The reason which prompted the Labour party
and its allies to opt for an indirect form of rule over the
part of the territories densely populated by the Palestinians,
instead of continuing to rule them directly, have been often
enunciated by the late prime minister, Yithzak Rabin, and other
ministers. They can easily be understood in the context of the
deeper Israeli assumptions held since the territories where
conquered.
Israel's basic strategy has always been about how to rule
the Palestinians with maximum efficiency. At first, the idea
called "the Jordanian option" (a favourite of Shimon
Peres) was to bring the Jordanians to the West Bank in order to
do the job on Israel's behalf. Later Israel created the
Villlage Leagues, whereby local collaborators effectively ruled
the West Bank for some years until seen off by the intifada.
Both concepts were intended for the same purpose as the Oslo
process: to let the Palestinians be ruled without Israeli
Supreme Court interference and without regard for the reports
of human rights organisations such as Betselem and other
hindrances.
Settlements and roads
The Israeli strategy under the Oslo process, as followed in
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, is based on the settlements
as the focuses of military power. To take Gaza first, detailed
maps of the Strip often published in Israeli papers show it is
criss-crossed by "military roads" which, according to
the Cairo Agreement, remain under Israeli jurisdiction. These
roads are patrolled by the Israeli army, either separately or
jointly with the Palestinian police. The Israeli army has the
legal right to close any section of such roads to all
Palestinian traffic, even within the autonomy, and it uses this
right when a convoy to a settlement is using the roads.
One of those roads, the "Gaza City Bypass", traverses the
entire length of the Strip, carefully avoiding the population
centers. A military road and a narrow strip of land not
included in the autonomy cuts it off from Egypt. A number of
parallel roads travers the Strip's autonomous area from the
Israeli border on the east to the Mediterranean coast or an
Israeli settlement bloc on the west. All authorised entry
points to the autonomy are located at the beginning of the
military roads. One such is the Netzarim road which begins at
an authorised entry point to the autonomy at Nahal Oz, from
there running west, skirting all major Palestinian localities.
After crossing the "Gaza City Bypass", it reaches the
settlement of Netzarim. It does not end there, however, but
continues to a military fortress on the sea shore.
This road cuts the Gaza Strip in two, in its strategically
most sensitive spot: between Gaza town and the big refugee
camps to the south of it. After the Oslo Accords were signed,
the Hebrew press reported that large military forces were
stationed at Netzarim. It is its official status as a
settlement which allowed Israel to do this legally. As the
commentator Nahum Barnea quipped at the time "had Netzarim
not existed we would have had to invent it".
The overall effect of all these roads is that the autonomous
part of the Gaza Strip is sliced into enclaves controlled by
the bypass roads. The role of the Israeli settlements in the
Strip is to to serve as pivots of the road grid devised to
ensure Israeli control. This new form of control, referred to
by Rabin and other Labour politicians as "control from the
outside", allows the army to dominate the Strip (and to
reconquer it with minimum effort if need be, as sometimes
mentioned in the Hebrew press) without having to commit large
manpower for the task of pacifying the Strip's towns and
refugee camps "from inside".
This task is now being undertaken on Israel's behalf by the
Palestinian security forces. The effectiveness of those forces
in controlling Gaza drivers on the Netzarim road (and, one can
add, the entire Palestinian population) has lately been
graphically described by Ari Shavit, who travelled on it as a
part of an Israeli convoy which included soldiers and settlers
going to Netzarim ( Ha'aretz, 22 September). He reported
that the advance part of the convoy drives on both sides of the
road, ordering all the Palestinian vehicles to park beside the
road until the convoy passes, "as we do i Lebanon". The
drivers he saw appeared to him as "submissive enough".
This is one of the many instances in which the Palestinian
authority can be said to actually help the settlements while
pretendeing to oppose them.
The settlers will stay
Moving on the West Bank, the task of the Oslo II agreement
is to eventually produce results similar to those existing in
the Gaza Strip. The conditions there may turn out even worse,
due to a much larger number of settlers and to the construction
of separate networks of roads and water supplies for the
settlers which cannot but pass near or through the many
Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, in stark contrast to the
relatively compact autonomous Gaza Strip. Moreover, the West
Bank includes the "Greater Jerusalem" area, which from a
stategic point of view cuts the territory in two and serves as
the focus of the system of bypasssing roads whose task is going
to be to allow effective control "from the outside" of
Palestinian West Bank localities.
So it can be said that the settlements in the territories
have a double significance: on the one hand they express the
continuation of Zionist ideology and on the other they serve as
a focus of a form of military control which saves a lot of
manpower. In addition, the new pattern of indirect control is
more in tune with recent developments of imperial control,
particularly as used by the US. After all, the US, which in
effect rules Panama, El Salvador and similar countries, does so
now much more effectively through the local regimes than by any
direct occupation or military invasion. The indirect pressure
on Iraq which followed the Gulf war falls into the same
category.
I should be clear from this discussion that the Israeli
government has no intention of removing any settlements in the
foreseeable future. On the contrary, the settlements are being
strenghtened. As Oslo II was being signed, Yossi Beilin, one of
the chief architects of the Oslo process, reassured the Israeli
public that "We have not abandoned the settlers".
Rebutting the accusations of Likud, Beilin, added: "The
most ridiculous accusation is that of abandoning the settlers.
The agreement was delayed for months in order to guarantee that
all of the settlements would remain an immense financial
outlay. The situation in the settlements was never better than
that which has been created following the Oslo agreement"
(Ma'ariv, 27 September).
Even more important is the fact that when the government had
a good opportunity to remove the Hebron settlers (or at leats
part of them), in the aftermath of the massacre, it did not.
Daniel Ben-Simon (Davar, 18 August) revealed that during
discussion of this problem which took place in the prime
minister's office, "the heads of Israeli security
services", that is the chief of staff, the head of the
Military Intelligence and the heads of Mossad and Shabak,
"all opposed the evacuation of Hebron's settlers".
Text published in "Forward", Nr. 122, March 1996
