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Indyk,
the Negev and the Settlements
On May 21, 2001, Martin Indyk, the
outgoing US Ambassdor to Israel, was at the Ben
Gurion University in the heart of the Negev
receiving the Negev Award at the university's Board
of Governors meeting. He waxed on with many a
Clintonesque soundbite on the peace process and how
life would be so peachy in this part of the world
"if only" Arafat had taken what was on the
table at Camp David II, and "if only"
Israel would re-order its settlement policies, and
"if only" Arabs and Jews could get along,
say like Clinton and Monica.
What was most telling in Indyk's
remarks was the following: Referring to the
settlements, Indyk said that "on one of my many
visits here I said, 'Imagine if all the effort that
went into putting settlements into the West Bank and
Gaza had been devoted to putting settlements in the
Negev. What a difference it could have made.' "
Now
that statement alone should have garnered Inkyk the
Negev Award. Just imagine.
[1]
The US has been providing billions of dollars in aid
to Israel, almost all of it after the 1967 Six
Day War, in which Israel captured most of what today
is referred to as the Territories. Only once
during all that time when Israel was busy building
settlements did the US withhold any aid to Israel
because of its settlement activities (i.e., the Bush
senior administration's loan guarantees, later
reinstated under Clinton).
[2]
The US has never taken the formal position that the
settlement of the Territories is "illegal"
under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention,
drawn up a few years after the end of the Second World
War, because Jordan and Egypt occupied those
territories prior to June 1967 in violation of the UN
Partition Plan. Article 2 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention states that it applies "to cases of
partial or total occupation of the territory of a high
contracting party." Neither Jordan, Egypt or
the Palestinians were "high contracting
parties." Thus, the Palestinians, Egyptians
and Jordanians have absolutely no standing (or privity)
under international law to make the claim of
"illegal" settlements. Indeed, the
longstanding policy by the US has been that the
Territories and the settlements are
"disputed" and their final disposition
should be resolved through negotiation.
[3] The billions of dollars in US aid
to Israel have gone in the main to the maintenance
of a socialist, statist system within the so-called
Green Line (inside Israel proper) with only a
relatively miniscule amount going to the
"building of settlements."
[4] The Negev has had many an
opportunity to be developed into, as Indyk put it, "a
new, magnificent, and enlightened reality on the
desert sands of the mighty Negev." One
such project, which has been discussed on these
pages many times before, the Free Processing Zone,
was almost a reality in 1994 but was destroyed by
the statist elements who also despise the
Territories. The central culprits were many of
Indyk's leftist Israeli businessmen friends in Tel
Aviv. Like many others, Indyk supported
the Free Zone idea but spent next to no energy
trying to protect it as an America's interest
(i.e., to help build a regionally strong, truly economically
independent Israel). Now, he feels quite
comfortable providing Israel with domestic building
and development advice for the Negev.
[5] Given the fact that the late
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made it very clear on
more than one occasion that the Peace Process was
about selling the Territories for huge sums of money
in foreign aid, and given the fact that the US has
provided the aid over the past thirty years that
allowed Israel to remain the last bastion of
socialism in the West, why would Indyk now expect
Israel to do anything but continue to use US aid
dollars to add value to its investment in the
Territories, which one day, given Israel's
insistence on statism and demographic decline, must
be sold to the Palestinians for US aid dollars, be
the agent for the sale a Sharon-led rightist
government, a Sharon-Peres-led unity government, or
a Ben Ami-Beilin-led leftist one. Whether a
general war intervenes or not, Israel given its
current national and demographic decline must sell
off its valuable real estate assets.
Indyk, over the years, has proven
himself to be a successful businessman turned
diplocrat, embracing and evincing the same airy (and
dangerous) lightheadedness as his former boss,
Clinton. Suggesting to Negbians that the
failure to develop the Negev is causally related to
Israel's settlement policies given Israel's
longstanding policy of statism and antipathy to the
kinds of free market reforms that would indeed have
turned the Negev into the heart of Israel, is at
once both disingenuous and stupid.
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