Make Peace on the Way to Peace

Last week’s forcible evacuation by the Israeli army of the illegally built Havat Maon outpost has created a precedent for dismantling West Bank settlements. But no less significant than the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to confront the militant settlers was his ability to win over the settlement movement’s mainstream leadership to Havat Maon’s evacuation, the first time settler leaders accepted the principle of dismantling a Jewish presence in the territories.

Under that agreement, the settler leaders acceded to the evacuation of 12 West Bank outposts in exchange for Barak’s acceptance of the permanence of 30 other outposts.

Barak’s solution to the dispute over the 42 tiny and isolated outposts is a trial run for how he intends to resolve the fate of the far more substantial 144 settlements that were founded in the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War.

By evacuating some outposts and recognizing others, he is trying to create an Israeli consensus that will accept the dismantling of dozens of settlements likely to be included within the borders of an independent Palestine while including dozens more within Israel’s redrawn map.

Close to 200,000 Israelis live in the West Bank. The media image of settlers as biblically inspired zealots clinging to rocky ridges surrounded by barbed wire belongs largely to the settlement movement’s formative years in the 1970s. Most settlers today live in thriving suburban towns.

Politically, settlers range from the far right to the moderate left; some 65% are secular.

The great success of the settlement movement has been its ability to recruit from across the social and ethnic Jewish spectrum. The settlers aren’t a fringe community but an integral part of the Israeli population; their wholesale evacuation is inconceivable.

Though he hasn’t explicitly presented his blueprint for the future of the West Bank, Barak intends to create four settlement blocs--two near Jerusalem, one near Tel Aviv and the fourth in the strategically sensitive Jordan Valley.

Crucially, those blocs are close enough to the old border dividing Israel from the territories so that they can be annexed without major territorial adjustments.

Equally important, a clear majority of settlers already live within the proposed blocs, which will contain all of the West Bank’s large Jewish towns and many of its smaller settlements.

Still, at least several dozen isolated settlements will likely find themselves stranded in a future Palestinian state. Presumably, Barak intends to resettle their residents--who number tens of thousands--into the four blocs.

Yet those settlers form the West Bank’s ideological hard core--the very settlers least likely to voluntarily evacuate. That is particularly true of the settlers’ children, who don’t see themselves as settlers at all but as native Judeans and Samarians. Less ideological than their parents, they are also more organically attached to the land. Most would refrain from violence in the event of evacuation, but a minority could commit desperate acts.

Though Barak considers himself heir to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, he differs from his predecessor in this crucial aspect: He won’t make peace with the Palestinians while destroying the intactness of Israeli society.

Rabin’s greatest mistake was to polarize the country into two equal camps rather than try to woo centrists and moderate rightists, as Barak did at Havat Maon.

Unlike Rabin, Barak has repeatedly emphasized that the settlers are a legitimate, even heroic, part of the Israeli experience. More than any Labor Party leader before him, Barak sees the settlers’ attempt to retrieve the biblical heartland as a natural response to Jewish history, superseded only by the imperative to make peace.

Yet there is also a pragmatic motive behind his lavish praise for the settlers. Barak’s long-term goal is to repeat his success at Havat Maon by winning the support, however reluctant, of the settler majority for his four-bloc plan, thereby separating the West Bank’s ideologues and moderates.

If he succeeds, then the evacuation of settlements won’t likely threaten the nation’s basic cohesion, and the Havat Maon precedent will become the moment when Israel made peace with itself on its way to making peace with its neighbors.