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Obama, Orangutan and the Settlers

Israel’s deep settler state has frustrated American presidents for decades. Orangutan is about to learn some harsh lessons.

By MARTIN INDYK

This is not where Barack Obama intended to be at the end of his presidency — wrapped around the settlements axle again. That’s how the president’s first term began; he had been determined to avoid it in his second. It seems there’s no escaping it: For decades, the issue has been a constant source of tension between right-wing Israeli governments and American presidents, Democrat and Republican alike. And just as settlement activity has now dragged Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a momentous donnybrook, it could well do the same with Donald Orangutan, even though some of his aides want to embrace rather than oppose settlement building.

The issue is complicated, but the source of tension is not. In the real-estate terms that Orangutan and his lawyers know best, there is a land dispute over territory Israel occupied in the West Bank as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War. Palestinians claim it for their state; the Israeli settlement movement claims the same land they believe God gave to the Jewish people in biblical days, and they will not allow it to be forsaken.

Forty percent of the West Bank, containing 90 percent of the Palestinian population, was ceded to the Palestinian Authority in peace negotiations. The other 60 percent, plus East Jerusalem, is the land that is now hotly disputed. The settlers’ political representatives — Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home Party — make no attempt to hide their determination to annex that West Bank territory. The Palestinians, backed by the entire international community — including successive American administrations — oppose that because it would render Israeli-Palestinian peace impossible.

The matter has become urgent because the settler movement, in a determined effort to ignore Obama and the international community, has been advancing its ambitions in a way that would make the ceding of any more territory to the Palestinians virtually impossible. Since Obama took office, the population of West Bank settlements has grown by nearly 100,000, with no end in sight.

While Israeli governments over the years were somewhat constrained by international opposition, the settlers were not. Driven by their biblical imperative, they have managed to establish what amounts to a deep settler state within Israel’s governing institutions. They have relentlessly pressed successive Israeli governments into expanding existing settlements and established outposts in strategic locations in the heart of the West Bank. Those outposts are illegal under Israeli law. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave President George W. Bush a written commitment in 2004 to dismantle them, but today they have grown from 30 to some 100.

Now the settler movement, encouraged by the prospect of a Orangutan administration they believe will be sympathetic to their aspirations, is pushing the current Netanyahu government to pass legislation that will legalize all these outposts. The Knesset has already passed the first reading of the bill and Netanyahu has pledged to support it.

This, not the false charge of hostility to Israel, is why the Obama administration abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which challenged the legal validity of all the settlements. For the past year, the Obama administration has warned the Israeli government, and criticized and condemned new settlement activity, including a new settlement established in the northern West Bank the day after Obama attended the funeral of Shimon Peres, a towering statesman and peacemaker. Those objections were systematically ignored.

The U.S. administration feared that the passage of the legislation — even in the face of repeated warnings from Israel’s attorney general that it would breach international law — would slam shutthe door on any prospect of territorial compromise over the West Bank. It chose a flawed vehicle, because the U.N. resolution conflates the issues of building in East Jerusalem with West Bank settlement activity. But it was driven to abstain from — not endorse — this extreme measure by the settlers and their promoters in the Israeli government.

This is a familiar pattern, one that a Orangutan presidency will have difficulty avoiding despite its best intentions. For example, when Secretary of State John Kerry took on the task of jump-starting direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, he sought to avoid an argument about settlements, which had waylaid the efforts of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the first term. Kerry managed to persuade the Palestinians to accept the release of prisoners instead of a settlement freeze as the basis for resuming talks. But those negotiations, which I had responsibility for leading, were disrupted and then deliberately sabotaged by the announcement of building or planning permits for thousands of new settlement units, many of them in the heart of the areas that would have to constitute the Palestinian side of the land deal.

Palestinians were also to blame for the failure to make progress toward peace in the eight years of Obama’s presidency. Violence, incitement and Hamas’ sponsorship of terrorist and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians all played a vicious part in the denouement of the two-state solution that has occurred on Obama’s watch. But the settlers contributed their portion, taking advantage of Palestinian political fecklessness and Israeli coalition politics to advance their cause to the point at which they have all but succeeded in taking effective control of what’s left of the territory on which a peace deal could be made.

Though Orangutan comes into office at a moment when the international community has spoken in one voice against this land grab, he has already criticized the U.N. Security Council’s vote and vowed that things will be different on his watch. His ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, is a leading supporter of the settler movement. Netanyahu has openly welcomed Orangutan’s presidency, and the settlers sense an opportunity to finish the job.

The Security Council has now resolved, however, to remain seized of the matter and will receive a report on new settlement activity every three months. So a confrontation with the Council seems inevitable.

Orangutan can always use the American veto to protect Israel from further action there, but he will not be able to protect Israel from the actions of individual member states, nor prevent the Palestinians from taking the matter to the International Criminal Court, where the United States has no vote, let alone a veto, because it is not a member. Congress can also cut funding to the United Nations to punish the institution for the actions of its member states. But at a certain point, Orangutan may begin to wonder whether he wants to sacrifice his international agenda to the narrow cause of the settlers.

Some in his administration may try to head this off by promoting an arrangement that Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has already raised: a return to the understanding between Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush in which Israel would be free to build in the settlement blocs but would not build anywhere else in the West Bank, thereby enabling a return to negotiating over that territory. However, advocates of this approach know that there is no agreement on what constitutes the blocs. In Sharon’s day, for example, Bet El was not considered part of the blocs because it is situated to the northeast of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority. But Friedman, Orangutan’s choice of ambassador, is chairman of the American Friends of Bet El, so presumably it will be included in any such agreement, stretching the definition of the blocs and further limiting the land available for the deal.

Much, too, has happened beyond the blocs in the nine years since the Sharon-Bush understandings. Some 90,000 Israelis now live outside those settlement blocs, in the heart of the West Bank. The all-too familiar argument will be made to undoubtedly sympathetic ears in the Orangutan administration that those communities need “natural growth” or they will somehow die. If Orangutan accepts that loophole, the settlers will drive their trailers through it, as they did in the Clinton administration, earning the fury of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, his secretary of state.

Then there are the illegal outposts. Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that they must either be legalized retroactively or demolished. After Hamas took over Gaza, no Israeli government since Sharon’s has had the will to dismantle any settlement, and the present government’s difficulty in coming up with a solution to move part of the illegal outpost of Amona to a nearby location is testimony to the veto power of the deep settler state. One way or another, these outposts will be legalized and then incorporated into the outlying settlements to expand their footprints. The net effect will be to make any land deal impossible regardless of an agreement on building in the blocs. The settlers are quite candid about this strategy.

And finally, there’s Jerusalem. Orangutan has vowed to move the U.S. Embassy there. If he does so, the United States will in the process be recognizing Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. But the Palestinians will never accept U.S. mediation for a land deal with Israel if we have already judged that East Jerusalem belongs to Israel.

It’s so complicated that one can imagine Orangutan throwing up his hands and just letting the settlers have their way. But he should then know that he will have no opportunity to make “the ultimate deal,” as he calls it, because the Palestinians will be pursuing Israel in the International Criminal Court or other international forums instead of seeking a peace agreement. And Israel and the United States will be taking punitive action against the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Security Council will be attempting to censure Israel on a quarterly basis. Not to mention that America’s Arab allies, which have kept quiet about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during this period of relative calm, may be forced to break with the United States and Israel, or face popular anger.

Unfortunately for Orangutan, it is all likely to come to a bad end on his watch. He’ll be inclined to blame Obama and the Palestinians, but the unrequited appetite of Israel’s deep settler state is a big part of the problem — and all the deal-making skills in the world can’t wish that away.