“Natural Growth”

by

by hilzoy

One Congressman seems to be confused about what freezing "natural growth" in West Bank settlements would mean:

"Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said focusing on settlement activity "detracts" from top U.S. goals in the region. However, he added: "I do not support a settlement freeze that calls on Israeli families not to grow, get married, or forces them to throw away their grandparents. Telling people not to have children is unthinkable and inhumane.""

Asking Israelis not to have kids, or to throw away their grandparents, would be inhumane. That's probably one reason why no one has proposed any such thing. A settlement freeze would just prevent Israel from building any new houses in West Bank settlements. If anyone could explain to me why a ban on construction would require not getting married, or not having children, or putting your grandparents on whatever the Israeli analog of ice floes is, I'd be fascinated to hear about it. (I'd be even more fascinated to learn how such a ban could be, as one Israeli cabinet member put it, "akin to Pharaoh's demand that all firstborn sons be thrown into the Nile River." Who knew?)

A construction ban might, of course, mean that a settler's house could get crowded as his or her family grew. In that case, that settler might have to, well, buy another house. And if no new houses were going up in settlements, houses there might get more expensive. Settlers could then choose between paying the extra money and moving back to Israel. Horrors!

Gershom Gorenberg has an article in the Prospect about shopping for houses in the West Bank. You might wonder: if Israelis need to build new houses on the West Bank so as not to throw away their grandparents or toss their firstborns into the Nile, how is it that Gorenberg, who does not live on the West Bank, can find them for sale? It's a good question. Gorenberg's answer:

"Settlements were established as part of a deliberate and controversial gambit, an attempt to lock Israel into keeping the occupied territories. A settlement freeze or evacuation has always been a possibility. "What will we say to a family living with one child, which now has four or five children? That the children will move to Petah Tikva?" asked Hershkovitz, referring to one of Tel Aviv's large satellite cities. Well, yes. The whole family, or any grown children, could move inside Israel.

But focusing the argument for settlements around expanding families is itself a very deliberate distraction. Construction in settlements is not aimed only at accommodating children of settlers. It's aimed at drawing more Israelis across the Green Line boundary between Israel and the West Bank. When I spoke to the Amana office, the sales rep didn't ask me whether I'd grown up in a settlement or where I currently live. She offered me real-estate deals. Were I a right-winger, were I someone who preferred not to think about the disastrous implications of permanent Israeli rule of the West Bank, were I not me, her offers would have been very tempting. Instead of the apartment in which I've raised three kids in Jerusalem, I could get a house, a yard, and considerable change.

Settlement homes aren't quite the giveaways they were a few years ago. But they are still cheap, subsidized housing that continues to draw Israelis to move to the West Bank. In 2007, the last year for which there are official figures, the settlement population (not including annexed East Jerusalem) grew by 14,500 people. Of that growth, 37 percent was due to veteran Israelis or new immigrants moving to occupied territory. The "natural growth" argument is intended to cover up the continued, state-backed effort to encourage this migration. (…)

Netanyahu and his partners don't want any of this to stop. They want settlements to keep growing, in order to block an Israeli withdrawal and a two-state solution. Obama wants a freeze as the first step toward a solution. The natural-growth argument is worse than a distraction; it's a scam. Let the buyer beware."

The settlements need to be dismantled, not expanded. And letting buyers from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv find houses in settlements that are cheaper than those they could buy in Israel proper is not "natural growth".

15 thoughts on ““Natural Growth””

  1. In his recent book on the middle east, “The Mess They Made”, Gwynne Dyer quotes Ehud Olmert to the effect that the Palestinians would eventually accept Israel, accept the settlement, accept the inevitable failure of the two-state solution. They would then ask for democratic rights within Israel. As Olmert said, “The day they do that is the day we lose everything.”

  2. All political correctness aside, the term that sums up the “land for us (and all of our offspring)not you” argument in a nut shell is “Lebensraum”.

  3. the “land for us (and all of our offspring)not you” argument in a nut shell is “Lebensraum”.
    Well-known pile of aspersion for ‘false equivalencies will descend in 5…4….3…..
    At this point, both one-state and two-state ‘solutions’ appear to present problems. The piece comment above highlights the one-state problem. At the same time, the other possibility, a real, independent, sovereign nation WITHIN Israel would probably regarded askance, too.

