In his Saturday column, New York Times writer Anthony Lewis described Israeli settlements as a "recipe for endless conflict” and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s expansionist plans.
While protesting as "brutal" the killing of two Jewish teenagers out on a hike from a settlement in the West Bank, Lewis nevertheless questioned the stereotype among Americans that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza were simply villages of Israelis who wanted to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.
Lewis built his thesis that the settlements are a danger to Israel on five points, while also citing a recent poll indicating that the majority of Israelis oppose Sharon's policies.
“In a poll taken after the schoolboy murders, 55 percent of the Israelis surveyed said Israel should agree to freeze all settlement building in return for a cease-fire with the Palestinians," noted Lewis. "That view is in direct conflict with the policy of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has rejected the idea of such a deal and ordered a go-ahead on the building of new housing in existing settlements."
Lewis' first point was that "it is false to see the settlements as ordinary villages or towns where Israelis only want to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors."
The columnist said the settlements were "in fact imposed by force - superior Israeli military force - on Palestinian territory. Many have been built precisely to assert Israeli power and ownership. They are not peaceful villages but militarized encampments."
Second, he wrote, "the settlements are provocative to the local Palestinian population in a way that Americans would easily understand if something similar happened to them." Lewis posed readers with the question of how it would be to wake up one day "to find a foreign power building apartment blocks across the street from your suburban home, under armed guard."
Lewis' third point was that the settlements "impinge on the daily lives of Palestinians in grinding, humiliating ways. In crowded Gaza, Jewish settlements occupy a quarter of the choicest land and seafront; all traffic comes to a stop for 20 minutes so a settler bus with military guards can go through. In the West Bank, settlements break up the territory so Palestinians have to pass Israeli checkpoints to go from one town to another."
Fourth, the column said, was the fact that settlements had ravaged the environment. "What we think of as the biblical landscape of the West Bank has been marred by bulldozers slicing off hilltops and cutting nearly 200 miles of bypass roads through valleys and woods. To get free-fire zones in Gaza, Israel has razed many of its citrus groves - which will take generations to replace."
Fifth, said Lewis, "contrary to many people's impressions, building has not slowed in the settlements at any point since the Oslo agreement of 1993. The settler population has risen 72 percent since then.”
For all those reasons, according to the New York Times columnist, Palestinians have increasingly come to see the settlements as a mortal threat to their hope of ever having a meaningful state of their own.
"They read Mr. Sharon as foreseeing, for them, no more than a collection of non-contiguous Bantustans,” the columnist concluded.
However, Lewis also said the Palestinians made a “ mistake” when their leader Yasser Arafat turned down the Camp David II peace plan.
“Of course the Palestinians have their share of responsibility for where things stand. To name only the most obvious, Yasser Arafat could have had a contiguous state, with most of the settlements gone, by saying yes to Prime Minister Ehud Barak's proposal for a final resolution of the conflict,” Lewis said – Albawaba.com
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