Political Dimensions of the Israeli Settlements Issue: Historic Opportunities and Challenges Open Access

We faced the dilemma of balancing the panel between a short‐term analysis — in this case of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan — with longer‐term scholarly insights less grounded in immediate concerns (a problem that frequently confronts political scientists). The choice of participants and presentations reflected our awareness of that tension. For example, Gilead Sher, a former Israeli government official, discussed the political background of the current Sharon relocation plan, while Ian Lustick and Chaim Kaufmann offered scholarly insights from scholarship. Jonathan Greenberg contributed valuable commentary.

The panel tried to answer, in essence, three sets of questions. First, what theoretical models can conceptualize the Israeli settlement project and its possible rollback? What would such models predict about the possible crisis in Israel over settlement relocation, and are there steps that could mitigate such a crisis? Are there other intellectual endeavors that might be relevant to understating the issue?

Second, we wanted to know which other cases of settler relocation might provide relevant models for resolving this conflict. While we realize the limits of historical analogies and the significance of context, we also believe that history can be instructive. Moreover, the settlement project itself draws heavily on history. It is based on the historical claim of Jews for Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), and it garners its public support, in part, through the evocation of the historical analogy to the pioneering settlement effort that created the infrastructure for the modern‐day state of Israel.

Last, we wanted to identify the core political questions facing Prime Minister Sharon, as he advances his plan for unilateral relocation from Gaza and the northern West Bank. In particular, we wanted to know what political mechanism will approve or block the process and how Sharon is faring in the political game of legitimizing his plan and implementing it.

Understanding the politics of the settlements dilemma is crucial for any progress in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is also a highly complicated and broad issue. It is hoped that this modest contribution will both shed light on a crucial issue and advance the discussion through scholarly insights and review of analogous situations.

In this discussion, I depart somewhat from the conference's focus on internal Israeli politics in favor of the more basic question of how we can reduce the loss of life in Israel and the occupied territories. I do not come to this problem with anything like the deep command of the data that many here have. What I do come with is some possibly useful theoretical tools and some command of the physical and population geography, perhaps just enough to be dangerous. I do not concern myself with issues of law, equity, ideology, politics, negotiation processes, or anything else — although it will turn out that law, at least, will intrude anyway.

It seems to me that the relationship between the Israeli settlers and the Palestinians is a straightforward example of what Robert Jervis called a “security dilemma” ( Jervis 1976: 65). The security dilemma is a variant of the more famous “Prisoner's Dilemma.” A security dilemma game is a two‐player game that has two properties — first, at least one side has some initial suspicion of the other's intentions; second, the measures that either side can take to improve its own security necessarily reduce the security of the other side, whether this effect is intended or not. Thus, any self‐defense measure by one side reduces the security of the second side, which may then lead the latter to increase its security efforts, again reducing the security of the former, and so on, leading to a spiral of increasing mobilization and suspicion, and possibly, war. The archetypical example is an international arms race, but the concept is also a four‐square match for the situation in the occupied territories today.

Until or unless the current structure in the occupied territories is changed, the two sides cannot stop committing violence against each other. In order to protect the settlers, Israel feels compelled to take a variety of steps — including road checkpoints, wholesale arrests, and interrogations with torture — that have the effect of reducing the freedom and even the physical safety of Palestinians. The Palestinians, for their part, cannot improve their own security, unless they can make Israel stop these practices. But Israel cannot do that, until and unless the settlers are removed. And I think a fair‐minded person would have to agree that the Palestinians cannot compel the removal of the settlers or the Israeli Army without resorting to violence.

A security dilemma‐based approach also implies that an appropriately designed structural change could make everyone in both communities safer, reducing not only their need to commit violence, but also their opportunities to do so. And it implies that it may be possible to improve human security in the territories, even if no one's preferences are changed and none of the issues in dispute are resolved. This conclusion follows regardless of who holds governmental power on each side, or even if one side lacks a functioning government. There may be things that can be done even in advance of any of the parties being ready to negotiate.

The key implication is that the structure of the situation — the exact location of Israeli and Palestinian settlements, roads, and other features — strongly determines outcomes. It is possible to improve human security in the occupied territories, but only if the structure of the situation is changed. In principle, there are three structural changes that could be implemented:

1. Remove all or nearly all of the Palestinians (this is an obvious nonstarter).

2. Remove all of the settlers. This will not happen because Israel is the stronger side and has another option available.

