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Sharon Government's Separation Plan Defines Palestine's Provisional Borders

By Geoffrey Aronson
Foundation for Middle East Peace
Posted on Thursday July 31, 2003

“Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories”
July-August 2003

The territorial division of historical Palestine has entered its most decisive stage since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in June 1967. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon is the prime instigator of this process, against which the vaunted road map, a creature of multilateral diplomacy now championed by the Bush administration, struggles to remain relevant.

In a variety of roles over the last generation, Sharon has labored to undermine an Israeli withdrawal to the June 1967 lines. He has masterminded the settlement map that is the template of the “separation zone”—popularly known as the “fence” or the “wall”—that is fast dividing the occupied territories between Israel and an ersatz Palestine—the “state with provisional borders” whose creation is called for in the road map.

“The map of the fence is the same map I saw during every visit Arik [Sharon] made here [Ariel] since 1978,” explained Ron Nachman, mayor of the settlement of Ariel, near Nablus. “He told me that he’s been thinking about it since 1973.”

Sharon has not only been thinking of this map, he has been busy fashioning it on the ground. His long-held vision of the territorial division of Palestine is now well on its way to being realized. He views the border now taking shape in the West Bank—Gaza’s separation into Israeli and Palestinian enclaves on the same model is all but complete—as his historical contribution, on par with David Ben Gurion’s creation of the state in 1948 and Menachem Begin’s peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, to the consolidation of Israeli hegemony over the Land of Israel.

The map now being carved out in the hills and plains of the West Bank confirms most but not all of Sharon’s historical strategic objectives:

Israel retains strategic command over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Arab populations in Jordan and Egypt are separated from their brethren in Palestine by Israeli-controlled or settled territory.

Palestinians are separated from each other and from Palestinian citizens of Israel by borders based upon settlement blocs.

Territorial continuity is established in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza by a small number of bridges or tunnels and in the Jerusalem area by a ring road.

Sharon is under no illusion that such a prescription will “end the conflict.” He is convinced that this will only come about when Palestinians surrender completely. In the meantime he is determined to realize his ambition of establishing the territorial and political parameters for the “long-term interim agreement” that he has championed for many years. As with Israeli efforts during the Oslo era to design a model for ruling the territories, Sharon aims at an internationally recognized agreement—pace the road map—with acknowledged Palestinian leaders, not as a prescription for ending the conflict but as a way to manage it, as Israel has done, albeit at increasing cost, for almost 30 years.

The one concession Sharon is prepared to make to his long-held beliefs, and the one that has so shocked his comrades in the settlement movement, is his prescription for Palestinian statehood as a reluctant accomodation to the Palestinian’s unassailable demographic lead in the populated heartland of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In contrast to his views as a settlement visionary in 1976 and to those held by many settler leaders today, Sharon is now prepared to pay a price in West Bank and Gaza territory—the 50 percent of the former and 80 percent of the latter that will comprise the new, nominally sovereign state of Palestine—to protect a Jewish majority in Greater Israel.

The division of Palestine according to this prescription is the synergistic outcome of a number of factors: principally Israel’s system of settlements and roads, now as always the key elements of Israel’s intention to preempt Palestinian control; the settlement “outpost” phenomenon, which aims in part at capturing territory in West Bank areas where the trajectory of the emerging border is still open to internal Israeli debate; and the “fence,” which is more accurately described as a border-like separation barrier.

The Israeli preference for the creation of a physical border as a solution to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is of relatively recent vintage. Since June 1967, Israeli proponents and opponents of the occupation have supported the erasure of the physical border and encouraged a wide range of contacts between the two peoples.

In the new era commencing with the 1991 Gulf War, this conventional wisdom was turned on its head. Since the construction of a short wall along the Green Line in 1995, Israeli public opinion has successfully demanded the creation of a physical barrier that it hopes will ensure its security, if not necessarily demarcate a political border.

Sharon has always been adept at taking an accurate measure of the forces engaged on an issue and turning them to his own purpose. He was initially opposed to a 300 km-long security zone more or less along the 1967 Green Line border, as were most members of the country’s political and security establishment. Like Sharon, they saw the project as the result of the Israeli public’s search for a simplistic answer to Palestinian attacks, a solution they considered expensive, unwieldy, and ineffective. Yet Sharon embraced the public demand to be rid of Palestinians even as he transformed it to his own purpose.

Following a series of decisions (some of which have been implemented and others of which are imminent) bolstered by effective lobbying from the settlement movement, the trajectory of the security barriers has ballooned to almost 600 kms along routes on either side of the 45–50 percent of the West Bank heartland, which together with 70–80 percent of the Gaza Strip, Israel has reserved for Palestine.

Pragmatic elements in the settlement movement have understood, like Sharon, that having lost the battle over the fence, their best option was to influence its route. Pinchas Wallerstein, a leader of the YESHA council, explained their views as follows: “Maximum Jewish population, with minimum Arab population, over maximum area, and all as part of an effort to correct losses that the fence along the Green Line will bring about.”

The changing route of the separation zone exemplifies the success of the settlers’ campaign and its transformation under Sharon’s guidance from a security measure to a far-reaching political fait accompli. Among the important way stations are Sharon’s decision soon after construction commenced in August 2002 to extend the fence to the east of the settlement of Alfe Menashe, followed by an IDF recommendation in early 2003, initiated by settlers and supported publicly by Sharon in mid-May, to include the Ariel “finger,” 20 km from the Green Line, adding 32,000 settlers and 7,000 Palestinians to the 20,000 Israelis and 11,500 Palestinians already included west of the zone.

On March 23 Sharon announced his intention to construct a security zone along the mountain ridge west of the Jordan Valley, at once almost doubling the physical distance and cost of the project, now estimated at 580 km and more than $1 billion. Two months later Sharon declared that the Beit El and Shilo settlements, west of the Alon Road and commanding Route 60, a vital transportation artery for Palestinians between Nablus and Ramallah, would not be evacuated, suggesting that the path of the eastern separation zone would also include “fingers” reaching west of the Alon Road to the settlements of Elon Moreh, Itamar, Shilo, Eli, and Ofra and south of Jerusalem to Tekoa, Nokdim, and Kiryat Arba/Hebron.

Still undecided is the route in the region west of Ramallah, where setters are lobbying for the inclusion of the Talmon bloc of settlements. The route preferred by settlers is not inconsistent with the principle established by the inclusion of Ariel and Alfe Menache. It would add 6 settlements with a population of 4,500 to the 10 settlements with a population of 30,000 included in a less expansive option. Adoption of the more expansive option would add thirteen Palestinian villages with a population of 24,000 to 41,000 Palestinians residing west of the principal separation barrier in this region.

The route south to Jerusalem and along the eastern and western perimeters of the Bethlehem-Hebron region is only tentatively outlined, with the exception of 22 km in the north and south of Jerusalem, only 10km of which is completed. The southern sector will include Bethlehem’s Rachel’s Tomb and surrounding Palestinian residential areas, as well as the main road into Bethlehem from Jerusalem, which now ends abruptly just north of town.

When finished in late 2004, the separation zones could leave on the “Israeli” side more than 50 percent of the West Bank and as many as 366,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Palestinians, in protests echoed by the international community, argue that the Sharon government is arbitrarily determining the borders of the Palestinian state called for in the road map. In response to such concerns, Sharon may concede the creation of a contiguous barrier in regions like Ariel, relying instead on a series of security perimeters encircling each settlement.

Notwithstanding such tactical modifications, Sharon is not prepared to abandon his long-held grand design nor contemplate an international demand that would oblige him to do so.