Last update - 00:00 07/12/2007
Go west - or become Palestinian
By Lily Gal ili
In the next few weeks, about 80,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, who have remained imprisoned on the eastern side of the separation barrier, will receive a surprising envelope. In it they will find a Palestinian passport issued by the One Home movement, which is promoting the idea of their returning to inside the Green Line (the pre-1967 Six-Day War border). More precisely, the letter originates in the consulting firm of Motti Morel and Ronen Tzur, who are in charge of One Home's campaign. Presumably many of the addressees will see the letter as a provocation. For others the passport will concretize their feeling that their country has left them on the wrong side of the fence.
In recent days the "evacuation-compensation" idea, which has been boiling beneath the surface ever since the law was first formulated by MKs Avshalom Vilan (Meretz) and Colette Avital (Labor), has erupted into public discourse. This fact in and of itself does not ensure the success or failure of the move. The fact that the initiative has now been adopted by Defense Minister Ehud Barak does afford it another dimension. Even if he did embrace the law in his role as a Labor Party chairman looking for an agenda, his position and status as defense minister accord more importance to the fate of 80,000 people.
"It isn't by chance that Barak has come out with this now of all times," says MK Vilan. "It's worth it to him. Instead of being pushed to evacuate settlements by force, here he has a plan for a larger voluntary evacuation. According to our measures, there are currently about 40,000 people who are prepared - and even want - to evacuate willingly. It is also possible to bear the price: It is a matter of a first stage amounting to $2 billion spread out over five years. There are already foreign donors for our movement, who are prepared to provide financial help for such a move."
Incognito inquiry
In the shadow of the disengagement and the Second Lebanon War, the evacuation-compensation initiative dropped from the public agenda. But quiet activity continued behind the scenes. Vilan and Avital met with groups of settlers, and were sometimes subjected to curses. Presumably the 2005 disengagement from Gush Katif (the settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip), and afterward from Amona (in the West Bank) served as a catalyst: The state proved that not only was it capable of evacuating, but that it knows how to do so violently. The experience furthermore conveyed, and not only to the evacuees, that those who once were the state's darlings can become a nuisance to it in the blink of an eye. There was a quiet increase in the queries to the public movement One Home, which was established in 2005 in the wake of the legislation. Recently, the organization has received up to 2,000 queries - some letters, some e-mails - from people who want to learn more about the conditions for evacuation-compensation.
Michal Steinman, who has collected the applications and replied to them, has noticed two prominent phenomena: The majority of these queries have been unsigned, most likely because the writers are afraid of hostile or violent reactions from their neighbors, as has happened in the past to those who identified themselves. The other commonality concerns terminology: "We are being abandoned," "We are hostages," "They have turned us into bargaining chips." There is also a feeling of "living on packing crates," even if this is still metaphoric. Some describe at length the isolation to which the new reality condemns them, the friends who no longer come over and the alienation of being cut off from grandchildren who don't come to visit any more.
The Annapolis conference has brought this subject back to the center of the public arena. During the preparatory stages for the conference, when it was clear that Israel had to come up with "something," evacuation-compensation was pulled out as a worthy initiative that could be proposed. Vilan presented the law to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who promised to have a look at it; Vice Premier Haim Ramon, who had joined the initiative at the start of the One Home activity, spoke about it with Olmert. Minister Without Portfolio Ami Ayalon thought that bringing it up at Annapolis would have significance both for the Israeli public and for the international community. He made similar comments to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "It is better that you evaluate me according to the number of Israelis who move from east to west than according to the amount of force invested into an operation to evacuate three settlers from one illegal outpost," he told her. He also thinks that this kind of matter cannot come as a private members' bill, but should rather be in the form of a law proposed by the government.
Since embarking on his activity in One Home, Ayalon has become a Knesset member and now also serves as government minister. Yet he is not at all disturbed by the fact that instead of formulating a policy and acting in accordance with it, both the Knesset and the government are in fact tempting citizens. "I don't see what the problem is," he says, rejecting the accusation. "We tempted the settlers to go there and now the appropriate thing to do is to avoid forced evacuation. A country enforces its laws as a last resort. When we arrive at a diplomatic agreement, we will have to enforce. In the meantime, it is best to be 'wise' rather than 'justified.' Such a move also sends a message to Palestinian society - the Israelis are moving westward and not eastward."
Crisis of confidence
On Sunday of this week, a working meeting of the One Home team was convened at the Morel-Tzur offices. On the agenda was the continuation of the campaign. During the course of the discussion, an employee came in and put a piece of paper on the table. It was only after several minutes that someone took a look at the paper and identified the unexpected asset that had come into their hands: The paper was a printout from the government meeting that had occurred at the same time, during the course of which Barak had declared his support for a voluntary evacuation-compensation arrangement.
At first the strategic advisors were a bit scornful of Barak's uncharacteristic haste in adopting an agenda that the Labor Party had so lacked; then they were already imagining the settlers' requests for evacuation-compensation arriving at the defense minister's bureau, as part of a campaign they were now formulating. "Barak took an idea around which he can gather a consensus of left and center, and even parts of the right," says strategic advisor Tzur. "A form requesting compensation is being added to the Palestinian passport sent to the settlers in those areas. We will pass the completed forms on to the Defense Minister's Bureau."
However, the initiative is being promoted at a time of a profound crisis of confidence between the public and its government. The continuing neglect in finding housing solutions for the Gush Katif evacuees is proving corrosive, and not only at the level of the evacuees' trust. The crisis of confidence, which has grown more profound since the Second Lebanon War, comprises far larger public sectors. This atmosphere could deter even those settlers who do want to evacuate.
Vilan is not worried. According to him, the law he proposed together with Avital is much simpler than the evacuation-compensation that applied to Gush Katif and is not expected to cause problems of that sort. Morel sums up the difference with undisguised irony: "Precisely the opposite," he says. "The government has indeed proven that it is incapable of doing anything, apart from writing a check. And this is exactly what will be required of it in the evacuation-compensation law. A person will bring a note from the government, saying that he is evacuating a home and he will receive a check in retun. This process is so simple that even the present government can implement it."
This view is not shared by Lior Kalfa, the former chairman of the Gush Katif Settlers Committee and currently the chairman of the settlers' lobby. To this day he is living in the transit station at Nitzan and only now are they beginning to prepare the plot on which his home will be built. He is advising the settlers not to move, both because of his ideological perspective as well as from accumulated experience. "They should look at us," he says, "at families that are collapsing, at the psychological breakage. No money in the world can compensate for all of that."
He is advising the settlers on the other side of the separation fence not to hasten to be evacuated, for completely practical reasons, too: "The current reality as well as all the research studies show that even in a situation of expulsion, the struggle up until the last moment pays off psychologically. The settlers who fought until the bitter end are in better psychological shape than those who wanted to arrive at an arrangement with the state at an early stage." The argument is not limited to the realm of the psyche: "Settlements that insisted on staying until the last moment received more."
The Palestinian passport that will be sent to the settlers along with the evacuation-compensation application form will also be accompanied by a letter that will outline the emerging reality: evacuation-compensation or life under Palestinian rule. It will also contain a warning about the inability of the separation fence to protect the inhabitants on the other side of it. "If the Israel Defense Forces did not succeed in protecting Netzarim, are they going to defend 80,000 people?" the letter will ask.
What should have been the government's job is being handled by a public movement, which is basing its proposal on the government's inability to protect its citizens.