The death of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on March 9 brought back memories of high hopes for Middle East peace. This former guerrilla turned peacemaker was a key player in the historic events of the late 1970s--the Camp David summit and the shared Nobel Peace Prize (with Egypt's Anwar Sadat), as well as the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
Begin's passing also recalled his determination to establish Israeli settlements on the West Bank's Occupied Territories, areas he called by their biblical names--Judea and Samaria. The day after his election as prime minister in May 1977, Begin visited one of the handful of settlements then in existence, Elon Moreh, to declare: "There will be many, many settlements in the coming weeks."
Fifteen years after the late prime minister's promise to implement the 1974 Gush Emunim plan for putting 100,000 Jewish settlers onto the West Bank, 91,000 Jews actually live there, with some 157,000 others in the rest of the territories annexed by Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War. In all, nearly one quarter of a million Israelis, 5 percent of the country's total population, reside in these settlements.
Today, using as justification the need to accommodate thousands of Jewish emigres from what was the Soviet Union, the Israeli government continues building settlements in the Occupied Territories. Most observers believe this threatens the peace process currently under way between Israel and its Arab neighbors, serves as a continued irritant for U.S. relations with Israel, and may delay to the point of no return any solution regarding a Palestinian homeland.
The rationale for these settlements, as the editors of the Catholic journal America concluded last October, remains quite simply "to so alter the demographics of the 'occupied territories' that surrendering an inch of land in return for peace becomes an impossibility." With hundreds of thousands of Israelis living on the lands taken in the Six-Day War, possibilities of further "land for peace" solutions to the Palestinian problem go abegging.
Since the beginning of Israel's settlement policy in 1968, successive U.S. administrations have unanimously opposed it. (An exception to this bipartisan continuity occurred when President Reagan waffled on the language he used to comment on the issue.) President Bush has proven perhaps the strongest of all U.S. chief executives in condemning the settlements.
Mainline churches in the United States have similarly spoken out against the settlement policy. The National Council of Churches has urged that "any further aid to Israel...not be used for the purposes of settlements." The American Friends Service Committee believes that "Israel's desire for security and a long-term peace is compromised by its policy of extensive settlements in the West Bank and Gaza." And the U.S. Catholic Conference has declared that "expanding settlements in the Occupied Territories would prejudice and threaten the peace process."
LAST summer, the Shamir government requested $10 billion in addition to the usual $3 billion Israel receives annually from the United States. The extra billions were to serve as loan guarantees for additional settlements in the Occupied Territories. Spread over a five-year period, these guarantees would enable Israel to secure massive loans from commercial banks in order to build housing, develop infrastructure, and create government incentives for the thousands of jobs needed for newly arriving Soviet Jews.
In effect, Israel has asked the United States to co-sign on a massive borrowing arrangement for a policy that U.S. administrations have consistently opposed. President Bush first postponed the decision on loan guarantees until the regional peace conference could get under way; then he absolutely refused Israel's request. The president has continued his opposition, to the settlements policy in general and loan guarantees in particular, even during an election year, knowing the political risk he is running.
Economists (including some in the Israeli government) agree that without the guarantees, Israel has no hope of borrowing the $10 billion from commercial banks. Lacking such loans, the country cannot provide housing or create new jobs to absorb the immigrants, thereby facing massive problems of unemployment and other economic hardships, say the same economists.
(There are an estimated 400,000 Soviet Jews now in Israel, with some 4,000 entering monthly. However, the latter number is rapidly decreasing; in fact, there are reports of increasing numbers of Jews returning from Israel to Russia and Ukraine.)
The Shamir government had counted so heavily on the first $2 billion in loan guarantees that it incorporated that amount into this year's budget. As a measure of the enormous stakes involved, Israel's housing minister, former Gen. Ariel Sharon, announced recently that 22,000 new homes are being built in the Occupied Territories.
Testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations in late February, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker laid out the administration's carrot-and-stick approach on the matter: "The choice is Israel's. This administration is ready to support loan guarantees for absorption assistance to Israel of up to $2 billion a year for five years provided there is a halt or end to settlements activity." This appears to be the final Bush-Baker position, judging from their rejection of a weaker congressional proposal in mid-March.
This compromise position--offering loan guarantees for non-settlement activities--blunts the criticism of those who say the administration is being anti-humanitarian and is disrupting Israel's absorption of émigrés from the former Soviet Union.
For its part, the Israeli government fears the loss not only of its ability to continue with settlements in the Occupied Territories; it feels also that the privileged place Israel has historically held in relation to the United States may now be in jeopardy, especially in terms of its virtually unfettered access to U.S. financial and military aid.
Another fear centers on Israel's forthcoming June elections. There is speculation that the Bush administration is using the matter of loan guarantees to defeat Prime Minister Shamir. It is no secret that U.S. policy-makers would much prefer dealing with Shamir's rival, Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin. Yet this is vehemently denied by administration officials, who say that such alleged interference could prove counterproductive, causing Israeli voters to re-elect Shamir and his Likud bloc.
ISRAELI public opinion appears to be shifting against the settlements program. "Peace Now," the most noted Israeli peace movement, claimed a year ago that more than 50 percent of Israel's population regards the settlements policy as an obstacle to peace. Last September, a survey taken by the Israeli mass-circulation daily paper Yediot Aharonot found that 69 percent of those questioned favored trading land for peace, a position directly opposed to official policy.
Twenty-three prominent Israelis, including 14 members of the Knesset (Israel's parliament), published an open letter to Prime Minister Shamir on September 16, 1991, declaring the peace process and the settlements "contradictory."
Another interesting dimension of this Israeli-U.S. impasse is the role of the American Jewish community and (not synonymously) the powerful Jewish lobby--the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). During the 1980s, the influence of AIPAC on Congress reached startling proportions.
When Prime Minister Shamir appealed to the U.S. Congress for his loan guarantees last September, AIPAC mounted an unprecedented lobbying campaign. Synagogue congregants wrote, called, and visited Congress by the thousands in support of the guarantees. The effort failed.
At the time, President Bush complained about powerful "political forces" arrayed against him, a thinly veiled reference to AIPAC. Tellingly, reaction in the Jewish community in Washington was one of fury.
Current Jewish lobbying on the issue is muted to an almost inaudible level. This may be due to the intimidation factor, or a reassessment among American Jews of Israel's settlement policy. "We were burned in September, and we don't want to go through that experience again," said Kenneth Bandler, of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, a national network of local Jewish community councils.
Yet AIPAC supposedly appealed, unsuccessfully according to a report in Washington Jewish Week, to Prime Minister Shamir in December to moderate Israel's settlement drive on the occupied West Bank. Americans for Peace Now, a counterpart to the Israeli peace movement, became the first significant U.S. Jewish group to explicitly call for linkage between the loan guarantees and a settlements freeze.
On the other end of the spectrum, an independent effort called the America-Israel Phone Project is seeking legislation that would grant Israel the loan guarantees without linkage. (Partners in this initiative include the mainly evangelical and fundamentalist Christians' Israel Public Action Committee.)
In any case, it seems clear that Israel will not receive loan guarantees from the United States--a prospect that Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish journal Tikkun, believes will benefit Israel in the long run.
"Even though I don't trust that [President] Bush has the best interest of the Jewish people at heart, his actions are in fact a form of tough love...and for that he needs to be congratulated and supported," Lerner told The New York Times. "He has given a major support to the peace movement in Israel and to all who argue that Israel must choose between territories and peace."
Joe Nangle, OFM, was outreach director of Sojourners when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!