On March 8,
Israeli prime minister designate EhudOlmert announced what amounted to a unilateral declaration
of annexation by Israel of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.During a series of interviews with Israeli journalists, Olmert, who
leads the Kadima party founded by Ariel Sharon prior to the March 28 Israeli elections,
stated that by 2010, Israel
would simply announce its new borders to the world.
“Israel will be
disengaged from the vast majority of the Palestinian population, within new
borders,” he said.The new border would
be close to the current line of the separation wall Israeli is constructing
through the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with
“some adjustments”, Olmert said.Israel will
determine the adjustments and its border on its own in “consultation” with the
international community.“There may be
cases in which we move the [wall] eastward [into the West
Bank], there may be cases in which we move the [wall] westward, in
line with what we agree upon.”The “we”
he refers to, he made clear in the round of interviews, are the Israelis and
the “international community” of its allies –
primarily the United States.
Olmert told
reporters he would evacuate isolated Israeli settlements within the West Bank, relocating those settlers to major settlement
blocs.“We will solidify Israel as a
Jewish state, one in which there is a solid and stable Jewish majority, a
majority which is not in danger.”He
hinted that those settlements outside the current route or planned route of the
separation wall would be relocated.However, during a March 15 visit to the West Bank settlement of Ariel,
located about 60 kilometres north of Jerusalem
and just beyond the current planned route of the wall, Olmert declared, “the Ariel bloc will be an integral part of Israel,
whatever happens.Ariel is Israel.”There are currently around 240,000 Jewish
settlers living on illegally confiscated land in the West
Bank, while the Palestinian population is around 2.5 million.
“I believe with
my whole heart that we have a window of opportunity that we must utilize in the
coming four years.We must carry out
historic steps,” Olmert said.He also
suggested that negotiations about borders with a Hamas-controlled Palestinian
Authority would most likely not be an option.While he would give Hamas a set period of time to enter into
negotiations, he said, he refused to specify how much, saying that Hamas does not represent a legitimate partner for peace
negotiations.“The Palestinian Authority
is one authority and the minute the dominant force in the PA is Hamas, then why
meet?” he asked a reporter.
The Palestinian
prime minister-elect Ismail Haniyeh responded to Olmert’s comments by
reiterating that the Palestinians want a viable state established in all of the
West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.“Anything less than these
rights will not be accepted by the Palestinian government.”
According to
Israeli commentators, Olmert’s interviews were intended to shore up support for
his party, which has been sluggish leading into the final weeks of the election
campaign.His proposal builds on Israel’s
unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip last August.Under Olmert’s unilateral declaration, Israel will be
able to extricate itself from some of the problems it faces in maintaining its
occupation while annexing lands seized in 1967 and effectively redrawing the
country’s borders.
Israeli
politicians have described one of the main challenges posed by the occupation
as the “demographic time bomb” – a reference to the fact that within a
generation, Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem are expected to outnumber Jewish Israelis
by two to one.The prospect of a Jewish
minority ruling over a Palestinian majority is something that would become
harder and harder to present as anything other than open apartheid, a fact of
which Israel’s rulers are only too aware.
In order to
avoid this embarrassing situation, many on the Israeli right have for some years
now favoured the expulsion of the Palestinians from the occupied territories
into neighbourhing Arab states.While
some on the right still favour the option, prime minister
Sharon concluded it was less and less likely to happen as the American quagmire
in Iraq
worsened.Without at least tacit U.S.
approval, the Israelis would not be able to carry out a full-fledged ethnic
cleansing campaign, and the Americans, Sharon believed, were not about to give
approval to something that would further inflame the Arab world against the
U.S.
Therefore, Sharon concluded that the only way forward was to
unilaterally withdraw from certain areas while strategically redrawing Israel’s
borders to include the largest settlements.From this conclusion the separation wall and unilateral withdrawal from
the Gaza Strip were born. Olmert’s unilateral
declaration of annexation has now taken Sharon’s
plan to its logical conclusion: an Israel existing within new borders
that it determines on its own and in violation of international law.