  4. I feel reminded of an editorial cartoon from the Croatian/Serbian war (dissolution of Yugoslavia): One Chetnik saying to his comrade ‘Two more armistices/cease-fires and we will have swallowed the whole of Croatia’ (that was before the tides of war turned against Serbia). Replace cease-fire with settlement freeze and you have a similar situation to the one that exists in the occupied territories.

  5. And letting buyers from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv find houses in settlements that are cheaper than those they could buy in Israel proper is not “natural growth”.
    In fact, it’s socialist interference with the free market. Why don’t the National Review and the Wall Street Journal condemn it?

  6. Here’s a solution to the I-P problem : give every Palestinian refugee permanent residency status in the USA and a ticket to the USA. Problem solved in six months:-).
    People would be breaking INTO the refugee camps to qualify as Palestinians…
    Hey, it is as likely to work as anything else suggested on this blog…

  7. Hilzoy: why do you think Rep. Ackerman was “confused” regarding his comments re the “natural growth” of the Israeli settlements? Isn’t it more probable (if a bit more cynical) to assume that he knows exactly what the parameters of the settlements situation is, and is simply indulging in hyperbole in order to score political points?
    Anyway, to me, the more interesting nugget was buried in the middle of your linked NYT article:
    Israeli officials say they have gone public on the secret oral deal during the Bush era to clear up the impression that Israel has “hoodwinked the world” on the settlements.
    Hello?? How do you say “clueless” in Hebrew? Revelation of a “secret oral deal” isn’t going to be taken as an adsmission of “hoodwinking”??

  8. I’d be even more fascinated to learn how such a ban could be, as one Israeli cabinet member put it, “akin to Pharaoh’s demand that all firstborn sons be thrown into the Nile River.”
    See, even this cabinet official was forced to admit that Obama is compromising. Pharaoh actually demanded that all Hebrew sons be thrown into the Nile. Progress!

  9. Here’s a solution to the I-P problem : give every Palestinian refugee permanent residency status in the USA and a ticket to the USA. Problem solved in six months:-).
    Because, ya know, Palestinians want nothing more than to be a resented refugee minority population in a large, non-arabophone nation, and in fact don’t even know what nationalism is. Hmph! Baladi, indeed.

  10. Here’s a solution to the I-P problem : give every Palestinian refugee permanent residency status in the USA and a ticket to the USA. Problem solved in six months:-).
    Because a country that can’t cope with letting in a handful of innocent Uighurs can easily cope with several million people who are scary! Muslim! Arab!

  11. Hey, tongue was set firmly in cheek, guys.
    You don’t like my suggestion, come up with your own perfect, ten point, non magic pony plan……………….
    (Crickets!)

  12. You don’t like my suggestion, come up with your own perfect, ten point, non magic pony plan……………….
    The state of Israel detaches itself from the mainland, and floats out into the middle of the Mediterranean sea, passing over Gaza via the use of large cranes, leaving the west bank and the rest of its neighbors behind.

  13. Here’s a solution to the I-P problem : give every Palestinian refugee permanent residency status in the USA and a ticket to the USA. Problem solved in six months:-).
    Do that for Israelis, and in 6 months the Israeli government will be asking about minority security guarantees in a Palestinian state.

  14. Because a country that can’t cope with letting in a handful of innocent Uighurs can easily cope with several million people who are scary! Muslim! Arab!
    Well, we could always let in just the Christian ones. Then they and all the American “Christian Zionists” who have been cheering the IDF blowing them into bloody rags can share a good laugh over the latter group’s hilarious ignorance.

  15. Ugh, my “Cyprus solution” is essentially that but without the difficult engineering problems (and that’s from someone who as a child wondered, whether Israel would drown, if someone built a pipe from the Mediterranean Sea to the Dead Sea).
    A move of Isreal to the sea could also be achieved without lifting the whole country by simply digging up the Jordan valley and throwing all the soil into the Mediterranean sea. Over time Haifa would become a coastal town on the Eastern shore of Israel ;-).
    Would be just the larger version of the Blaumilch Canal (link)

Comments are closed.