[Joel Brinkley] Settlements keep Mideast unsettled

GUSH ETZION, West Bank ― Shaul Goldstein knows that most everyone on earth dislikes him and his kind. For some it’s visceral hatred. For others he represents the largest obstacle to solving a problem everyone everywhere wants resolved.

“We are the enemy of the world,” he volunteered without any prompting. “We have to hide behind a curtain.”

Goldstein is mayor of Gush Etzion, a large bloc of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, southeast of Bethlehem. About 70,000 people live here in about 20 different “communities,” as the settlers like to call their collections of tidy little homes and carefully landscaped yards ― tall fences all around.

The mayor’s constituents drive every day to jobs in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv on highways specially built for them, lined mile after mile with towering concrete barriers to protect them from rocks ― or worse ― hurled by Palestinians whose land, they say, the settlers stole.

This is a debate without end. But because of settlements, as much as anything else, the Middle East peace process ― an oxymoron if ever there were one ― is moribund. In fact it’s now a chimera. The reasons are myriad, but let’s focus on one that’s almost never discussed: the anticipated cost.

In 2005, Israel withdrew all of its settlers from Gaza, 9,000 people in all. “For all those people, you need alternate jobs, alternate homes, alternate schools,” noted Shlomo Avineri, former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. A U.S. government analysis said the Gaza withdrawal cost $2.2 billion.

Well, at least 350,000 Israelis now live in West Bank settlements.

“That’s 6 percent of Israel’s population,” Avineri said, his voice tinged with alarm. Several studies using different baselines and assorted political motivations show too many variables to estimate the cost for evacuating most West Bank settlements. Still, clearly it would require tens of billions of dollars. And that doesn’t even touch the payoffs Israel would have to offer each settler to persuade him to leave.

Why does this matter? Isn’t the settlers’ stubborn, aberrant ideology the real issue?

Not now. Today Israel is experiencing its own “Arab Spring.” Hundreds of thousands of people nationwide are staging huge protests over the extraordinarily high cost of living and the sacrifices they’ve made for security ― with no return.

“An entire generation demands a future,” they are chanting as one.

Just imagine how all of those people would react if the government announced plans to pay $50 billion to resettle all those West Bank settlers, people most protestors despise, in new homes inside Israel. Imagine how the Tea Party tyrants in Congress would react if Israel came to Washington asking for help.

So the drama endures, and settlements grow ― year after year, decade after decade.

For a group of us, visiting this settlement on a German Marshall Fund tour of the region, the settlers put on a show. They played a video portraying the violent history of Kfar Etzion, one of the settlements that comprises Gush Etzion. With poignant, mournful music as backdrop, the narrator showed the massacre of Jews who tried to settle here in the 1940s, interspersed with shots of Auschwitz.

When the film ended, the screen retracted, and a tour guide invited us into the next room. There, a shattered bunker lay in silent testament to the tragic story. Then came the refrain I’ve been hearing from settlers since my first involvement with this place 23 years ago: Jews lived here long ago, so we have every right to be here now.

But one of our group, Shirley Salzman, an Israeli German Marshall Fund officer, asked a perceptive question: Palestinians claim a right of return to their homes and lands in what is now Israel (an idea Israel understandably rejects). Why is your claim on this land any more valid than theirs? Our guide fumbled and stammered for a moment, not sure how to answer. Finally she said something about how Jews were here longer ago.

I do not favor anything more than perhaps a small, token Palestinian return to their ancestors’ homeplaces in Israel. Others, if they want, can move to the West Bank. But Salzman’s question is particularly salient.

Mayor Goldstein is an extremist. In June, the Daily News of South Africa quoted him saying: “I will be so glad to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque,” Islam’s third-holiest site, in Jerusalem’s Old City. Goldstein improbably denies he actually said that.

But why should Goldstein and his ilk have any more right to land legally designated and recognized as Palestinian than Palestinians do to land that is legally designated and recognized as Israel?

By Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of “Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a troubled Land.” ― Ed.

(Tribune Media Services)