COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Labor Party: More Finesse, Same Intent : An Israeli development plan aids West Bank annexation without challenging the U.S.

With the Labor Party’s victory in Israel over Likud comes talk of a new era of understanding between Israel and the United States, with “hard-liners” such as Yitzhak Shamir giving way to smooth-tongued “pragmatists” versed in the art of saying what Washington wants to hear. Such, certainly, is the calculation of Israel’s lobby in the United States, now pondering how rapidly the famous $10 billion in loan guarantees withheld by the Bush Administration can be revived.

As a measure of how impediments to the $10 billion could be finessed, consider the Seven Stars Plan, recently described in Challenge, an English-language publication in Israel edited by Jews and Arabs.

The Seven Stars Plan was approved by the Knesset in 1990 at the instigation of Ariel Sharon, Minister of Housing in Shamir’s ousted coalition. It targets a narrow strip of land known as the “triangle,” which runs north for about 50 miles from a point east of Tel Aviv along the “green line,” the border between pre-1967 Israel and the occupied West Bank.

This strip is dominated by Arab towns and villages and inhabited by 140,000 Arabs and 40,000 Jews. The plan envisages a series of “stars,” new suburban centers directly abutting the West Bank and ultimately linked by a six-lane highway, with secondary routes to Israel’s coastal cities and to the illegal settlements in occupied territory. By design, the plan fractures old Arab lands--the new Jewish communities being interspersed among and encroaching upon existing Arab ones--with the expectation that by the year 2005 the area’s demographic balance will have tilted to a Jewish population of 393,000 against an Arab one of 162,100.

On paper, the Seven Stars Plan addresses development only within the green line, inside Israel’s pre-1967 border, thus sidestepping international objections to illegal settlements. In practice, given growth patterns, the Judaization will operate on both sides of the line, blurring the distinction between Israeli and occupied territory, bridging the gap between the relatively isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the population centers farther west--in effect, accomplishing annexation. At the same time, the construction will atomize Arab towns in the “triangle,” cutting them off from one another and from Palestinian villages in the West Bank with which they are linked economically and socially. Already the bulldozers are at work, the construction teams in action.

The six-lane highway, 120 meters wide, known as Road No. 6, will run from the Lebanese border in the north down toward Dimona in the south. The road planners are approaching their task with the delicacy of American legislators gerrymandering an electoral map. Most of the highway access ramps will be far from Arab towns, which will see their current connecting roads splintered and their agricultural land severed from easy access, with tractors forced to make long detours to cross the road. At least one Arab town’s expansion will be annulled by the road, since construction is forbidden on land adjacent to it. Another town will lose 80% of its land to an exit ramp. Jewish settlements are being built on “state lands,” most of which belonged to Arab villages before 1948.

It is possible that this vast scheme will be slowed by Israel’s dire economic situation, on which Likud’s pell-mell settlement policy in the occupied territories has wrought a fearful toll. But the plan may be particularly appealing to the new Labor government as it pursues the suspended loan guarantees. Seven Stars eschews the overtly annexationist manifesto of the Likud Party in favor of a more subtle approach that the Bush Administration would find politically difficult to oppose.

The Seven Star Plan fits neatly into Rabin’s promise to concentrate on the Israeli economy and job creation while establishing a one-year moratorium on the construction of “political” settlements. Within the plan, the Soviet Jews can be settled in new towns that are not only residential but commercial and industrial as well.

Michal Schwartz, editor of Challenge and author of articles on the Seven Star Plan, has recently met with some U.S. legislators who told her that settlements in the occupied territories were one thing but activity in Israel proper was the business of the Israeli government and the United States will not meddle in the internal affairs of another country. Thus may the loan guarantees be revived, despite the fact that Israel’s annexationist policies may well be pursued with undiminished vigor.