OPINION:Palestinian protests about Israeli West Bank settlements are a red herring as the real aggression is the rockets of Hamas, writes Seán Gannon.
THE INTERNATIONAL sound and fury which has greeted Israel's decision to green-light the construction of housing in the West Bank town of Givat Ze'ev underlines once again the success of the Palestinian propaganda machine in casting the settlement issue as "the ultimate obstacle to peace".
For example, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the move "may put in jeopardy the peace process" while the UK Foreign Office condemned "all Israeli settlements anywhere as . . . a serious impediment to a negotiated two-state solution".
Meanwhile on these pages, the Palestinian Delegate General to Ireland, Dr Hikmat Ajjuri, described the settlements as "incompatible with the 'land for peace' concept upon which all Israeli-Palestinian agreements are founded". ("West can settle conflict", March 7th)
But the settlement issue is, in fact, the reddest of Palestinian red herrings. The presence of 280,000 Israelis in the West Bank certainly makes the creation of a Palestinian state more complicated but it is hardly an insuperable barrier.
For while 42 per cent of the land was appropriated for settlement activity down through the years, only a fraction was actually developed with the result that the majority of the settlers live in a small number of built-up blocs, about 80 per cent of them in communities located along the Green Line.
Israel's annexation of these "bedroom settlements" (with territorial compensation for the Palestinians from inside pre-1967 Israel) is the recognised solution to the problem yet Dr Ajjuri presents this proposal as an American-Israeli plot foisted on the Palestinians in 2004.
But the concept of territorial exchange was discussed by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators as far back as the Stockholm meeting of May 2000 before being placed on the table at Camp David two months later where, although the sides differed on the percentages, agreement was reached on the principle.
And while there was some regression on the matter at the January 2001 Taba talks, the annexation of these settlement blocs remained the accepted way forward and formed a fundamental part of what
Ehud Barak described as the "many
other exchanges of ideas" of the post-Taba period.
This includes the Geneva Accord which the late chairman Arafat talked of adopting as the official Palestinian peace plan.
Therefore, construction within "consensus settlements" such as Givat Ze'ev has no bearing on the shape of a final peace deal; they will remain Israeli by mutual agreement and there can be no meaningful argument with respect to their "natural growth".
Nor, for that matter, does building (long since frozen) in communities outside these blocs affect the final outcome of negotiations; either these will be annexed as part of an agreement or they will not and, as the August 2005 evacuation of Gaza demonstrated, construction within them is irrelevant in this regard. The same is also true of "unauthorised outposts".
Yet the present Palestinian leadership has fetishised the settlement issue to the extent that its chief negotiator, Ahmed Qurei, has described it as "a kind of terror against the peace process and against the Palestinian people".
But such self-serving overstatement cannot obscure the fact that Palestinian terrorism remains the real obstacle to Middle East peace.
The prospects for a final agreement are today being frustrated, not by the building of bungalows as Dr Ajjuri and his political masters maintain, but by the rockets and missiles that have relentlessly rained down on Israel since the withdrawal from Gaza, almost 700 of them in the last two months alone.
The Irish media's focus on the relatively low Israeli casualty figures ("only" 12 have so far been killed by Qassams) ignores the fact that every strike is intended to cause carnage and that good fortune alone has prevented multiple fatalities.
On the eve of the Annapolis conference, 25,000 Israelis daily faced the prospect of death in a rocket barrage.
Now, with Iranian-made Grad missiles striking the heart of Ashkelon city, 10 times this number is threatened.
As Ehud Olmert confirmed at Annapolis, it is this ongoing terrorist campaign which discourages Israel "from moving forward too hastily" towards the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The result of the disengagement from Gaza has been the emergence of an Iran-sponsored Islamist terrorist entity which is now waging a war against Israel's very existence.
Meanwhile, the possibility that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (where the Israeli defence force's security presence alone is preventing a complete Hamas takeover) would inevitably lead to a "second Gaza" within sight of Tel Aviv is one Israel cannot afford to discount, especially given that even Fatah officials like Dr Ajjuri are now talking of a "third intifada".
Indeed, Mahmoud Abbas himself recently said that while the Palestinian Authority is presently "unable" to pursue armed conflict, "in the coming stages things may be different".
It is not the construction of settlements but this threat of continuing terrorism that is paralysing the Annapolis process.
Seán Gannonis chairman of Irish Friends of Israel.