There WAS an Agreement On The Settlements
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Elliot Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a U.S. official who handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009, has written a forceful op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on the agreement between the United States and Israel on the issue of the settlements and natural growth.
We’ve all heard in recent weeks from the current administration’s talking heads that, despite popular belief, there supposedly was never any agreement between the U.S. and Israel on the issue of natural growth. This chatter arose from Obama’s recent hardline attitude toward Israel and his demands that Israel cease all settlement activity, including natural growth.
When Arial Sharon, one of Israel’s most hawkish prime ministers at the time, made history by announcing his acceptance of a future Palestinian state and his plan for complete disengagement from Gaza, including uprooting and displacing thousands of Israeli residents, it wasn’t because he woke up one day with a reckless itch that needed scratching. It was entirely the result of strong promises and assurances by President Bush that his doing so would result in the backing of the U.S. on certain issues.
One of those issues was natural growth in existing settlements. As Elliot Abrams—a man on the inside of these talks—attests, the U.S. agreed to allow natural growth as long as they adhered to a few conditions, including taking no additional land for such growth and pulling out of Gaza and a few West Bank settlements.
Israel’s acquiescense in this disengagement and displacement hinged entirely on these promises. For the current administration to “undo” these assurances, knowing that Israel cannot “undo” their disengagement and displacement, is one of Obama’s most backstabbing betrayals yet, and a testament to his utter lack of integrity.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been at the forefront defending Obama’s hardline tactics, claiming that there was never any such understanding or assurances, but Elliot Abrams went out of his way to lay out the entire sequence of events and understandings in his WSJ piece. I strongly encourage everyone to read it.
Here is an excerpt from it, which I think is the main essence of it:
On the major settlement blocs, Mr. Bush said, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” Several previous administrations had declared all Israeli settlements beyond the “1967 borders” to be illegal. Here Mr. Bush dropped such language, referring to the 1967 borders — correctly — as merely the lines where the fighting stopped in 1949, and saying that in any realistic peace agreement Israel would be able to negotiate keeping those major settlements.
On settlements we also agreed on principles that would permit some continuing growth. Mr. Sharon stated these clearly in a major policy speech in December 2003: “Israel will meet all its obligations with regard to construction in the settlements. There will be no construction beyond the existing construction line, no expropriation of land for construction, no special economic incentives and no construction of new settlements.”
Ariel Sharon did not invent those four principles. They emerged from discussions with American officials and were discussed by Messrs. Sharon and Bush at their Aqaba meeting in June 2003.
They were not secret, either. Four days after the president’s letter, Mr. Sharon’s Chief of Staff Dov Weissglas wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “I wish to reconfirm the following understanding, which had been reached between us: 1. Restrictions on settlement growth: within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria.”
Stories in the press also made it clear that there were indeed “agreed principles.” On Aug. 21, 2004 the New York Times reported that “the Bush administration . . . now supports construction of new apartments in areas already built up in some settlements, as long as the expansion does not extend outward.”
In recent weeks, American officials have denied that any agreement on settlements existed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated on June 17 that “in looking at the history of the Bush administration, there were no informal or oral enforceable agreements. That has been verified by the official record of the administration and by the personnel in the positions of responsibility.”
These statements are incorrect. Not only were there agreements, but the prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation — the dissolution of his government, the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza, and the removal of four small settlements in the West Bank. This was the first time Israel had ever removed settlements outside the context of a peace treaty, and it was a major step.
[...] and his State Department on the construction in the Israeli capital of Jerusalem. As I pointed out previously on this blog, there was an agreement between the United States and Israel on the issue of settlement [...]