Settlements That Settle Nothing

By Richard Cohen

Fortunately for Jeffrey Goldberg, he not only once
lived in Israel but served in its army. Without those
credentials he almost certainly would be denounced as
an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. After all,
Goldberg had the consummate gall and utter chutzpah to
say the obvious: Israel’s West Bank and Gaza
settlements have to go.

Actually, Goldberg went even further. In nearly 16,000
words in the May 31 issue of the New Yorker, this
Washington-based journalist wrote that in some ways,
the Jewish zealots who have established settlements in
the heart of overwhelmingly Palestinian areas are as
great — or greater — a danger to Israel as their
counterparts among the Islamic extremists, Hamas and
Islamic Jihad. His article was titled "Among The
Settlers; Will They Destroy Israel?"

For raising that question, he has come under
unaccustomed attack. Goldberg has spent the past
several years reporting and writing about Islamic
radicalism and the threat it posed. This made him the
darling of the neocons. But now he’s asking similar
questions about Jewish zealotry, and for that his
integrity, if not his very sanity, has been questioned
by the usual American guardians of Israeli security.
Among the slings and arrows sent his way was one from
Andrea Levin, the head of a media watchdog group,
published in the English- language Jerusalem Post. She
called Goldberg’s piece "distorted and sloppy with
facts." I read it quite differently: on the nose.

But what really matters is not this or that fact —
although I could find nothing wrong in Goldberg’s piece
— but his overall point. It is that not only has
Israel gotten itself into a demographic and geographic
trap with its settlements in Palestinian lands, but it
has allowed the most reactionary, belligerent and
racist elements in Judaism to establish some of the
most provocative settlements. God might want these
settlements, as the settlers themselves insist, but it
is conscripts, mostly secular Jews, who have to guard
them.

For American Jews to keep quiet about these settlements
does Israel no favor. After all, in the long run the
settlements are unsustainable — difficult to defend
militarily, impossible to defend legally. Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged to remove settlements
from the Gaza Strip, but that still leaves the West
Bank, with more than 2 million Palestinians — and only
about 200,000 Israeli settlers. The government seems to
consider most of these settlements a permanent part of
Israel. That’s exactly the way some Israelis saw the
Gaza Strip. But Israel is pulling out — not because it
wants to but because it has to. The same will
eventually happen in large parts of the West Bank. The
longer Israel waits to deal with those settlements —
not all, mind you, but most — the deeper it sinks into
a quagmire. Goldberg has it right: These settlements,
as much as Islamic radicalism, threaten Israel. The
latter feeds off the former.

The observation is not original to either me or
Goldberg. He quotes Michael Tarazi, a Harvard-trained
Palestinian American who makes essentially the same
point about the settlements. "The longer they are out
there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be
essentially an apartheid state," Tarazi said. Anyone
who has seen how the settlements are protected and
maintained, the weird road network for instance, can
appreciate Tarazi’s point.

Much of Goldberg’s article is spent on Jewish religious
settlers. But he talked to Palestinians, too. What they
have to say is hardly encouraging, often downright
frightening, and usually sad. But the issue for me is
not what is good for the Palestinians — I wish them a
state of their own and also all the happiness in the
world — but what is good for Israel. Getting rid of
the settlements would be good for the Palestinians. But
it would also be good for Israel.

Some of what the Jewish settlers told Goldberg is
disturbing. Many of them have a contemptuous, virtually
racist, view of their Arab neighbors. They are wedded
to the literal word of the Bible while much of Judaism
is not, and while they by no means share the Islamic
radicals’ yen for martyrdom — and they do not approve
of the killing of innocents — they are quite willing
to die for their beliefs. Okay. But it is the nature of
these things that they will take others with them. Not
okay.

Goldberg has written a good article about some ugly
facts — and done so with a reporter’s keen eye, but
also with a Zionist’s loving heart. It should be read
by anyone interested in Israel. See for yourself.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42031-2004Jun14.html

cohenr@washpost.com