Settling the West Bank and Gaza

Or is it Gaza, Judea and Samaria?

No surprises?

• M.I. Colonel Shlomo Gazit proposes, June 9 1967, Israeli withdrawal to prewar lines in exchange for full, formal peace

• Aziz Shehadeh proposes, on the same day, the creation of a Palestinian state that would sign a peace agreement with Israel

• Nothing came of either proposal

Annexation of East Jerusalem

• Labour leader Levi Eshkol pushed it

• Menahem Begin objected to annexation as implying Israel had no right to Jerusalem

• The National Religious party opposed annexation outright

And the West Bank?

• Begin supported annexation

• Israel Galili of the leftist Ahdut ha-avodath (Unity of Labor) also supported it

• Yigal Allon proposed creating a Palestinian state while annexing the desert areas and Hebron hills

Voices in opposition

• Justice Minister Yaakov Shapira– “In a time of decolonization…can we really

consider an area in which mainly Arab live…Who’s going to accept that?

– Annexation would, moreover, turn Israel into a binational state with a Jewish minority

– Without returning the West Bank, “we’re done with the Zionist enterprise…”

The Meron memorandum

• September 1967, legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry Theodore Meron writes a memo

• Spent four years in a Nazi labor camp

• “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and member of the International

Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

The desire to “replay” the 1930s

• For Labour it was nearly impossible to resist the pursuit of their early goals

• For right-wing forces such as Gush Emunim and the Revisionist it was nearly impossible to resist the temptation to accomplish on their own what Labour had done 20 years earlier

The other argument

• The West Bank and Gaza are not the territory of independent states

• The armistice line is a temporary division of the territory of a single entity (the Mandate)

• The settlements can always be withdrawn

May 1977

• About 80 settlements in the territories

• Population = 11,000+

• East Jerusalem neighborhoods= 40,000

• “Erasure” of Green Line

• Blurred boundary between legal and extralegal activity and loss of state control

• Settlers remained Israeli citizens

Begin in power

• Stage set for expansion of settlement activity

• A decision “not to decide” about the fate of the West Bank

• The growth of religious political power

• Differentiation of the territory of other Arab states (especially Sinai) from the territory of the Land of Israel