Cutting a deal.

 

Mohammed ben Salman is our new friend, so we had better get used to the idea.

That was my conclusion after reading Nahum Barnea’s column in

Yediot Aharonot’s weekend supplement.

Under the heading “With cunning you shall wage peace.” he was obviously reverse- paraphrasing a passage from Proverbs 24;6: “With cunning you shall wage war.”

Barnea quoted from an interview MBS gave to Fox News, the first of its kind to a non-Arab news outlet since 2019. “Every day we are drawing closer to an agreement that will benefit the Palestinians and will make Israel an important player in the Middle East.” Netanyahu couldn’t have wished for more!  In the deal currently being worked out there are three partners. The most confident of them is the Saudi Crown Prince. At present he is set to gain from both East and West. China, America’s greatest opponent, is wooing MBS and by doing so, increases the prince’s bargaining power.  Russia, America’s second opponent in this power struggle, is trimming 1.3 million barrels of crude oil out of the global market and boosting energy prices. A move that was coordinated with Ben Salman. The Saudis followed suit by doing the same, causing no little consternation in the White House.

Not so long ago, MBS was persona non grata in Washington. Now he is welcome almost everywhere. Partly because of his new image – a man with a vision. He has been carrying out drastic and far-reaching changes within Saudi Arabia, both by promoting large scale construction works and by relaxing some of the restrictive social mores.

So far no one has dared to oppose him, even high-ranking Muslim clericals.

Near East analysts are wondering how he will win over the Palestinians.   

After all, they won’t be satisfied with sympathetic platitudes and although they are always willing to accept ‘donations’, they won’t be bought off.

The Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan’s 16-minute address to the UN General Assembly on Saturday surprised many observers. He warned that regional security in the Middle East hinged on a “just, comprehensive solution to the Palestinian issue” and appeared to criticise Israel without mentioning it by name. Nor did he mention the efforts being made to further the possibility of normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Other reports claim that Riyadh has asked for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians that nevertheless, fall short of giving them an independent state.

Saudi Arabia's first ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, Nayef al-Sudairi, arrived in Ramallah on Tuesday morning, implying in a statement to reporters that the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem would be a central pillar of any future deal with Israel.

I doubt if Israeli negotiators and their US counterparts are deterred by Saudi foreign minister and ambassador al-Sudairi’s seemingly emphatic statements,

Mohammed ben Salman is the man to watch.

At this juncture let’s consider what’s at stake.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, there are 451,700 Jews living in West Bank settlements. Between 20,000 and 30,000 more live in illegal West Bank outposts. All settlements are located in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank controlled by Israel. Given that Israel has not annexed the West Bank, Jewish settlements in the territory are not considered by Israel to be under its jurisdiction. Emergency regulations renewed every five years extend Israeli criminal and some civil law to Israeli citizens in the West Bank.

Today, approximately one-third of settlers are Haredim, one-third are secular, and the remaining third are religious Zionists.

In allowing and encouraging the establishment of Jewish communities in the West Bank, the Israeli government’s initial priority was security. By placing Israeli civilians in certain areas to solidify Israel’s control, Israel sought to ensure that the territory’s political future would be consistent with the country’s perceived security needs. A civilian settler population could also act as the first line of defence against an invasion. Under this approach, Israel designated certain strategic regions of the West Bank for Jewish settlement while initially prohibiting the establishment of civilian communities in more heavily populated Palestinian areas.

Over time, messianic Religious Zionist ideology developed as a significant driver of the settlement movement, based on the notion of a religious imperative for Jews to settle the entire Land of Israel. Settlements established as part of this religious movement were often placed in regions with a large Palestinian population in order to secure Jewish dominance over the territory.

Driven by two distinct rationales, the settlement movement and the Israeli government sought to achieve the following political goals since post-1967 Jewish settlement in the West Bank began:

To delineate a future border between Israel and a Palestinian entity that reflects Israel’s priorities.

To disrupt the contiguity of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, especially along the central mountain range running north-south

To establish a significant Jewish population in parts of the West Bank so that if annexed, it would not impact the demographic character of the State of Israel.

Nonetheless, the size of the settler population does not come close to threatening the West Bank’s solid Palestinian majority.

Namely, 85.2% of West Bank residents are Palestinians.

Jews are the majority population (51.9%) within the environs of Jerusalem. In all other parts of the West Bank, Palestinians are the overwhelming majority. 96.7% of the population along the West Bank’s central mountain range that connects the major Palestinian cities is Palestinian.

The growth rate of the settler population has fallen to 2.24% from a high of 16% in 1991. Most of this growth is the result of natural growth, rather than migration, and almost half of it is from the Haredi cities of Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit—both of which are consensus settlements that would be annexed to Israel under any two-state formulation. Settlements deep in the West Bank in areas slated for evacuation do not pose a demographic threat. Moreover, the West Bank Jewish population’s growth is expected to fall given current trends.

