At Maskiot, the Bulldozers Speak

Gershom Gorenberg

You could call the timing mere coincidence. Yesterday Bibi met Barack Obama, who told him to stop settlement building:

Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements.  Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward.  That’s a difficult issue.  I recognize that, but it’s an important one and it has to be addressed.

And the day before, as if to answer Obama in advance, contractors visited Maskiot in order to prepare bids to start construction of a settlement at the site. (A Ma’ariv report in Hebrew is here.) The Jordan Rift Regional Council – the local government for Israeli settlements along the Jordan River in the West Bank – issued the call for bids last week.

Let’s say this is just business as usual; no one was even paying attention to Obama. That’s also a slap in the face.

Right now, Maskiot is home to a pre-army academy. Building housing for families there is, for all intents, a break with the official policy in force since the early 1990s of not establishing new settlements.  Then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz approved construction at the site a couple of years ago, and then backed down under American pressure.

Last July, with Ehud Barak as defense minister, approval was reissued.  By then, apparently, the Bush administration had stopped paying attention. As I explained here at SoJo at the time, Maskiot is

…in the Jordan Rift area, which the Labor Party has treated as kosher for settlement since the fall of 1967, under the Allon Plan. Labor’s idea of what’s kosher is like that of a person who eats crab but won’t touch pork because it’s a symbol. A Jordan Rift settlement is as illegal under international law as a settlement next to Ramallah, and is as much an obstacle to peacekeeping.

Maskiot is intended for settlers  from Shirat Hayam – an illegal outpost in the Gaza Strip, evacuated with the rest of the Gaza settlements in 2005. As a reward for settling without government approval, they now get an approved settlement.  As Isabel Kershner reported last summer, approval of Maskiot was supposed to be part of a deal between Barak and settler leaders: In return for the go-ahead, some unapproved outposts would be quietly evacuated. But outpost settlers regard establishment settlement leaders as sellouts, and reject such deals. Children, for your homework, count how many ways this makes a mockery of the rule of law.

Arguably, this is all symbolism. The policy of not approving new settlements hasn’t stopped the rapid population growth in the existing settlements, or establishment of the outposts.

But the symbolism does matter at the moment: Whatever is discussed in the Oval Office, the bulldozers keep working.

To alter Pete Seeger’s words only a tiny bit:

We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools kept yelling to push on