Hold the Headline Until Bibi’s on the White House Steps

posted at 3:58 pm on July 5, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ Israel ]   

Bloggers, and a few MSM organizations, are picking up on the interesting timing request of the Israeli rights group B’tselem, which has compiled a report on West Bank settlements that claims 21% of them are on land confiscated from Arabs.  B’tselem’s press release, issued the afternoon of the 5th (in Israel), asks that it be held by news outlets until 6 July.

Israel’s Arutz Sheva, along with a number of bloggers, is speculating that the requested delay is intended to ensure that this headline blares Tuesday morning, just in time for Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, D.C.  (My local MSM paper, the mighty Press-Enterprise, actually picked up on this and posted a link to the Arutz Sheva story on its items-of-interest “Topics” page.  Way to go, PE!)

Arutz Sheva quotes settlement official Danny Dayan as asserting that the 21% figure is a distortion.  He’s not cited making a detailed argument in this particular article, but an excellent primer on settlements and international agreements, from Commentary in December 2009, helps put the issue in perspective.

Dayan points out that no private land has been confiscated without compensation since 1974; the Commentary piece, by David M. Phillips, helps the reader understand that some parties dispute the designation of certain lands as “state land” – and that means they will count the occupation of “state land” as if it was seized without compensation from private owners.  I strongly suspect that accounts for much of the 21% B’tselem comes up with.

Phillips, for example, recounts the reputed prior use of the Maale Adumim settlement land east of Jerusalem as occasional grazing land for nomadic tribes.  Even by the strict standards Israeli courts increasingly upheld from the mid-1970s on, there was no good justification for asserting that the occasional grazing – which could be interrupted by decades of non-use – amounted to a form of customary title to the land.  No private ownership of it had been recognized under the Jordanian mandate or the Ottoman Empire.  Building a settlement on it, whatever other objections could be advanced, simply did not represent the uncompensated seizure of privately-owned land.

This kind of scenario, of course, makes Americans think immediately of our advance across the North American frontier.  The thing about B’tselem’s approach, like that of so many critics, is that it seeks to cloak a political objection in legal arguments.  By the understanding of law universal in Western societies, Israel has not confiscated privately-owned land for settlements, in the manner implied by B’tselem, since the early 1970s.  But if you don’t think Israel has any business having settlements at all, the legal weakness of the argument doesn’t matter to you.   You’ll repeat it because it sounds like an additional indictment – “Hey, in addition to being evil and vicious, the Israelis are illegal.”

Israel is daily on the front lines of the clash of civilizations; how you interpret what is actually happening depends on what your prior beliefs are.  How you talk about it depends on whom you are trying to impress or convince.  B’tselem’s press release, with the instruction to hold it for 6 July, becomes an obvious ploy in the context of this truth, just as the interpretation of what constitutes “confiscation” tells us more about B’tselem than it does about what the mechanisms really are for choosing settlement land.

Meanwhile, B’tselem may well have wasted its time for this Netanyahu trip, in effect heaving a cup of water into a rising surf.  The White House has already said it plans to urge Netanyahu to extend the settlement freeze.  Its spokesman Dan Shapiro has also explicitly said the White House has no comment on the George W. Bush letter from 2004 in which Bush affirmed that the US supports “defensible borders” for Israel.  That formulation means the US recognizes the defensibility of her borders, in a final settlement with the Palestinian Arabs, as a valid, unbreachable principle for Israel’s part in the negotiations.

This remarkable report, moreover, if it’s valid (it cites no sources by name), suggests that Obama has tried to gain Saudi assistance with suppressing the Taliban by promising to make Israel accept the pre-1967 line (which was never an international “border”), and indeed all of the elements of the Saudi “peace plan.”  (I wrote here last year about why that leaves Israel with indefensible borders.)

Unfortunately, this report can’t be assumed to be untrue on the basis that it would be out of character for the current occupant of the White House.  Netanyahu is waging an uphill diplomatic battle with this US administration.  We can watch the MSM tomorrow morning and see if B’tselem’s little spin grenade is given the big launch it needs to dog his steps further.

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