Expert Doubts Gain in West Bank Quality of Life

The 16-month-old national unity government of Israel says it has improved the quality of life for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank area, but an Israeli expert said Wednesday that he has found “just the opposite.”

Meron Benvenisti, director of the West Bank Data Project, said that developments in 1985 show that Israel is moving “toward full integration of the (occupied) territories into the Israeli system.”

Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, appeared at a news conference in connection with publication of his third major study of conditions on the West Bank of the Jordan River, an area occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East War.

New Questions Raised

He said his findings raise questions about whether there is any justification for widespread optimism about the prospects for general peace in the Middle East.

“Since before the October, 1973, war there has not been such an atmosphere of optimism,” his study concludes, “nor has there been such a gulf between perceptions and objective reality. There is nothing on the ground to substantiate the euphoria prevailing both amongst Israelis and outside observers.”

Benvenisti is an outspoken critic of Israeli policy on the West Bank, but his studies of the area are considered fundamental reference material, by admirers and detractors alike.

Funded by Foundations

His West Bank Data Project is an independent research group that works with Washington’s American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations provide funding. The group’s first report was published in September, 1982, and a second appeared in April, 1984.

Benvenisti has said his studies show that creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank has progressed so far as to be virtually irreversible.

Although the national unity government says it has undertaken a “new approach” to the West Bank Palestinians, Benvenisti said Wednesday: “We could not see that. What we could see was just the opposite.” The only change, he said, is one of style.

Jewish Settlement Increases

Despite a nominal freeze on new Jewish settlement on the West Bank, he noted, the number of settlers increased last year by more than 9,000, to 52,000. The Jewish settlers live among about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs.

The rate of growth was down slightly from the peak period of 1982-1984, but new housing is being put up at such a rate that “in all likelihood” the number of settlers will reach 100,000 by the end of the decade, he said.

He said the government invested about $150 million in the West Bank settlements last year, down from the $220 million or so of the year before but still much more than it spent on the larger Palestinian population.

‘Strong-Arm Policy Seen’

More than offsetting what concessions the government made to the West Bank Arabs, Benvenisti said, was a “strong-arm policy” of deportations, administrative arrests and other repressive measures intended to punish and deter terrorism. These measures, he said, were “perhaps even more coercive than the “iron fist” policy on the West Bank that was criticized abroad in 1982.

Benvenisti said that land confiscations decreased last year, but he said this was because the government had already expropriated or otherwise brought under its control more than half the West Bank territory. And now, he said, the government is imposing town planning schemes that “amount to the same thing” but “perhaps seem to the authorities to be less controversial.”

The government says it would like to do more to improve conditions for West Bank Arabs but that its plans to do so were upset last year by an upsurge in terrorist attacks against Jews in the area.