British MPs in the M.E.
Shirley Williams
22nd March 2004, International Herald Tribune
Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, has now chosen to escalate still further the unending conflict with his Palestinian neighbours by assassinating their revered spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Ariel Sharon has always been a risk-taker. By escalating the conflict he increases the pressure on his strongest ally, the United States. The next ten days may determine the fate of the region whether it is ever-growing violence or a massive effort to bring about a negotiated peace.
The Prime Minister of Israel has been trying to convince his fragmented and divided coalition Cabinet to back his proposal for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and a few settlements on the West Bank. In return he seeks to exact a hugely high price from Washington: endorsement of a major incursion into the Palestinian West Bank, amounting to the annexation of 8% of the territory, a territory already reduced to 22% of what was Palestine in 1948, when the state of Israel was founded.
Eight percent sounds rather modest. But anyone who has travelled recently in the West Bank, as my two Parliamentary colleagues and I have done for the past week, knows it is not. Much of the West Bank is arid, starved of water. It is criss-crossed with handsome modern highways, linking one Israeli settlement to another. Palestinians are not allowed to use them. Access to Palestinian villages along the route of the roads is blocked by huge stones and often by checkpoints manned by bored and sometimes nervous young soldiers of the Israeli Defence Force. Palestinian cars and trucks can not get through. Palestinians spend hours trying to cross these lines to tend their fields or to meet members of their families. In Hares, a West Bank village, we met two young men on their way to a family wedding in another village. They would have to get through three such blockades and check points, abandoning their car at the first one and hoping to get a lift on the other side in the few kilometers between the villages.
The West Bank is not poorer than Gaza, a crowded enclave of people without work unemployment is well over 60% dependent on UNWRA or busy NGOs to feed them. But it is even more wretched. It is close to impossible for a Palestinian anywhere near Jerusalem or any other Israeli city get a license to build a house. Since the second Intifada began in September 2000, some 1,019 Palestinian houses have been destroyed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, for breaching planning laws. These laws appear to be waived for the new Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Thousands of white houses march in regiments over hill after hill, dominating the scattered Palestinian villages. The security fences and outposts mark out the areas for future development, four times the area of the existing settlements. In between, Palestinian farmers watch their traditional olive groves and grazing land gradually swallowed up. Thousands of acres of citrus orchards and olive trees have been rooted up and destroyed, some by the IDF on security grounds. Palestinians have little left to live on.
What Ariel Sharon is seeking from the United States is the legitimation of this conquest-by-stealth. If Washington supports Sharon's proposal, the so-called "Two States" solution, a secure and sovereign Israel alongside a secure and safe Palestine, will be dead in the water. Those Palestinians who have the right of residence in Israel will flood back, as they are already doing in Jerusalem. Those without will be driven out of what they regard as their historic homeland.
Israel has the energy, the education and the commitment to be a wonderful country. It has great achievements to its credit. Sickened by the suicide bombers that kill innocent Israeli civilians, a majority of the population longs for a lasting peace. Israel is also a vibrant democracy. Protest NGOs are flourishing, many of them engaged in helping Palestinians. To take just two examples: Physicians for Human Rights mobilise scores of Israeli doctors who give up their weekends to attend makeshift clinics in Palestinian villages jammed with desperate parents and sick children. Defiant Israelis rush to defend Palestinian homes about to be demolished. The newspapers reflect the deeply divided opinions of Israel's Jewish citizens. But large areas of the West Bank are forbidden for Israelis to enter. Many do not know what is being done in their name.
Israel's democracy could be the source of a much wider democratic movement among her neighbours, if only the cycle of revenge and retaliation were brought to an end. The most promising candidate is, paradoxically, Palestine. We three Parliamentarians, on an all-party visit sponsored by Christian Aid, encountered to our surprise, a lively civic society in Gaza and the West Bank, non-violent activists running health centres, human rights groups, agricultural and environmental projects each a victory of the human spirit over despair. These men and women, not the backward-looking and impotent Palestinian Authority, offer hope for the future, and could become the partners Israel claims to want.
But if President Bush blesses Ariel Sharon's unilateral plan for the West Bank, illegal in international law and outside the Road Map the international community has subscribed to, if he condones a wall that splits farms and families and requisitions large new areas of Palestinian land, without negotiating a solution acceptable to both sides, the cancer of this conflict will claim new victims and create an army of new terrorists.
