel, they were suspended. Over the next eight years, the Israelis reverted back to the old strategy with no apparent objections from the Bush administration or congressional Democrats.

Demographics
A particular sore point for Palestinians over the settlements arose from the Oslo Accords, which refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a "single territorial unit, the integrity and status of which will be preserved during the interim period." This was essentially a prohibition against either side taking steps that could prejudice the permanent-status negotiations. As a result, the Palestinians -- when they signed the agreement -- assumed that this would prevent the
Israelis from building more settlements.

Furthermore, as the principal guarantor of the Oslo agreement, the United States was obliged to force Israel to cease its construction if they tried to do so. However, Israel and the United States have refused to live up to their obligations, and -- since the signing of the Oslo Accords -- the total number of settlers in the occupied territories has nearly doubled from approximately 250,000 to close to a half-million, moving onto land that the Palestinians assumed would be returned to the three million Palestinians that already live there and the large numbers of refugees who would presumably be resettling to the new Palestinian state.

To the shock of much of the international community, the Clinton administration also insisted that the Fourth Geneva Convention and the four U.N. Security Council resolutions addressing the settlements issue were suddenly no longer relevant. In 1997, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution sponsored by France, Portugal, Sweden and Great Britain calling on Israel to cease its settlement activities and come into compliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention. Shortly thereafter, the United States vetoed a second resolution calling on Israel to cease construction of an illegal settlement in an environmentally sensitive area near Bethlehem designed to complete the encirclement of Arab East Jerusalem.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright had called on the United Nations to no longer draft resolutions dealing with settlements since "these issues are now under negotiations by the parties themselves."

In reality, neither the Fourth Geneva Convention nor the U.N. Security Council resolutions can be superseded by a bilateral agreement, particularly when one of the two parties (in this case, the Palestinians) insist they are still relevant. Indeed, none of the other 14 members of the Security Council accepted the Clinton administration radical reinterpretation of international law in their support for Israel's settlement policies. Furthermore, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- backed by a broad consensus of international legal scholars -- repeatedly insisted that these Security Council resolutions were still valid.

Given the gross asymmetry in power between the Palestinians under occupation and the Israeli occupiers -- whose primary military, economic and diplomatic supporter was also the chief mediator in the negotiations -- it was rather obvious that the U.S.-led peace process would be unable to stop settlement expansion. It appears, then, that the Clinton administration's insistence on sidelining the United Nations was to enable Israel to do just that.

It was during this period that the Israelis began building a massive highway system of 29 roads totaling nearly 300 miles, designed to perpetuate effective Israeli control of most of the West Bank.

These highways -- designed to connect the settlements with each other and with Israel proper -- are creating a series of borders and barriers, in effect isolating Palestinian areas into islands. In addition, since Israel has defined these highways as "security roads," they reach a width of 350 yards (50 yards of road plus 150 yards of "sanitized" margins on each side), the equivalent of 3 1/2 football fields. This has resulted in the destruction of some of the area's richest farmland, including olive groves and vineyards that have been owned and farmed by Palestinian families for generations.

The impact of such a massive road system in an area the size of Delaware is staggering, and has serious political, economic and environmental implications.

As part of what Clinton referred to as "implementation funding" of the 1998 Wye River Agreement, in which Israel agreed to withdraw from an additional 14 percent of the West Bank, the United States offered $1.2 billion in supplementary foreign aid to the Israeli government. Most of the funding was reserved for armaments, but much of the nonmilitary funding was apparently earmarked to build these "bypass roads" and security enhancements for Israeli settlers in the occupied territories.

Such direct subsidies for Israeli settlements placed the United States in violation of Article 7 of U.N. Security Council Resolution 465, which prohibits member states from assisting Israel in its colonization drive. So, not only has the United States allowed Israel to violate U.N. Security Council resolutions in continuing to maintain and expand its illegal settlements, Clinton placed the United States itself in violation of a U.N. Security Council mandate as well.

Once filled with enormous hope with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinians have since seen more and more of their land confiscated and more and more Jewish-only settlements and highways constructed, all under the cover of a U.S.-sponsored "peace process."
It was frustration over the failure of the peace process to end Israel's colonization drive that contributed to large numbers of Palestinians rejecting the diplomatic approach of Fatah and other moderate nationalists and embracing Hamas. Indeed, prior to this dramatic growth in settlements during the 1990s, Palestinian support for Hamas was less than 15 percent. Now it is close to a majority.

