BY ROHAN PEARCE
A report released on May 13 by B'Tselem, the Israeli centre for human rights in the Occupied Territories, exposes the continuing illegal appropriation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government and Israeli colonial settlers.
The report, Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank, shows that while the area covered by Israeli settlements is only 1.7% of the West Bank, municipal boundaries for the settlements cover 6.8% of the territory, and regional councils (grouping together settlement areas) cover a further 35.1%. Thus 380,000 Israeli settlers control 41.9% of the total land of the West Bank.
According to B'Tselem, the building of Israeli settlements within the Occupied Territories constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention: "The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
The first Israeli settlement in the West Bank was established in September 1967, only three months after Israel's military conquest of the territory.
The B'Tselem report says Israeli government policy was originally ambivalent, with some in the government opposing the construction of settlements, in order to use most of the West Bank as a "bargaining chip" in negotiations with the neighbouring Arab states. Pressure on the government, from both within its own ranks and from groups of settlers, later forced a change in policy.
However, the government's policy toward East Jerusalem was clear right from the time that it seized control of the city from Jordan in June 1967. Israel quickly began to construct settlements, annexing areas to the north, south and east of the city to the Municipality of Jerusalem, in an attempt to make a withdrawal from the area non-negotiable.
By the end of 1967, Yigal Alon, head of Israel's ministerial committee on settlements had prepared a plan for colonising the West Bank. The original plan was to incorporate the Jordan Valley and the Judean desert into Israel. The settlements were to provide a "Jewish presence" to justify formal annexation.
By the final draft of the Alon Plan in 1970, further areas in the West Bank were added to the list of planned annexations: a 20 kilometre-wide strip of land along the River Jordan, various areas around Greater Jerusalem, the Etzion bloc, the majority of the Judean desert and an area of land south of the Hebron mountains. This brought the planned annexations to around 50% of the West Bank, leaving just two non-contiguous areas slated to become part of a "Jordanian-Palestinian" state.
The declaration of principles issued by the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in September 1993 as part of the Oslo accords did not deal with question of expansion of Israeli settlements. However, according to the Oslo B accords which the two parties later signed: "Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations."
Settlements continued to expand however, until the Israeli government promised the United States that the construction of new settlements and the expansion of current settlements would halt, except for construction to meet the "natural growth" of settlement populations.
The Israeli government guidelines for settlement constructions included important exceptions however: "No new settlements will be established and existing settlements will not be expanded, with the exception of those situated within the Greater Jerusalem area and in the Jordan Valley."
The "Greater Jerusalem area" was defined to extend beyond even the areas seized in 1967 and the municipal boundaries of the city. In addition, the government completed construction of 9850 housing units in various settlements, which had begun before the Oslo accords were signed.
"Natural growth" of the settlement population was never fully defined, and Israeli governments since 1993 have "interpreted" it to include migration to settlements, offering financial incentives (and automatic weapons) to encourage Israeli Jews to migrate to the settlements. Another tactic of the Israeli government has been to declare an area it wishes to colonise a "new neighbourhood" of an existing settlement.
There have also been cases of groups of settlers simply seizing land and living on it, the Israeli government refusing to evict them (in some cases, giving these seizures official reactive approval).
Between the signing of the Oslo declaration of principles in 1993 and the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, housing units in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories increased from around 167,000 to 488,000.
The report argues that the "the growth of these settlements is fueled not only by neutral forces of supply and demand, but primarily by a sophisticated governmental system designed to encourage Israeli citizens to live in the settlements".
"In essence", the report concludes, "the process of assimilation blurs the fact that the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories has created a system of legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination that has, perhaps, no parallel anywhere in the world since the dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa."
[A full copy of the B'Tselem report can be obtained at <http://www.btselem.org/Download/Land_Grab_Eng.rtf>.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 22, 2002.
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