The Skinny on What Happened When Israel Tried to Make Peace With the Palestinians

Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

About 2.5 million Palestinians and 400,000 Jewish Israelis live in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria.

Jordan conquered the West Bank after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Then Israel captured the territory from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, but never fully annexed it into the country. So for more than 50 years, the West Bank has been controlled by Israel, but its status has been under debate.  Historically, and by Jewish tradition, this is where the Jewish patriarchs lived and where many of the events of the Bible took place.

From 1949 to 1967, there were no Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria or even in the Gaza Strip. There wasn't any peace, either.  Arab belligerence was unrelated to Judea and Samaria and Gaza villages.  The Jewish communities they called settlements that the Arabs objected about at the time were Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hadera, Afula, etc; cities in Israel, proper.                                    

    Ariel, a city in Samaria: It is 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of the Green Line and 34 kilometres (21 mi) west of the Jordan border.  Ariel was first established in 1978 and its population was 20,540 in 2019, composed of veteran and young Israelis, English-speaking immigrants, and immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, with an additional influx of 10,000 students. It is the fourth largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank, after Modi'in Illit, Beitar Illit, and Ma'ale Adumim.  Ariel was established in 1978.   Ariel is in the Shomron council.                                                 

 Almon in southern Samaria in council of Binyamin has population of 1,420 in 2019.

It was established in 1982. The council's jurisdiction is from the Jordan valley in the east to the Samarian foothills in the west, and from the Shiloh river in the north to the Jerusalem Mountains in the south.

Palestinians see apartments going up in Judea and Samaria and they see it as a harbinger of Israel's permanent occupation of the land and so make territorial compromise impossible in peace talks. They also feel the building signal's Israel's inherently obvious unwillingness to negotiate a fair peace.  Do their suspicions correspond to historical reality?  

Yet the propaganda the Palestinians spewed out and continue is that Jewish building is illegal and is a sign of Israel's intent on conquest of Palestinian land and it is this that is the obstacle to peace. Their intention  evidently is that Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem is to be their country of Palestine. 

                                                      

Metzad (Hebrew: מיצד‎), also Asfar, is an Israeli settlement organised as a community settlement in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in Judea. Established as by ultra-orthodox Jews in 1984, it is located south of Bethlehem in the eastern Judean Mountains, 14.5 km from the Green Line, outside the Separation Barrier. In 2019 its population was 932. It falls under the municipal jurisdiction of the Gush Etzion Regional Council.

Metzad was established in 1984 by immigrants from the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and France.

Actually, a Palestine exists under the name of Jordan right next door.  The king is married to a Palestinian Arab girl.  Palestinian Arabs fought against Jordan and lost but remained as his subjects.  A lot of them make up the population.  Luckily, it seems that the king, from a line in Saudi Arabia, has been keeping the peace since 1967's war, and on the most part, except for the Temple Mount, a good neighbor.  The thought of having 2 Palestines next door to Israel is unnerving. 

 Jordanian 69.3%, Syrian 13.3%, Palestinian 6.7%, Egyptian 6.7%, Iraqi 1.4%, other 2.6% (includes Armenian, Circassian) (2015 est.) 

Actually, the whole history of the Middle East has been that of conquest and divide.  It is a shock to their system that someone else doesn't want to conquer, though they had to do  lot of defensive fighting.  It was the Jews who were attacked and conquered and it's been our history pretty much, ending with our Temple's destruction in 70 CE by the Romans leaving us without a country.  

In June, 1967, immediately after the 6 Day War and before there were any Israeli development in Judea and Samaria and Gaza Strip, Israel proposed its dramatic peace initiative both at the UN and in sub rosa talks with Jordan.  This initiative was rejected by all Arab states and the PLO at the Khartoum Conference in August-September, 1967.  The obstacle to peace was the very existence of Israel, not settlements in Judea-Samaria. 

In 1979, as part of the accord with Egypt, Israel froze their building on empty land expansion plans for 3 months in order to encourage entry of Jordan into the Egypt-Israel peace process.  Jordan refused.  The freezing of building development did not stimulate peaceful interaction.  Arafat had been working on creating his own terrorist state in southern Lebanon and was invited to join Egypt at the peace talks.  This building freeze was intended to encourage his participation and he had refused.  The existence of villages or towns in Sinai did ot interfere with the Israel-Egypt peace accords;  and the freeze on building activity did not encourage Jordan or the PLO to enter into peace accords.  

                                             

In 1994, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel, while towns grew into cities in Judea and Samaria and Gaza.  Their existence in no way impaired the peace process with Jordan.  

In 2000, part of PM Barak of Israel's offer to Arafat was the exchange of land such that the Palestinians would be compensated for the small number of Jewish communities that would not be dismantled by the ceding of Israeli land within the pre-1967 boundaries to the Palestine National Authority (PA).  This was an offer made in addition to the almost 95% of all the disputed land in Judea and Samaria and 100% of the territory in Gaza which were to be under the control of the PA.  Arabs rejected the offer, much to the surprise and chagrin of President Clinton.  

The accords discussed at Madrid, Wye, Oslo and Taba all included the acknowledgement that these villages or cities would be dismantled in the context of a peace agreement, even though it's a hardship on the people living there.  Jewish communities did not impede negotiation then. 

In 2005, about 250,000 Jews lived in a total of 144 communities scattered through Judea and Samaria and Gaza.  This is the year that all Jews, 8,500 of them,  were moved out of Gaza from their 21 communities for peace which they did not get.  To this day Gazans continue to shell Israel. Who was hurt in this act of peace?  It was Israel.  Besides that, 80% of them could be brought within Israel's pre-1967 borders with only a very minor re-arranging of "green line" boundaries but have not been.   

Professor Kontorovich, and international lawyer and scholar, says that Israelis are not breaking international law by living in Judea and Samaria.  The Geneva Convention and UN Resolution 242 do not say that Israel is breaking the law.  The Palestinian  accusations are red herrings.  Israel has been more than willing to negotiate a fair peace. In fact Israel did with Gaza and got burnt.   It's been a catastrophe.  Gaza has become a platform for rockets, mortars and missiles to be aimed and shot at Israel.  Jews had left their homes and businesses for nothing when they were removed.       

 Most of the international community sees the settlements as illegal. Palestinians see the settlements as colonies that prevent them from achieving statehood, and blame the residents there for inflicting violence on them. The settlers and their defenders see the settlements (villages, towns and cities) as a security bulwark against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank and Israel. The seriously religious people see the land of Judea and Samaria the most important element of Judaism.  That's why they have been returning and settling there.   How can you ever have Israel so close to our history of Judea-Samaria yet not be a part of it?  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza#:~:text=The%20Israeli%20disengagement%20from%20Gaza,from%20inside%20the%20Gaza%20Strip. 

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/facts-about-jewish-settlements-in-the-west-bank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_statistics_for_Israeli_settlements_in_the_West_Bank

BIG LIES: by David Meir-Levi of David Horowitz Freedom Center, demolishing the myths of the propaganda war against Israel. 

https://www.jta.org/2019/04/08/israel/netanyahus-promise-to-annex-the-west-bank-settlements-explained

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/26/palestine-and-israel-mapping-an-annexation/