E1 Settlement Expansion: Why Europe’s Outrage over Israel’s Plan is Pure Theater
Now, as this fact is abundantly clear, the European allies of Israel still pretend to hold on to their 30-year-old trick. Nobody should buy it.
International condemnation of the new plan for the expansion of the E1 settlement, particularly on the part of Israel’s Western European allies, is little more than theater. Although it is true that the construction of some 3,400 settler units as part of the project bisects the West Bank, this is far from what makes a so-called “Two State solution” possible.
The United Kingdom, France, Australia, and Canada have signalled their intentions to recognize Palestine as a State at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly scheduled for this September. In response, an outburst of opposition immediately came from Israeli politicians, including Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Although the recognition is more symbolic than anything, Israel treats the move as a serious diplomatic threat. This is partly due to the government’s rejection of a Palestinian State, but also due to their public’s opposition to what has been the consensus conclusion to Israel’s occupation for decades: the Two-State solution.
The E1 settlement plans were indeed frozen for decades due to foreign opposition. This is because the expansion of illegal settlements in this area will effectively cut off the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem, dividing the occupied West Bank into two.
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While former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may have been behind the push to expand the settlement, the idea was originally conceived by Labour Party leader Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
Rabin was dubbed a “peacemaker” by Israel’s Western allies, yet was known as a tyrant by Palestinians, as he was the architect of the “bone-breaker strategy” against non-violent demonstrators during the First Intifada.
Sharon had proposed the settlement to go ahead in the early 2000s, as he also approved the “Gaza disengagement” policy to withdraw settlers from the coastal Palestinian territory. It was more of a move that was an olive branch to the settler movement, after withdrawing them from Gaza and choosing to occupy the territory from its periphery instead.
Israel’s recent move to unfreeze the E1 settlement plans appears to be Tel Aviv lashing out at its Western allies, as this initiative doesn’t actually represent some kind of final death blow to a Two-State solution.
In 1993, when Oslo I, or the Declaration of Principles, was signed, it was sold as evidence of Israel’s intention to pursue the creation of two States. However, at that time, only 200,000 Israeli settlers were living on illegally seized West Bank land; today, there are at least 750,000 living there.
Israel never for one moment relinquished its goal of colonizing the occupied West Bank, and their US allies, while voicing their alleged concerns at each critical juncture, accepted each new set of realities Israel imposed on the ground without imposing any consequences.
Take Israel’s ongoing ‘Greater Jerusalem’ settlement project in its entirety, and the plan becomes very clear. Although E1, which is an extension to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, does complete the goal of physically severing the “north” and “south” of the West Bank, this territorial separation already exists when the occupying regime chooses so.
If you go to the occupied West Bank and travel between Ramallah and Bethlehem, the route you will take will include a stop at a large Israeli checkpoint, which the Israeli border police can simply close off at will anyway.
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You need only take a look at a map to see this all in action. The Oslo Accords introduced a system of separate areas inside the occupied territory: Area A, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) has security and administrative control, Area B, where the PA has administrative control, and Area C, which is under full Israeli army domination.
Area A creates Palestinian enclaves in the major population centers, while Area B wraps around these enclaves and represents many villages. Meanwhile, Area C is 60% of the West Bank, and all that territory isolates Areas A and B into segregated enclaves.
On the ground, what this Oslo system has led to over decades is that Israel has been granted a PA collaborator security force that manages the population centers on their behalf, cracking down on resistance with an iron fist and doing so with Western funding. Meanwhile, Israel has steadily expanded its system of walls and fences, seizing more land while expanding its settlements slowly over decades.
It is a plan that has been implemented incrementally, successfully isolating all major cities completely from one another. Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho, Bethlehem, and Al-Khalil, to name the major enclave areas, are all separated and function as separate bantustans.
Even when it comes to individual villages, their roads are blocked with cement blocks, while the entrances are covered with gates that Israeli soldiers decide to open or close arbitrarily. Meanwhile, other villages are located in between, or are partially eaten up by settlements, the people’s olive groves are slowly confiscated by settlers, and incrementally, extremist Israelis come to establish outposts on their lands whenever they choose.
So, no, E1 doesn’t suddenly serve as a major game changer for the mythical Two-State solution; it is just one more step to further isolate different regions of the territory and make life more difficult. This process has certainly accelerated since October 7, 2023, but it was always the plan that anyone who has visited the occupied West Bank can clearly see.
The reason why it is sold as a game-changer is that the European allies of Israel want to pretend as if the territory hasn’t already been de facto annexed, which it has. When Israel talks now about imposing annexation, this is more of a legal matter than a physical one, with the big exception being for the way this will impact over 300,000 Palestinians living in Area C, who will likely face ethnic cleansing.
As much as the Israelis need to be held accountable for their egregious violations of international law in the West Bank, which killed any notion of a Two-State solution, the allies of Israel are equally culpable. They understood well that Tel Aviv never sought to allow for a Palestinian State and that they were only using Oslo to their benefit, with no intention of ever coming to a resolution.
Now, as this fact is abundantly clear, the European allies of Israel still pretend to hold on to their 30-year-old trick. Nobody should buy it. Israel seeks to seize all of Palestine and beyond; this is now the objective truth. Recognizing Palestine now is too little too late; if they were genuine, they would have imposed a full economic embargo, anything short of this is virtue signalling.
Photo: Israeli soldiers demolish a Palestinian building in the so-called Area C, in the occupied West Bank. Source: WAFA.
See also:
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