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. After waxing 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 1667 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.