The Palestinian population density in the West Bank is six times higher than that of the Jewish population.

The layout of the West Bank’s Jewish population is also ineffective for the purposes of controlling the territory. Settlements are largely concentrated linearly, such as along the Green Line, along Route 60 through the central mountain ridge, and along Route 90 in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea region.
The Palestinian population, by contrast, is more evenly distributed throughout the entire territory, with the exception of the sparsely populated Jordan Valley (where Palestinians, nevertheless, still outnumber Jews). 

Contrary to the widespread perception that the settlement movement succeeded in establishing facts on the ground that ensure Israel’s dominance over the territory, in fact, the opposite is true.

Settlements are incredibly dependent on Israel-proper. They are not self-sufficient and their residents are reliant on aid and services from within the Green Line.

Settlements are not a cohesive community, even within each of the six regional councils in the West Bank. 

 Long distances between settlements and their respective regional council administrative centres, as well as between the settlements themselves, limit interaction and hinder the establishment of Jewish cultural and economic centres within the West Bank. 

The need to circumvent Palestinian areas when traveling exacerbates this challenge.

The West Bank settlement system lacks a normal urban hierarchy, i.e., large urban centres surrounded by medium-sized and small communities.

The two largest settlements, Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit, are Haredi communities that are largely irrelevant to the lives of non-Haredi settlers. 

The settlement system largely consists of small settlements that function as disconnected islands reliant on cities in Israel.

Israeli West Bank residents frequently need to travel to major cities within Israel for services that aren’t available in the settlements.

Employment opportunities within the settlements are incredibly limited. On average, 60% of the employed population in a settlement is employed in Israel.

The Israeli government provides significant financial aid to the local authorities and residents of the settlements. 

The number of settlers employed in local agriculture and industry in the West Bank is insignificant.

The precarity of the settlement enterprise is obscured by the government largesse that keeps it afloat. Should the government choose to end this support, local governments and residents would find themselves in a dire financial position. 

Most of the statistics and details I have quoted above were obtained from open-source information.

The rest from: - Shaul Arieli, Deceptive Appearances: Do the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank Negate the Feasibility of the Two-State Solution? (2020).

Margin note: Dr. Shaul Arieli is arguably the most knowledgeable authority on Israel’s borders. I can attest to the fact that he is also an excellent tour guide.

However, if as claimed MBS has asked for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians that fall short of giving them an independent state, would they agree to forget the Palestinian refugees.

I pause here in order to consider the theoretical possibility of dismantling the Jewish settlements in the West Bank in the unlikely event of a “comprehensive solution to the Palestinian issue.”

You probably recall the traumatic forcible removal of 8,600 Israeli settlers from   Gush Katif in August, 2005. Their communities were demolished as part of Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

The evacuation and relocation of close to half a million residents of the West Bank is inconceivable.

Time out for another margin note: -

In the aftermath of World War II, when it became apparent that millions of destitute refugees were not going to be attended to by existing organisations, the United Nations saw fit to establish an agency—the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)—to coordinate assistance to them.  To date, the UNHCR has helped over 25 million people successfully restart their lives.

There is one group of refugees, however, for whom no durable solution has been found during the seventy-five years since their problems began: Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel in the period 1948-1949 as a result of its War of Independence. Originally numbering between 500,000 and 750,000 persons, today they number, (mainly their descendants), approximately 6 million persons.  Arguably, they constitute one of the world’s largest and most enduring refugee problems, and there is no feasible solution to their situation in sight.

The plight of the Palestinian refugees is, at first glance, fairly surprising. Whereas the rest of the world’s refugees are the concern of the UNHCR, the Palestinians are the sole group of refugees with a UN agency dedicated exclusively to their care: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which operates independently of the Convention on refugees. The differences between the two agencies are striking: In addition to classifying Palestinian refugees by a distinct set of criteria, UNRWA, through an international aid package of several hundred millions of dollars a year, serves as the main provider of healthcare, education, relief, and social services for its client population—the sort of assistance the UNHCR usually devolves to refugees’ countries of asylum. Moreover, while the UNHCR actively seeks durable solutions to refugee problems, UNRWA has declined to entertain any permanent solution for the Palestinian refugees, insisting instead on a politically unrealistic “return” to pre-1967 Israel.

UNWRA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini speaking at UN Headquarters on Thursday, last week made an impassioned appeal for additional funding.   It appears that notwithstanding the generous funding UNRWA receives it is on the verge of bankruptcy. “I keep reminding Member States that we are the only Agency, with 30,000 staff, which operates on a negative cashflow.”  Lazzarini said.

This a good time to send in the bailiffs, dismantle UNWRA and everything it represents. Somehow, I doubt if this will happen.

 

Anyway, take care.

 

Beni,           27^th of September, 2023.