3. Remove some of the settlers and protect the rest behind a security wall.

The evidence seems to be that walls work. After Israel built its “security fence” along the Lebanese border in the early 1980s, terrorist penetrations across that border decreased to nothing. I am told that in the decade‐plus that Israel has kept Gaza walled off in this way, not one suicide terrorist has succeeded in penetrating from Gaza into Israel.

Israel needs to minimize three things about the wall around the West Bank. They are

1. the number of settlers outside the wall, who will continue to present a security dilemma for both sides unless they are removed (more than 90 percent of Israeli settlers — except for those who reside in the expanded boundaries of Jerusalem and other settlements, immediately adjacent to the Green Line — will be outside the fence as constructed now);

2. the number of Palestinians inside the wall, for the same reason; and

3. the overall length of the wall, purely to make it more effective.

Political debate in Israel is now in part over how to resolve trade‐offs between these criteria, which arise in particular cases.

The real bite of this analysis comes down to the settlement of Ariel, which is by far the largest settlement so deep in the West Bank. Together with its satellite settlements, it has a population of more than 44,000. If the “middle option” of using a wall to protect some of the settlers in place is to succeed, it must succeed here.

My understanding is that the Israeli government originally intended to include the Ariel settlement inside the wall, but that most analysts now believe that it has given up the idea, even though no formal decision has been taken. This change of course is variously attributed to three factors: (1) pressure from the U.S.; (2) the need to make this section of the fence far longer and more convoluted than any other section of the wall, which could make it too costly to patrol or simply ineffective; and (3) the June 2004 Israeli Supreme Court ruling on sections of the wall northwest of Jerusalem, which said nothing specifically about Ariel, but did set standards of proportionality for burdens that could be imposed on Palestinians in order to improve safety for Israelis — legal tests that the long fence around Ariel would likely fail.

There is said to be a plan to wall in Ariel as a disconnected island within the West Bank, but that would not reduce the security dilemma between the two communities, because Israel would still require military control of the gap between Ariel and the main fence. This gap includes Palestinian settlements and the road accesses upon which they rely.

But if you cannot save Ariel, you cannot save much. It now appears that, except for the expanded boundaries of Jerusalem and other settlements immediately adjacent to the Green Line, more than 90 percent of the remaining Israeli settlers in the West Bank will be outside the fence. It therefore seems to me that the Ariel block of settlements is the single largest obstacle to improving human security on the West Bank.

I came to this problem expecting to find that a security dilemma‐based approach would offer some encouragement for a “middle way” that could improve human security in this case, but in the end, I am driven to a very discouraging conclusion. Until or unless Israel can muster the political will to remove nearly all the settlements (even the largest), the security dilemma on the West Bank will remain just about as bad as it is now, and we cannot expect a sustainable reduction in the level of violence.

Withdrawing settlers unilaterally primarily represents an example of realpolitik. Israel has an existential interest in ending its rule of the occupied territories and ceasing to manage the lives of millions of Palestinians. Unless Israel divests itself of the occupied territories, Muslim Arabs will constitute a majority of people between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan within ten years. Unless Israel divests itself of rule in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, although not necessarily in the form of an agreement, it will, with its own hands, put an end to the Jewish state and bring a binational state into existence. Therefore, Israel needs to define its borders by itself.

Prime Minister Sharon realized the need to define the borders two‐and‐a‐half years into his tenure and initiated the Gaza Disengagement Plan. As this goes to press, a detailed plan is being developed and refined through a cross‐ministerial process involving all levels of government in Israel, amidst harsh public debate and political constraints. The hour is ripe for this initiative because more and more Israelis, from the right and the left, understand the importance of a democratic state with a Jewish majority. They are also aware of the demographic danger that threatens the very existence of such a state. Here is the timeline for the plan:

• December 2003: Sharon announced the initiative in a speech delivered in the Israeli city of Herzliya.

• February 2004: Work on developing a detailed law began within the Israeli bureaucracy.

• September 2004: A blueprint of the law was made public by the government.

• October and November 2004: Submission of the proposal to, and first vote in, the Knesset. (Ed. note: The proposal passed in the Knesset by a vote of sixty‐four to forty‐four, with nine abstentions.)

• March 2005: Government to approve evacuation plan.

A new comprehensive law that addresses the following issues needs to be enacted:

1. the physical evacuation of settlers, severance of property rights, dissolution of leases, and expropriation of land;

2. the need for an equitable assessment mechanism for compensation;

3. the economic effects (such as loss of homes, employment, businesses, and industry);

4. contractual, property, and employment rights; and

5. dissolution of local authorities.

