"Israel Dismantled Settlements in Sinai and Gaza; It Can Do So in the West Bank Too."
Don't bet on it. Beyond the obvious explanation that the biblical connection for Jews to the lands of Judea and Samaria, as many Israelis refer to the West Bank, is stronger than those to Gaza and Sinai, the larger problem is that the settlements have become so enmeshed with Palestinian communities that disentangling them is practically impossible.
There are today more than 300,000 settlers in the West Bank. This doesn't even include the 190,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War. This figure is nearly triple the West Bank settler population when Oslo was signed. Although it is true that most of these settlements are in and around the 1967 borders, the reality on the ground is extraordinarily more complicated. For example, approximately 30 percent of the settler population resides outside the separation barrier, many in some of the most radicalized settler communities like Itamar and Kiryat Arba.
In the unlikely event that Israel and the Palestinians did agree to a two-state solution and were to use the separation fence as a final border, there would still be more than 70,000 settlers and dozens of settlements on Palestinian land. These settlers would either have to accept living in a Palestinian state, which is unlikely, or have to be evacuated by the Israeli government. Not only would settlers almost certainly resist such a move, but already today settlers have set up dozens of illegal outposts in the West Bank and the Israeli government has made no effort to dislodge them. According to Hagit Ofran, director of Settlement Watch for Peace Now, while Israel has removed the stray trailer or small shacks of settler youth, it has never evicted a single "real outpost" or taken down "infrastructure and removed families" from the larger outposts that are in clear violation of Israeli law.
Removing tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Israeli citizens from the settlements would require the sort of political will from the Israeli government that it has never shown toward the powerful settler movement. And the fear that taking on the settler movement could lead to civil war or political violence hangs over Israelis' heads. While hawkish Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was able to unilaterally evict around 9,000 settlers from Gaza in 2005, this move was met by widespread protests from the settler community. It could be a harbinger of things to come if a similar eviction were attempted in the West Bank.
Considering that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has, according to a recent report by Peace Now, doubled construction in West Bank settlements since last year's building moratorium expired, it's hard to imagine that the world is likely to witness a fit of courage from Israeli leaders regarding settlements anytime soon (or that the current Israeli government has any inclination to evict settlers at all).
What makes the settlement question even more difficult is that to prevent contact between Israelis and Palestinians -- and thus potential violence -- Israel has constructed a host of checkpoints, security fences, and transit roads that crisscross the West Bank and significantly inhibit the movement and daily life of Palestinians. South of Ramallah, for instance, the Palestinian villages of al-Jib, Bir Nabala, and Beit Hanina al-Balad are literally surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlements and the separation barrier; in Hebron, 30,000 Palestinians have their mobility and economic activity severely restricted by the Israeli army's need to protect fewer than 1,000 settlers. These types of situations are replicated across the territories and are bolstered by provocative actions and even violence from the settlers that rarely are punished as strongly as Palestinian violence. As Israel continues to build more settlements, expand the barrier fence, and enforce the geographical divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, undoing these realities on the ground and the entanglement of both populations will become virtually impossible. Indeed, it likely already has.
Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
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