Jerusalem/Amman/Brussels, 25 July 2003: Israeli settlement expansion in the Palestinian occupied territories is endangering the viability of the Roadmap and, most importantly, of the two-state solution that forms the core of President Bush’s stated vision. The cumulative impact of ongoing settlement and outpost development, along with the planned route of the security fence, are inflicting grievous harm to Palestinians’ territorial integrity. In short, settlement expansion jeopardises any realistic prospect of a fair and sustainable territorial separation.
A new report by the International Crisis Group, The Israeli-Palestinian Roadmap: What a Settlement Freeze Means and Why it Matters* urges the U.S. government and other members of the Quartet to clearly define the terms of a genuine settlement freeze. It also is vital to monitor Israel’s implementation of the freeze through a joint Israeli/Quartet committee led by the U.S.
ICG Middle East Program Director Robert Malley said: “There is a long history of efforts to halt or slow down settlement expansion. To date, all have failed. This is because a settlements freeze has never been clearly defined, and exceptions were allowed in response to seemingly reasonable Israeli requests, for example to accommodate ‘natural growth’. In each case the exception ended up swallowing the rule. This time, any exceptions should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis only, in a transparent and public manner. The Quartet – and principally the U.S. – should strictly define what it means by a settlement freeze and hold the Israeli government to the high standard expressed in the Roadmap”.
The failure of past efforts also reflects the practical and political difficulty in implementing a genuine and airtight settlement freeze as an incremental, confidence-building measure. The settlement enterprise has become an integral part of Israel’s formal and informal political, economic, social and legal system. Accomplishing a real, comprehensive freeze in the initial stages of the Roadmap will require momentous effort, hard to imagine, given Israeli political realities across a range of administrations. In all likelihood it will be achieved only in the context of a diplomatic endgame on which the Israeli government and its people are engaged in a process designed to end the conflict with the Palestinians – and therefore to evacuate the vast majority of the settlements.
As the experience of the Oslo years amply demonstrates, the way out of this dilemma is not to disregard the need for a genuine freeze or to dilute its contents. ICG Middle East Project Analyst Daniel Levy noted: “To allow settlement activity to proceed in the run-up to the endgame is to endanger the possibility of ever getting to the endgame itself. A freeze is both a necessary and long overdue ingredient of any political process that seeks to sustain an atmosphere of security and peaceful negotiations. To conduct negotiations on the Roadmap’s next landmark, the option of a Palestinian state with provisional borders, would seem untenable without a genuine freeze”.
Both the urgency and difficulties in implementing a genuine settlement freeze highlight the need to move as quickly as possible to a final status agreement. As ICG has consistently argued, an incremental approach to the peace process based on mutual confidence-building measures multiplies the obstacles it is meant to overcome. By fleshing out the contours of a final agreement and leap-frogging the myriad steps in the Roadmap, the U.S. and its Quartet partners have a far better chance of achieving their ultimate objective – a fair and sustainable peace.
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*Read the Report in full on our website: http://www.crisisweb.org/
The International Crisis Group (ICG) is an independent,
non-profit, multinational organisation, with over 90 staff members on five
continents, working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to
prevent and resolve deadly conflict.
