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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Price of settlement: strife
and pain
Israelis face daily trials in hard land
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
GUSH ETZION, West Bank -- The shopping list
for just one school in this Jewish settlement bloc
on the outskirts of Jerusalem is impressive and somewhat scary:
Six armor-plated school buses, one bulletproof minivan, armed bus personnel, 380 bulletproof vests and helmets for teachers, security guards for school trips, bulletproof walls, illumination of roads and fences, and counseling for students who suffer a "siege mentality." Total $1.9 million.
Mayor Shaul Goldstein, responsible for 38,000 people in 15 separate communities, drives an armor-plated vehicle and carries a gun. Most of the settlers are armed and many are army reservists. All take turns at nightly guard duty to supplement the military checkpoints and regular army patrols that protect them from their Palestinian neighbors.
Even so, 17 civilians and soldiers have been killed in Gush Etzion since the intifada began in September 2000. Among them were two teen-agers, bludgeoned to death with rocks in a cave where they liked to play, and a 72-year-old American architect so friendly with the Palestinians he called them "my family."
Ambushes on the way to school, nightly guard duty, a pistol-packing mayor and a blood-stained cave in the Judean hills. Is all this really worth it to maintain a Jewish presence on what the Palestinians say is stolen land?
Steeped in the biblical history of the rocky hills around him, Goldstein has a simple answer: "If there is a Jewish people, then this is our home."
He points to a mikvah, or underground cistern, where Jews traveling to the Holy City used to stop and cleanse themselves in preparation for prayer at the Temple Mount. Nearby is a trough where they used to press grapes with their feet. Both were carved out of stone before the birth of Christ.
Goldstein's father fought to create the state of Israel in 1948, he himself served 10 years in the Israeli army and the mayor has a map in his office to prove that much of the land was not "stolen" as Palestinians claim but bought from them by Jews during the British mandate. Dated by a Jordanian administrator in 1951, the map delineates Jewish land, Arab land and land shared by both.
"There were Jews here in the 1920s, later chased out by Arab riots," he said. "They were pushed out again in 1936-37 but came back to rebuild in the 1940s. They lost four kibbutzim to Jordan in 1947-48."
Warnings ignored
So when Israel captured the West Bank in the Six-Day War of 1967,
it allowed Jews to "re-establish themselves where they had
been before." By Goldstein's reasoning, that is ample justification
for ignoring international condemnation of the settlements, including
repeated U.S. warnings -- the latest from retired Marine Gen.
Anthony Zinni -- that they "don't promote peace."
Gush Etzion, for example, is not one settlement but a string of them stretching from Jerusalem all the way to Hebron. "Unlike other settlements, we are a sea of Jews living with a handful of Arabs," said Goldstein. But 50 percent of the land between the settlements is still Arab-owned, making it impossible to separate the two.
A Palestinian goatherd drives his flock down the shoulder of Route 60 at the risk of losing an animal to a speeding Israeli car. Arab farmers prune their vines right next to Jewish vineyards in the heart of Gush Etzion. And, while Goldstein is showing visitors around his domain, he catches a Palestinian dump truck filled with building debris trying to unload the refuse near a settlement park.
"It's all right," the driver assures him, "we have permission from the mayor."
"I am the mayor and you don't have my permission," he retorts, sending the truck on its way with a policeman in chase.
"Before the intifada, Jews and Arabs lived side-by-side peacefully," said Goldstein. "We still have good relations with some of them. But we have to be careful about being too friendly now because that would make them 'collaborators' and victims of their own extremists."
Yet, even the friendly ones, Goldstein acknowledged, resent the Israeli presence. As a building contractor after he left the army, Goldstein employed many Arabs and considered some of them good friends. When he built his home in Gush Etzion, they told him:
"Because you built your house with your own hands you can stay. But we will never accept a Jewish state on Arab land."
The hostile ones have resorted to armed resistance and suicide bombings. Some never reconciled themselves to the existence of Israel, believing they can still drive the Jews into the sea. Others have resigned themselves to Israel's 1948 borders but not its 34-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, saying the violence will end only when the settlements are gone.
Goldstein doesn't think they should ever be given up.
"We are surrounded by hostile Arabs," he points out. "Take away Judea and Sumaria (the West Bank) and the width of Israel becomes indefensible. We may not like it when our children have to go into the army and we have to go to funerals, but we have to fight for it. Moses gave us a very tough neighborhood to live in."
However, most Israelis do not think that way. The settler population is small -- 200,000 in 6 million -- and public opinion polls consistently show that 60 percent to 70 percent are willing to give up most, if not all, of the occupied territories if that will bring them peace and secure borders.
Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an old warhorse detested and distrusted by the Palestinians, has acknowledged their right to a Palestinian state, albeit on his terms.
All they have to do is give up what Sharon calls "terrorism" and they call "legitimate resistance" to an occupying power. While the Palestinian community is itself divided on what constitutes a legitimate target -- some oppose attacking civilians in Israel proper but consider Jewish settlers and soldiers fair game -- many believe that all Israelis should be made to feel as vulnerable as Palestinians who have been subjected to Israeli airstrikes and tank incursions.
Accusations exchanged
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat himself issues repeated calls
to halt attacks on "all Israelis," soldiers and civilians,
saying it harms the Palestinian national cause. But he never uses
the word "terrorism" and accuses Sharon of inciting
the Palestinians with his policy of "targeted killings."
Sharon, in turn, dismisses Arafat's cease-fire calls as a sham.
He holds the Palestinian leader directly responsible for every
attack on Israelis and refuses to negotiate with him until such
attacks stop.
But Sharon's terms are not nearly as generous as those of his predecessor. Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians more than 90 percent of the land they lost in 1967, including a capital in East Jerusalem, which they turned down but which Israelis regarded as being so excessive they cost Barak his political career.
So the terrorism goes on.
In one week alone, a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli women on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road, a Palestinian suicide bomber wounded 25 people in Tel Aviv, a female suicide bomber killed one Israeli and wounded 125 on Jaffa Road again and an unarmed Palestinian driver ran over an Israeli policeman outside Tel Aviv before being shot dead.
Sharon responds with what the Palestinians call "state terrorism" -- assassinating Palestinian militants, blockading Palestinian towns and villages and confining Arafat to his headquarters in Ramallah. Palestinians respond with yet more terror, and the deadly cycle continues.
Dan Meridor, a minister in Sharon's Cabinet responsible for national defense and diplomatic strategy, says the basis for a solution "must be two states." After much bitter debate spanning the better part of a decade, most Israelis are willing to trade their vision of a Greater Israel for security in a Lesser Israel.
"The debate is now over," said Meridor. "Eighty to 90 percent of Israelis understand that a Palestinian state is needed in borders to be agreed upon. However, a similar revolution has not taken place in the Palestinian camp.
"There is still no recognition of Israel's right to exist in secure borders.
Unpleasant options
"Until that happens we have to keep fighting for our survival.
You may not like our methods -- we ourselves don't like some of
the things we have to do such as assassinations and economic blockades
-- but how else do you fight terrorism?
"You cannot negotiate with terror and you cannot give in to terror. It must be fought militarily."
In Meridor's view Israel has four options:
"Obviously, the first two choices are better," said Meridor. "If I had only the last two to choose from, I would choose unilateral withdrawal. At least that would normalize the battlefield. We would be fighting from more clearly defined borders against an enemy no longer among us."
If that happens, much of Gush Etzion would probably be kept by Israel. It is too close to Jerusalem and has too many settlements to be turned over to the Palestinians. But some Jewish communities would have to go, as would some Palestinians.
As enemies, they live too close for comfort.
January 30, 2002
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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