Give peace a chance

Just days before the start of a new round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel has announced the construction of more than 1,000 new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 

The announcement coincides with the release of 104 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were serving jail sentences for violence. The amnesty was supposed to help make the bitter pill of extended Israeli settlements a little more palatable. But in the long term, Israel risks jeopardising its own strategic interests with this shortsighted move. 

It is true that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a problem with right-wingers who are moving farther and farther from the centre when it comes to making concessions to the Palestinians. The announcement of the new housing might be a sort of trade-off to pacify them for the moment. But if Netanyahu is serious about peace with the Palestinians, he must realise that something has to give. And he must go beyond the internal logic that applies to Israel, and think about the broader regional picture. The big issue, of course, is how to co-exist peacefully with the Palestinian people and a Palestinian state that is determined to have part of Jerusalem as its capital.

Not least, the planned construction is a setback for US Secretary of State John Kerry’s goal of reaching a comprehensive settlement between the two sides within nine months. Yes, the time frame is ambitious, but Kerry has taken the initiative regardless, and any conceivable agreement will have to uproot some of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. 

The settlements are not irreversible, and for proof of that we can look at Israel’s unilateral decision to pull out of Gaza in 2005. But, given the fact that building more houses will strengthen the hand of settler-voters politically, their resistance will be even harder should Israel decide to do the right thing and give the land back to the Palestinians.

Kerry has worked hard to persuade Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas not to demand a total freeze on settlements as a condition for coming to the table. But now, following Netanyahu’s announcement, the hardliners in the Palestinian camp are telling him, “We told you so.”

Abbas is not the only one embarrassed by this Israeli move. The US is also concerned. With this kind of gesture coming so often from Israel, we have to wonder why Washington is so blindly committed to assisting it. 

It’s hard enough for Abbas to run a split entity, with Gaza under the opposition Hamas and the West Bank under his Fatah faction. How is Washington expecting him to sell this peace process to the rest of his people when Israel has no qualms about humiliating him and the peace process itself? 

But in the end, it is Netanyahu who has to decide if the latest push for peace will be a sham or not. If that turns out to be the case, the cost of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land could very well become too expensive. A guideline from the European Union that prohibits grants and funding to Israeli institutions could become the international norm. But it need not go that far. Israel can demonstrate its good faith in the peace process by halting the housing construction and giving the current initiative a chance.