Wolf D. Fuhrig

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Sharon’s Palestinian State

During his recent visit to Brussels, Belgium, President Bush explained that he wanted a “truly viable” Palestinian state. “A state of scattered territories will not work.” That is also exactly what his “road map” demanded.

How viable, however, can the Palestinian state be that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon envisions? He and his fellow Likudniks have ardently been working toward the Zionist goal of an Israeli state that would ultimately encompass all land between the Sea and the Jordan River. It was expansion, not military security that Sharon has been pursuing ever since 1977 when Prime Minister Begin made him the head of the Ministerial Committee on Settlements.

What to do with those 4 million Palestinians in the territoryof Greater Israel, that is the problem Sharon wants to solve as advantageously as possible for his people. Keeping the Palestinians indefinitely under military occupation is not likely ever to bring peace to the region. Yet, most Israelis are apparently not willing to give up their ethnocentric insistence on a predominantly Jewish state and embrace political and social pluralism.

So Sharon is devising an arrangement that will give the Palestinians as little as possible. Never mind that Israel has already three times as much territory as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza combined. They barely cover the territory of the state of Delaware.

With the permission of the Israeli government, some 250,000 Israeli citizens have by now settled on the West Bank, 180,000 in and around East Jerusalem, 16,000 in the Golan Heights, and 8,000 in Gaza. The largest of the 200 settlements, such as Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel, are self-contained towns with tens of thousands of inhabitants and an infrastructure for permanent residence. Sharon no longer calls them settlements but “population centers.”

An official Israeli document (the Sasson Report) of March 8 revealed that, in defiance of the road map, the Sharon regime secretly diverted millions of dollars to build more settlements --with roads and electric grids for them--on the West Bank. 400 mobile homes went to outposts on private Palestinian land. Trailers were positioned to provide new outposts. $100 million from American Evangelicals were--and continue to be--supporting the expansion of new Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land.

Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan provides that 21 small settlements in the Gaza and 4 in the West Bank, involving some 10,000 Israelis, are to be evacuated. Yet, simultaneously he continues to push the construction of 3,500 new housing units in Ma'ale Adumin, with 25,000 inhabitants the largest Israeli “population center” outside Israel.

This project is part of the comprehensive plan for a “Greater Jerusalem” which the Knesset endorsed in 1997. By surrounding the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem with sufficiently large settlements, the Israeli government will justify its claim to the possession of all of Jerusalem, thus ending the Palestinians’ dream of East Jerusalem as the capital of the state promised to them.

By enlarging Ma'ale Adumim, Sharon will likely also prevent a territorial link between the Palestinian communities of Bethlehem and Ramallah, a necessity for a viable Palestinian state. His Palestinian state would consist of five or six disconnected territories with no control over its borders, no control over the water resources, little economic potential, no capital in East Jerusalem, no control over its airspace, no military, and no assurance of immunity from unilateral Israeli raids.

Sharon, moreover, told President Bush: “We will continue with the negotiations only after Palestinians agree to stop the terror.” He said this a day after soldiers of his occupation army had shot to death two soccer-playing Palestinian boys, allegedly because they approached a fence 50 meters away.

Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace representing tens of thousands of Americans, has been asking President Bush in a detailed message that he urge Mr. Sharon to “halt all settlement expansion activities, halt further work on the security barrier over the green line pending full public disclosure of the planned re-routing, and suspend all new construction initiatives being developed for East Jerusalem.”