TITLE: Cure the Settlement Obsession Syndrome

AUTHOR: Doron Rosenblum

PUB: Ha'aretz

DATE: May 11, 2001

There is a fascinating, almost circus-like thrill in watching Ariel Sharon try to shake off the image of the bull in a china shop and daintily calculate every step - all the more so now that the bull has become the proprietor of the shop."Bullish caution" - welcome in and of itself - has been transformed from an election campaign gimmick into pretty well the only political policy of Sharon. But there are those moments when he reverts to his ponderous old ways - knocking over pails, trampling on plates - as though answering a primeval call. It happens as soon as he steps over the Green Line. And so, when talking to a group of settlers, he must talk about "things we will do and deny"; standing in the Jordan Rift Valley he annexed it all "for all time" - and even as he annexed the water sources too, he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the settlements. It was only when he stepped back inside the Green Line that he resumed his visage of caution and denial, with the embarrassed grin of someone who, with a careless wave of the tail, has accidentally knocked over a shelf full of porcelain figurines. Sharon, like his settler buddies, devoted all his years in politics to blurring the Green Line. But the settlements have never - never more flagrantly than now - ceased to be a "different country," with their own distinctive ways of speech, behavior and morality. First, this is because of the threat entailed in the overbearing ways of the settlers' leaders themselves. They forcibly abducted the national agenda and for the past 30 years have managed it like a self-inflicted hostage-taking attack ("our fuse is getting short," as they warned this week in a typical threat - reserved exclusively for terrorist attacks in the territories, together with singular settler-type utterances - "to spew out the traitors," "to shave the villages"). Second, it is because of the sycophantic, kow-towing, not to say cowed attitude of all Israeli leaders in our generation in the face of the settlers (except for Rabin - and look what happened to him). But why should we complain about Sharon? His predecessors from the Labor Party, going all the way back to the days of Sebastia, were seized by trembling of the knees, or perhaps reverential awe, when they entered settler country. Some sort of primordial force, stronger than them, seemed to compel them to quell the wrath of these "lords of the land," to placate them with a kind of sacrificial offering. Always they had to bring some sort of militant declaration, operational secret, conspiratorial encouragement - to subsidize an unnecessary road, a ghost-neighborhood, a prosthetic settlement, so long as they did not come empty-handed. Did Israeli leaders ever offer such words or such flattery to the residents of the slum neighborhoods or the development towns or the border settlements inside the Green Line? Did they pump huge amounts of money into Dizengoff Street after the terrorist attacks there? Did they subsidize a plot of land for the victims of the terrorism in Netanya or at Cafe Apropos? Did they issue a permit to build an addition to a house on the roof just because people were killed in an attack? Not once.Who do those people think they are? Settlers? It's possible the inertia of the "settlement momentum," which underlay the establishment of the settlements from the outset, will one day, like "Jerusalem syndrome," be categorized as a bizarre psychological reflex. It will be diagnosed as an irresistible impulse, stronger than us, more powerful than international law, more potent than our own self-interest, stronger than any security, and economic, urban or political logic. It is an obsession "to settle" any territory just because it has been overrun by the IDF - just for revenge, or in defiance. So we inject prodigious resources throughout an entire generation - in most cases merely out of groveling before the anachronistic image of the pioneering settlement. The collapse of the "Oslo process" is construed as the victory of the settlement approach, which holds that the intercommunal war over the Land of Israel never ended, and therefore the Israeli entity within the boundaries of the Green Line was no more than a passing episode. But the opposite is also true. Maybe the war over the Land of Israel is not ending because the boundaries of the Green Line are considered a passing episode and have not been internalized by the governments of Israel as the original defined and final blueprint of the state. It is true that the left's over-symmetrical scenario - maintaining that the depth of peace would be equal to the depth of the withdrawal - has gone somewhat askew. But a return to an Israeliness contained by its borders, together with a curing of the obsession for expansion and settlement, is something we owe ourselves - irrespective of Arabs or peace. END top