Stop Settlement Activity; Peace Will Follow

A 4-month-old Palestinian infant died as a result of Israeli shelling last week. Two days later, the bodies of two Israeli teenagers were found, killed by as-yet unknown assailants. More blood has been spilled since.

These deaths cry out for condemnation. But a more important cry must be for an end to this violent hell and the immediate start of serious peace talks.

Israel suspended peace talks when Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon, well-known as a hawk, refuses to return to the peace table until the Palestinians unilaterally stop their violent resistance to Israel’s occupation. Palestinians insist they will only stop their resistance when Israeli occupation ends.

The Palestinian leadership has refrained from using force against those who protest the occupation. Israel claims that PA security men took part in the violent resistance. But an international fact-finding committee, named by then-President Clinton last October in an effort to prevent Israeli-Palestinian unrest from spiraling out of control, has not found any evidence to support this claim. The committee, which was headed by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and includes senior officials from Western and/or NATO-member countries, zeroed in on the need for a settlement freeze as the way to end the present violence. According to Palestinian and Israeli press reports, the Mitchell committee determined that “a cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless the government of Israel freezes all settlement construction activity. Settlement activities must not be allowed to undermine the restoration of calm and the resumption of negotiations.”

It is not clear where the present Palestinian resistance will lead, but already prominent Palestinians are saying that if it results in a freeze of settlement activities as a step toward their eventual dismantlement, then the decades-old conflict might have finally turned a corner.

Since the Israeli occupation in 1967, no issue has angered Palestinians and delayed an eventual peace with Israel more than expanding Jewish settlements, done contrary to international law.

When the secret peace talks between Israel and the PLO produced the memorandum of understanding for what became the Oslo accords, glaringly absent was a call for an end to settlement activity.

When I asked Sharon Peres, who at the time was foreign minister in the Rabin government and now holds the same post in the Sharon government, about the wisdom of continued settlement activity during peace talks, he said that we must look at the bigger picture. The peace talks would produce a permanent solution in which such details would no longer be important, he told me and a group of Palestinian journalists.

That was in the first year after the famous White House handshake.

But as the Mitchell committee report states, “Except for a brief freeze during the tenure of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, there has been a continuing, aggressive effort by Israel that increases the number and size of settlements.”

For Palestinians, the continuation of land confiscation, expansion of settlements and opening of settlement roads during what was to have been a peace process is proof that Israel was not genuinely interested in peace.

The settlements are at the heart of today’s violence. The daily confrontations are primarily based around these settlement communities. Except for Hebron, daily life in the center of Palestinian cities and towns is free of violence. The focus of confrontation is only in the outlying areas that are close to Jewish settlements.

Israelis refuse to accept the international conclusion that settlements are a major source of Palestinian anger. They prefer to believe the claims of their leaders that Palestinian violence is the result of Palestinian incitement and that Palestinian parents send their children to be killed for propaganda gains.

So we are left with the Sharon government insisting that Palestinians unilaterally stop their violent resistance before negotiations can take place. Palestinians want negotiations to resume without conditions.

The Mitchell committee has presented a worthy deal to restart peace negotiations: A total freeze by Israel of settlement activity and the total cessation of Palestinian violent resistance.

The Palestinians have accepted the Mitchell committee’s recommendations. Israel has refused to do the same.

The time has come now for the international community to support the committee’s findings and demand that both sides sit down in accordance to its recommendations. This is the best way to break this cycle of violence so that we will no longer have to mourn the deaths of 4-month-old Palestinian infants or Israeli teenagers, and so that we can provide the people of the region with independence and security.