Ironically, the Democrats' criticism during the 2008 election campaign of the Bush administration's handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was that they were not engaged enough, in contrast to the Clinton administration, whose policies were widely praised. It is important, however, to remember that it was the former Democratic administration's policies on Israeli settlements that have largely contributed to the dangerous impasse we see today.

Download a version of this article with full citations/links here.

 

 

Comments

[Theou]

Taxi's comment is roughly, even uncouthly, put.
However, it is essentially true.
The foundation upon which Israel is built is the deprivation and suffering of non-Jewish Palestinians.
That they have not withered and perished is no thanks to the Israelis, but is due to their own inherent toughness and stick-to-itiveness.

[JacksonJones]

That they weren't hunted down and killed is due to the fact they fought Jews and not others more ruthless, the fact that they haven't recovered and thrived is due to their determination to deny to the Jews of Israel what they demand for themselves, i.e., self-determination. Whatever one may feel about the just outcome of this conflict, and I for one support a 2 state solution based on, but not strictly limited to, the 67 lines, they are a large part of the reason why we are now talking with Arabs about peace with and recognition of Israel and they are not now talking about whether Israel will be wiped off the map now or whether they will have to wait until later (and the reality is that the core of the militant movement still talks about it being just a matter of time).

The settlements are obstacles in the negotiations, sure, but they are also what's made negotitations possible. No one of the Arab side (no one who ran a country or the PLO or any of the other splinter terror orgs, that is) even mused about peace before the settlements.

Settlements can, and have been mover, given away and plowed under. This happened in Gaza and in the Sinai. But lives taken cannot be returned, and that is why Israelis, quite reasonably, cannot see the logic in equating the presence of building that you object to with the attacks to which they've been subject.

[arle]

"We are doing to them what were trying to do with us." Where have I heard that before... oh, that's right! I read about rhetoric like that in Europe, in the first half of the 20th century. I don't recall that they were talking about Muslims then, though... hmm... I'm trying to recall but all this darn irony floating around here is getting in the way.

[alexa07]

Professor Zunes,
Thank you for another painful ennumeration of how we have arrived at such a sad state of affairs. It is just very alarming that supposedly moral, intelligent people in our leadership could be so nefarious in their dealings with the Palestinians, the majority of whom are stateless, dispossessed & very poor. Shame on President Clinton, the cohorts in Congress & our media who advocate for Israel, no matter what it does or how abominable it has become.

[myopinion2]

This is a joke. In the Camp David negotiations, Israel agreed to president Clinton's bridging proposal which would have provided the Palestinians with 94% of the West Bank and another 3% land compensation area, and the abandonment of all settlements except for the four urban areas adjacent to the Green Line. Arafat rejected it. But Arafat's rejection is excused because settlemet activity wasn't halted prior th the negotiations. similarly, Abbas is now boasting that Olmert offered 97% of the West Bank, but he rejected it. Yes, Netanyahu's position is unacceptable. But prior Israeli governments have made the necessary peace offers, without success. But it's always and only Israel's fault.

[arle]

Nobody buys this myth. Nowhere is this "fantastic deal for the Palestinians" documented and Israeli colonization efforts actually sped up duriing negotiations. Israel has never had any honest intention of obeying any peace deal with the Palestinians of their own accord.

[myopinion2]

Each of the american negotiators at Camp David have confirmed the offer in writing. Ross and Indyk have each written books which provide excrutiating detail of the process. But I suppose any account that is not anti-Zionist is rejected by the majority of posters on this board as a 'myth", because for them only an anti-Zionist account could be "fact."

[oncethere]

Modern syllogism: There were almost daily terrorist attacks against Israel prior to the occupation of West Bank and Gaza. Therefore, the occupation of these territorities was the cause of these attacks.

[arle]

Bzzzt! False.

[Sentientbeing09]

The Israeli military occupation of Palestine for defensive purposes doesnt explain the civilian settlements.

it doesnt explain Israeli-only roads, residential neighborhoods, swimming pools and schools.

[JacksonJones]

"The Israeli military occupation of Palestine for defensive purposes doesnt explain the civilian settlements."

Right, one needs to dig a bit deeper to explain that sort of thing, like the massacres at the Etzion Block and in Hebron, the desire for strategic depth to which the country was deeply committed and, of course, the cultural connection.

"it doesnt explain Israeli-only roads, residential neighborhoods, swimming pools and schools."

