Israel
Announces Plans To
Annex More Palestinian Land
By Jean Shaoul
24 March 2006
World
Socialist Web
Ehud Olmert, Israel’s acting
prime minister, whose Kadima party is expected to win the national election
on March 28, recently announced that Israel would unilaterally redraw
its borders by 2010, annexing Palestinian land without negotiations
with the Palestinians.
Hamas’s political leader
in exile, Khaled Meshaal, described Olmert’s plan as a declaration
of war. Following Hamas’s election in January, Israeli leaders
have made numerous provocative statements, including threats of targeted
assassinations, which have been combined with almost continuous military
interventions against the Palestinians, including the attack on the
Jericho prison.
In his remarks, Olmert effectively
repudiated the so-called Road Map, backed by the United States, Russia
and the European Union, that was supposed to lead to a negotiated two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His annexation plan ends
any notion of a sovereign Palestinian state that corresponds with any
internationally understood meaning of the term. Israel is to seize huge
tracts of land, securing them behind the 360-kilometre-long militarised
separation wall—effectively turning the West Bank into a series
of non-contiguous and impoverished ghettos, hemmed in on all sides.
Once again, there was barely
a word of criticism, let alone condemnation, by world leaders or commentators.
The Israeli government has
already cut off the Jordan Valley, which constitutes one third of the
West Bank, from surrounding Palestinian territory. This will not be
handed back to the Palestinians, but will instead form part of Israel’s
eastern border with Jordan. “There are strategic considerations
for this that we cannot relinquish,” Olmert told the newspaper
Ha’aretz.
In the west, the nearly completed
separation wall will leave an estimated 10 percent of the Palestinian
territory, including all of East Jerusalem, on the Israeli side.
The expansion of the Zionist
settlement of Ma’ale Adumim westward will encircle Arab East Jerusalem.
Illegally annexed by Israel in 1980, East Jerusalem has long been viewed
by the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the future capital of a
Palestinian state.
Ma’ale Adumim will
soon be enclosed within Jerusalem behind the separation wall, which
will cut off occupied East Jerusalem from other Palestinian areas and
leave the northern and southern areas of the West Bank connected only
through a narrow strip of territory controlled by the Israelis.
Israel has already begun
the construction of a police station between Ma’ale Adumim and
Jerusalem as the first step towards implementing a plan to build 3,500
homes to link the settlement to Jerusalem, which is 9 kilometres away.
Cut off from their families
in the West Bank by the separation wall, life for the Palestinians in
East Jerusalem is already becoming so intolerable that they are being
forced to leave the city.
Olmert’s plan will
leave the Occupied Territories divided into three isolated and truncated
areas. The 50 to 60 percent of the West Bank that remains will effectively
be bifurcated by Ma’ale Adumim, and cut off from Gaza by Israel.
Gaza is already a besieged ghetto whose land, air, and sea borders are
controlled by Israel.
Olmert told the Jerusalem
Post that by 2010 he intends to “get to Israel’s permanent
borders, whereby we will completely separate from the majority of the
Palestinian population and preserve a large and stable Jewish majority
in Israel.”
The projected borders contravene
international legal requirements and numerous United Nations resolutions
requiring Israel to fully withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank, and East
Jerusalem, territories seized during the 1967 war. Israeli strategy
is to seize as much Palestinian territory as possible while at the same
time minimising the number of Palestinians in the Zionist state.
“The principle that
will guide me...is convergence into the large settlement blocks and
the thickening of those blocks,” Olmert told Ha’aretz. The
prime minister refused to specify his plans for all of the different
settlements, but he left no doubt that by “convergence”
and “thickening” he meant expansion of the major settlement
blocks, particularly those lying behind the West Bank separation wall.
According to the Israeli
human rights group B’Tselem, this means about 40 percent of the
West Bank would remain in Israeli hands.
Olmert confirmed that settlements
behind the wall would be expanded. He was asked if he intended to develop
the planned “E1” settlements between occupied East Jerusalem
and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement.
“Of course,”
he replied. “After all, it is unthinkable that we will talk about
Ma’ale Adumim as part of the State of Israel and leave it like
an island or an isolated enclave. It is completely clear that the contiguity
between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim will be built up. This is
clear to both the Palestinians and the Americans.”
Olmert sought to reassure
his right-wing critics that Israel would keep Ariel, the largest West
Bank settlement outside of the separation wall, and smaller neighbouring
settlements, including Gush Etzion. The annexation of Ariel would effectively
cut off a direct route between Nablus and Ramallah in the West Bank.
This underscores the expansionist intent behind his earlier remark that
the separation wall may later be moved eastwards.
John Dugard, United Nations
special rapporteur on human rights, in his report delivered to the UN
Human Rights Commission on March 8, said, “The character of East
Jerusalem is undergoing a major change as a result of the construction
of the wall through Palestinian neighbourhoods.... The clear purpose
of the wall in the Jerusalem area is to reduce the number of Palestinians
in the city by transferring them to the West Bank.”
As far as Olmert is concerned,
Hamas’s election victory provides a pretext for Israel to step
up its war against the Palestinians. Even before the Palestinian elections,
Olmert said, “If a government should arise in which Hamas is a
participant, the world and Israel will ignore it and render it irrelevant.”
Just what is in store can
be seen from what has happened to Gaza, which has become a giant holding
pen for the Palestinians. On March 21, Israel sealed off the crossing
point from Gaza into Israel at Karni. While this latest closure follows
a partial reopening after a two-week closure, Karni has been closed
for most of the last two months, ostensibly for security reasons. The
closure has brought all shipments of goods to a halt. Israeli officials
declined to say when the border would be reopened.
As the only route for the
export of Gaza’s agricultural produce to Israel and Europe, Karni
is vital for the Palestinian economy. Its repeated closure has brought
misery and hardship for ordinary Palestinians and bankrupted farmers
and merchants. Israel radio reported on Friday that the price of flour
had risen from NIS 70 to NIS 90 per sack.
A UN statement said that
most bakeries in Gaza have closed due to grain shortages, and the area
is suffering from an “extreme short supply” of diary products
and fruit. It also said the closure had hindered efforts to deliver
emergency food supplies.
Hamas has accused Israel
of closing the vital crossing point as retribution for its election
victory.
Olmert’s announcement
underscores the fraud of Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement”
from Gaza, which has been hailed by the international press as an important
first step towards alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people,
normalising relations between Israel and Palestine, and creating an
independent Palestinian state.
The withdrawal from a handful
of settlements was a smokescreen to mask Israel’s consolidation
of the far more significant land grab of the West Bank. The withdrawal
of 8,000 settlers from Gaza has given the Israeli military a free hand
to bomb targets, assassinate militants and close the borders with Israel.