At last, Israel gets ready to undo its 1967 mistake

James Klurfeld
March 31, 2006

There is one undeniable message from Tuesday's election in Israel: The 40-year effort to make the West Bank territory part of Greater Israel is over. It was a mistake, a historic mistake. And it will take many more years to correct that mistake if, indeed, that is even possible.

The proof is that the Likud Party, the party that controlled Israel's government for most of the last 30 years and whose core principle has been that the West Bank is part of religious and historic Israel, won only 11 of 120 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. A new party, Kadima, formed only months ago by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, won the most seats, 28, and its leader, Ehud Olmert, will certainly be the next prime minister. Olmert campaigned on an explicit platform to withdraw from much of the West Bank, including abandoning many settlements either through negotiations with Palestinians or, more likely, unilaterally.

Olmert's view now is that it makes no sense for Israel to try to hold onto much of the territory it conquered in the 1967 war. That was the view of many after the 1967 war, including the government of the United States. But Israel went ahead and built settlements all over the West Bank, and its great patron in Washington just watched.

At first the settlements were designed basically to give Israel more secure borders. But, after the Likud came to power in 1977, the settlements were placed deep inside the territory with the objective of "creating facts" - that is, making it eventually part of Israel. Prime Minister Menachem Begin called the area by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, and always corrected those who called it occupied territory. "How can you occupy something that is already yours?" he protested.

Why was Likud's vision finally rejected? Many Israelis never accepted it in the first place. Others were ambivalent, especially on the need for more secure borders and strategic territory. The West Bank is the military high ground. Some intellectually knew the settlement policy was a mistake, but were intoxicated by the experience of the 1967 war into believing the romantic notion that there could be a Greater Israel. Zionism was about settling the land. That was before all the violence that came from the territories that were, after all, occupied.

But the tipping point came in the last few years when the likes of Olmert, who had been a young and zealous Likud member in the mid-1970s, and eventually Ariel Sharon himself - Likud's architect of the settlement policy - came to believe it was not worth the effort. They came to see that Israel could not be a democratic and a Jewish state and still hold onto the West Bank, an area of more than 2.4 million Arabs with one of the highest population growth rates in the world.

Israel and the rest of the world will be dealing with the consequences of the settlement policy for years to come. When states make mistakes, they can't just be erased like chalk on a blackboard. Some of the settlements, such as Ariel in the heart of the West Bank, are too large to dismantle. It's a suburban city with a population of about 17,000. As Israel redraws its borders, it will include Ariel and other large settlements inside its green line. That will always be a thorn in the Palestinians' side. And relocating Israelis from the settlements that will be dismantled will be a traumatic event for the country - much more so than the removal of settlements from Gaza. The West Bank has religious and historic meaning to Jews; the Gaza Strip does not.

None of this excuses the inexcusable terrorism of the Palestinians or suggests there is any equivalence in who is to blame for the lack of a peace agreement. Palestinian policies have been unbelievably counterproductive. But Israel has made mistakes as well. Likud is fading away. Unfortunately, the settlements will last longer.