Huffing and bluffing the settlements
Akiva Eldar
Haaretz, November 18, 2003
Whoever invented the discounts on the loan guarantees for investments in the settlements and separation fence deserves both an Israel Prize and a Congressional Medal of Honor. The ingenious invention enables the government of Israel to maintain excellent relations with the U.S.
administration, keep on building settlements, and pay a ridiculously low financial price - slightly higher interest on some borrowed money. The Americans meanwhile can show the Arabs they've punishing Israel for deepening the occupation, keep their special relationship with Israel and
pay a ridiculously low political price for it.
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proved it himself
when he told Israeli reporters last week in Washington that the dollar for dollar cuts in the guarantees "is a symbolic matter." Obviously, he added, he'd prefer the U.S. not to make the cut. But if it does, it won't be of any significance.
The paradox is that the bigger the headlines about the cuts in the guarantees, the American pressure to cut spending on settlements and the fence grows ever more limp. Senior Israeli officials confirm that the sides have reached an unwritten agreement: the U.S. will cut the loans by the amount Israel spends, and Israel will settle. All it takes is a glance at the settlement map to see that if it is meant to
stop or slow down Israeli settlements, it doesn't work. Since this cut arrangement was invented in 1992 in the first Bush presidency, and the second Rabin premiership, to create a
settlement freeze, more than 100 new settlement points have been added to the map and more than 100,000 settlers.
The White House would be happy to show the Arabs that their friend, Sharon, dismantled an outpost or two and froze the separation fence construction deep inside Palestinian territory. American officials have even complained at the
embassy in Washington that the prime minister is not keeping the promises he made by signing onto the road map. Even Jewish activists who aren't identified with Peace Now have started warning the Prime Minister's Office that if
Sharon does not do something about the outposts, President Bush could loose his patience. Sharon's chief of staff, Dov
Weisglass, offers them a glass of water.
Sharon's people have long since taken note of the vast difference between diplomatic anger and political anger. Those same American officials who bang the table when they face Israeli diplomats in Washington, pat the backs
of the Israeli ministers who visit the capital. They politely ask if it might not be possible to do something to alleviate the president's worries about the outposts and the fence for a few months, at least.
Actually, it is difficult to blame them. The leading Democratic Party contender, Howard Dean, has begun referring to the West Bank and Gaza as "controversial."
At the same meeting with the Israeli reporters, Netanyahu denied reports the fence would "result in the annexation of 300,000 Palestinians." He was telling the truth, but hardly the whole truth and the really important truth.
True, the number of Palestinians actually annexed to Israel would remain small. But the important number is not the number of people annexed to Israel, but the number of square kilometers of the West Bank and the number of
water sources the fence will effectively annex to Israel. According to the map on the Defense Ministry's Web site, 14.6 percent of the West Bank is located between the Green Line (which is not even mentioned on the official ministry
map) and the fence. The eastern fence, which has yet to be approved, will take away another 26.7 percent of the Palestinian enclave.
Obviously, Israel does not want to annex 35,000 residents of Qalqiliyah, but what Palestinian policeman or tax collector is going to go into a besieged city where Israelis soldiers control the only entrance and exit? Qalqiliyah is the
largest of 23 Palestinian towns, with a total population of 86,326 people who will be imprisoned n ghettos created by "the deep obstacle."
Another 17 settlements, including Baqa al Sharkiya and Qalandiyah (259,396 Palestinians, including East Jerusalem), will find themselves west of the fence, cut off from its territorial and social hinterland.
There are 54 settlements with 329,000 Israeli residents, east of the Green Line, that will end up west of the fence. The Geneva Accord leave 21 settlements and 310,000 residents -
including Ma'ale Adumim - inside the border. But the separation fence is 929 kilometers long, and the Geneva border is 445 kilometers long.
Government Coordinator in the Territories Maj. Gen. Yusef Mishev is desperately seeking ways to minimize the damage the fence is causing to the civilian population. In addition to the old-new idea of "industrial parks" along the seam, he proposes commercial centers in the Jilma area near Tivon. Instead of the Israel bargain-hunters going into the territories, the Palestinian vendors and their goods will be
examined at the border crossing and then offer their wares from inside Israel.
In internal discussions Mishlev described total anarchy in the northern West Bank. The police and courts have ceased functioning in Jenin and Nablus. Murder, robbery, drugs, prostitution, and protection racketeering have become
routine. Armed gangs rule the streets, and all it takes is for a boy to whistle at a girl for a thug to put a bullet in his head. The residents have ceased paying taxes to the Palestinian Authority or their electricity and water bills. The PA owes Mekorot and the Israel Electric Corporation some NIS 160 million. Israeli hospitals are owned about NIS 15 million.
Some Palestinian businessmen have proposed to Mishlev that they stop paying the VAT on Israeli products that Israel collects for the PA. The complain that the PA doesn't pay them back their VAT because Israel doesn't hand over the money to the PA. Mishlev said last week that the chaos and despair of the intifada is actually giving birth to sparks of the desire for change.
The weakest link
Israeli professors are not alone in their campaign against the politicization of higher education. There are politicians in the U.S. casting an eye on academic freedom. In October,
a month after the Israeli government adopted a law that puts the management of the institutions of higher education and their budgets in the hands of public officials from outside academia, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would create a committee to examine the influence that academic institutes on international relations
have on national security.
The committee is meant to examine, among other things, to what extent the supporters of U.S. foreign policy are adequately represented in those institutes and departments. Those that do not meet the committee's expectations could
lose their federal funding. There are 17 institutes specializing in Middle East studies in the U.S., many at leading universities and enjoying federal funding. An investigative piece that appeared at Salon.com says the
conservatives are using the trauma of September 11 to depict American experts on the Middle East as "an intellectual fifth column."
Soon after 9/11 the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, published a report called "Defending Civilization: How Our
Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," calling universities the "weak link" in the war on terror, because of unpatriotic professors.
At the same time, American-born Israeli researcher Martin Kramer, who edits the right-wing Middle East Quarterly, published "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle
Eastern Studies in America." Salon.com says Kramer "argues that academia, in thrall to romantic Third-Worldism, has turned a blind eye to the region's dangerous pathologies."
Last year Daniel Pipes, a Kramer colleague since appointed by Bush to sit on the U.S. Institute of Peace, launched CampusWatch, a Web site that invites students to submit reports on their instructors.
The International Studies in Higher Education Act is a victory for Kramer, who proposed similar legislation in "Ivory Towers on Sand." He has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, he served as the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He aligned with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Middle East Quarterly is published by the
Middle East Forum, whose director is Pipes.
"Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most established experts believe American Middle East policy is bad, the flaw lies with the experts, not the policy," says Salon.com. which notes that while the the International
Studies in Higher Education Act would "not allow the government to exclude voices from Middle Eastern studies departments ... it would give the government a role in defining which views need to be included in the academic
mainstream."
Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, worries that the International Studies Act would give the field's most vituperative critics a perch from which to judge their doctrinal opponents. "One of the subtexts is they don't like criticism of Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down," says Cole, who formerly directed the school's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies,
which could have its funding threatened under the act. "I could imagine the board making it a criterion that the politics of a faculty are not balanced, so the university must balance things out by hiring pro-Likud scholars, or else
funding could be withdrawn. "