Right, the bullets and bombs aimed at Israeli civilians explains those things.

[jgarbuz]

The Arab population INSIDE Israel proper has grown from 145,000 in 1949 to about 1.2 million today, or about 8-fold in 60 years. If the US population had grown at the same rate in the same time period, there would be well over a billion Americans today. The Arab population of Israel now constitutes about 20% of Israel's overall population. By contrast, the Jewish population in Judah and Samaria is less than 400,000 or about 8% of the total population of the Palestinian Authority. Between 1949 and 1968 there was not a single Jewish settler and yet there was neither peace nor a Palestinian state established. After refusing to recognize Israel yet again after the '67 war, slowly in drips and drabs some Jews began to set up small outposts which became "settlements" or Jewish communities, first in Hebron from whence Jews had been chased out in 1929. At first they settled into homes their parents and grandparents had once owned. Only by 1977, with the election of Menachem Begin, did settlement activity begin in earnest. It was only because of settlements that the PLO began to make sounds of some degree of compromise, fearing all of the West Bank would disappear. Peres kept trying to give back the West Bank to Jordan, who had occupied it from 1949-1967, but in 1988 Jordan renounced any further claims on it. So, why were there no peace offered by the Arabs before they even existed?

[joeinvt]

You make too much sense to be taken seriously on this site.

[nk007]

That's an escape hatch implying that people who frequent this site are stupid. If he really made sense, and was not parroting the right wing Likud position, he would not have referred to the West Bank as "Judah and Samaria" the name preferred by Likud in legitimizing the colonization of the West Bank. As long as people insist on blaming everything on either the Arabs only or Jews only there will never be a settlement in the Israel/Palestine conflict. By the way, since Arabs constitute 20% of Israel and Israel is still recognized as a Jewish state, may be the 8% of Jews, who voluntarily chose to settle on Palestinian land, should be part of a new state of Palestine. So in this case there would be no need for Israel to grab more land or delay the independence of Palestine on the basis of 1967 borders. The 8% of jews who settled on Palestinian territory will have a choice: agree to be part of Palestine or move back to Israel. The same choice should be given to Arabs in Israel. My point is if 20% of a Jewish state is Arab why can't 8% of a Palestinian Arab state be Jewish?

[Theou]

jgarbuz,
Whatever was the situation before 1967, it does not change the illegitimacy of any placing of "settlers" in hostily occupied territories. It does not change the very great injuries that are done to the non-jewish population and that it creates a climate of provocation.
Most importantly it does not make the case that settlements are not a very grave impediment to peace and justice.

[JacksonJones]

"creates a climate of provocation"

Erm...I think that the 48, 67 and Yom Kippur wars, not to mention the unceasing rhetoric about pushing the Jews into the sea and wiping Israel off the map created a "climate of provocation" *long* before there were any settlements.

The PLO was founded *before* the 67 war, not after, back when there wasn't any occupation, unless you count Tel Aviv as occupied land, as the Palestinian terrorists (and Mr. "Taxi" below) will tell you they do.

[Freenation]

ok, long story short..settlements aka land grabbed need to go....

[JacksonJones]

Really? It so simple? Are you really wanting to argue that international law was meant to enshrine the results of events like the massacres at the Etzion Block and Hebron or Jordan's ethnic cleansing of the Old City following the 67 war? When, in your opinion, did the 1948 armistice borders take on such grave meanings? Surely it wasn't a product of the armistice agreement, which, at the insistence of the Arab parties, expressly stated that the lines drawn thereby were *not* to be regarded as international borders (all the better to keep insisting that Israel be wiped off the map, you see).

[Taxi]

Why would you make 'peace' with a thief who robbed you in daylight and refuses to give back ALL the loot?

Geddit?

1948 partition is a problem for the natives.

Why should Palestinian natives give ANYTHING to people from Europe - whatever their religion is?!

Why isn't Europe giving a chunk of America to Palestinians because it sure looks like they too are being slowly genocided?

I'll tell you why, because it doesn't make sense for a third party to give away something that doesn't belong to it in the first place.

Geddit?

1948 partition is bankrupt and unworkable from the get-go.

A crime against a whole nation is a crime against life itself!

[JacksonJones]

"it sure looks like they too are being slowly genocided?"

A simple reference to population figures for the last 60 wholly undermines that suggestion, unless this is the first genocide in human history in which the "victim's" population numbers actually and steadily increase.

Maybe that where the "slowly" bit comes in I suppose....