The proposed legislation is modeled after the 1982 law governing the withdrawal from the Sinai but is much more elaborate. It comprises one‐hundred thirty‐eight sections in a multitude of chapters and subchapters, plus three schedules with elaborate compensation models for homes, employees, and businesses. The time constraints on legislation are clear. The draft law is huge, and it needs wide multidisciplinary input in order to get it right.

The stated legislative objectives are: (1) to arrange for the evacuation of Israelis and their moveable assets from the Gaza Strip and a specified region in the north Shomron (Samaria) area, in accordance with the government decision; (2) to provide equitable compensation to those eligible; and (3) to provide evacuation and relocation assistance to those eligible.

Physical evacuation will involve: (1) annulling all rights to, and dissolving all contracts and leases on, land in the territory; (2) creating a staggered time period for evacuation; (3) prohibiting entering or remaining in the “territory” from the evacuation date; (4) establishing criminal sanctions; and (5) transferring possession of the land back to the custodianship of the Israeli government.

The law will set up a compensation assessment commission with powers to hear and process claims, review evidence, and issue assessments and appraisals. It will also set up a procedure for submitting claims and filing appeals. The essence of the plan is an on‐the‐ground redeployment of forces and dismantling of settlements. It has four main drawbacks:

1. It is unilateral.

2. Israel continues to control the perimeter of Gaza, the airport, and the Philadelphia corridor (a strip several hundred meters wide that separates Egypt from Gaza).

3. There is no third‐party mandate.

4. There is no Palestinian statehood, leaving the political status of the land ambiguous.

Let me offer a few thoughts about possible consequences of the disengagement plan, not all of which are favorable. For one thing, within Israel there is the possibility that national elections will take place either in summer 2005 or in the beginning of 2006. Moreover, there is a growing debate over the issue of whether some sort of national referendum should take place before the plan is implemented.

On the international front, even if the plan is implemented, Israel is likely to continue to control the perimeter of Gaza without allowing a new political entity to emerge in the strip. This will also undermine international recognition of “end‐of‐occupation” status. In other words, the plan may produce few, if any, gains in terms of international legitimacy. Contributing to the international community's reluctance to give Israel much credit for this initiative are Israel's unwillingness to negotiate the plan with Palestinian representatives and likely Israeli retaliation against probable Palestinian terrorism during a protracted implementation process.

After disengagement, Israel may seek to reach a permanent status agreement via the “package approach” of the Oslo Peace Process, or it may negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian State with Provisional Borders (PSPB) as provided for in the second phase of the Road Map for Peace, which was drafted in 2003. Finally, it could bring into being a PSPB through unilateral recognition. I recommend the establishment of a PSPB of some form.

The current situation, as well as the lack of capacities on the Palestinian side, have made clear that third‐party involvement (subject to a defined mandate) will be required to restore stability and to enable progress whether in the event of an agreement or of unilateral disengagement. The aim is to add an international presence to the set of policy options available to the Israeli leadership in its quest for providing peace and security to its citizens.

Israel could make effective use of the new intervention tools developed within the international community over the past decade. Such tools range from informal guidance and monitoring to the establishment of international transitional governing authorities. It should be noted that the level of intervention required is highest during the first phase of any separation process. The operational capacities can take on a wide array of scopes and structures, including security‐verification mechanisms, settlement‐monitoring mechanisms, and the monitoring of incitement and of Palestinian state‐building efforts.

During my first stay in Israel as a student in 1969, I came to the conclusion that the settlements would become the main obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. I came to feel passionately about this issue, and by the early 1970s launched an international effort among Jews to oppose settlements in favor of a peaceful Palestinian state side‐by‐side with Israel. We were a small group, and although we attracted some attention in the Israeli press, the government of Israel — which included some of today's leading doves and settlement opponents — ignored us. So, I cannot help but feel a bit vindicated by this conference.

But despite our efforts, a large‐scale settlement movement did develop and has created an enormous obstacle to peace based on the concept of two states — Israel and Palestine. This is not an insoluble problem. To address it properly, however, one must not only master the details of this particular conflict, but bring to bear an understanding of the dynamics of similar problems that raise questions about how states (especially democratic states) can decide to shrink themselves.

States rarely contract themselves by choice. But when they do, the payoffs are usually very high. In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian was vilified by military commanders and other contemporaries outraged at his decision to retreat from Mesopotamia and Scotland in order to improve the empire's overall staying power. Hadrian's Wall across Scotland symbolizes this courageous decision. Historians agree it was a brilliant move that helped Rome survive for centuries more.

As it is with bodies, so it is with states. It is usually much easier to get bigger than to get smaller. States expand in regular patterns, and successful state expansion is the story of much of political history. The most effective model of state expansion involves following up a military conquest or an inheritance of territories with the cooptation of local elites. Ownership of land is granted by the new sovereign to local elites. In return, local elites abandon claims of local sovereignty and contribute their influence over local populations to the enforcement of the core state's rule of the newly acquired territory, which will eventually be absorbed. This is how an outlying territory becomes an institutionalized part of the core state.

In another, less effective method of state expansion, settlers are used to populate the new territory. This can be a huge mistake, unless the settlers can annihilate the native population or render it demographically and politically irrelevant (which is what happened in the United States). However, if settlers in the new territory make up 10 to 20 percent of the population and a decisively important political force within the regime of the core state, the seeds of long‐term political disaster are planted. Conflict arises because the settlers interrupt the process of central state cooptation of local elites. The settlers oppose central state assimilationist policies based on granting local native elites land rights. They want the land for themselves and fear competition from the natives. The settlers get in the way of state policies of cooptation and assimilation, the natives rebel, the state comes in to protect the settlers, the state declares a new policy of liberalization toward the natives, the settlers sabotage the policy, and the cycle begins again.

So when a substantial settler population — large enough to exercise decisive political influence over policies toward that territory but not large enough to dominate the natives without central state support — is used to extend central state control over an outlying territory, a kind of pathological political condition is created. This is the condition that developed over long periods of time in Britain's relationship to Ireland, in France's relationship to Algeria, and in Israel's relationship to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Understanding the challenges of state contraction in such conditions requires a general understanding that state expansion and contraction are not symmetrical processes. Institutionalization of a territory into a state is a process in which ties to the territory become tighter and tighter. In Unsettled States, Disputed Lands (Lustick 1993), I modeled that process as a progressive deepening of the kind of problems that separation from the territory would trigger in the core state. If a state can separate from a territory it acquired without generating powerful effects within itself, it can be said that the ties to that territory were not strongly institutionalized. On the other hand, not only are strong ties to a territory reflected in the depth of the crises liable to erupt within the core state if the territory is relinquished, but it is possible to plot the changing status of a territory in relationship to a central state by the kinds of crises within it that would be associated with separation. States can tighten ties to acquired territories in ways that push their relationship to the territory in question beyond two thresholds of institutionalization. Passage of each of these thresholds, in the state‐building or state‐expanding direction, registers an order‐of‐magnitude shift in the consequences of moving backward toward state contraction for the political system in the core state.

With two thresholds of institutionalization in mind, three stages can be imagined: one before the first threshold; one between the thresholds; and one after the second threshold. In the first, “incumbent” stage of institutionalization, the core state does not so much relate to the territory as a part of the state but as an asset that may or may not be worth the cost of keeping it. Core state elites who attempt to disengage from the territory at this stage risk only their political careers and the integrity of ruling coalitions. As powerful groups within the core state, which could include settlers established in the territory as well as their allies at home, begin to think of the territory as part of the core state, elites who subsequently attempt to disengage may not only risk incumbency but will fear as well extra‐legal threats to the regime and to the legitimacy of the ruling apparatus. These threats may include assassinations, mass civil disobedience, or even civil war. When these concerns become most salient to disengagement‐oriented elites, the regime threshold within the process of institutionalizing the expanded shape of the state has been crossed. Accordingly, the relationship between state and territory is in the second, “regime” stage.

If elites and masses within the core state become so habituated to rule of the territory and to its incorporation into the state, the relationship may become even more deeply institutionalizing, passing the threshold into the third or “hegemonic” stage. At this point, the issue of the territory's future disappears from the state's agenda because the territory is perceived as part of the state and efforts to disengage are considered secessionist treason. Even in this stage, however, the tie can still be broken, but in addition to incumbency risks and risks of threats to the regime, elites have to battle against naturalized conceptions and well‐established notions that the territory is a permanent and integral part of the state. Elites in this situation risk ridicule and political irrelevance and must achieve a kind of ideological or cognitive revolution in perceptions in order not to withdraw from the territory but to simply push the problem back across the hegemonic threshold into the regime stage where, again, threats to the integrity of the legal order will still confront those committed to disengagement.

The goal of settlers who want to establish central state rule of the outlying territory as permanently as possible is to first move the status of the relationship from the incumbent stage to the regime stage (so that the state cannot disengage without risking civil war and the legitimacy of the state), and then from the regime stage, past the hegemony threshold, to the point where the population of the core state can no longer imagine their country existing without the territory forming an integral part of it.

My research on Algeria and Ireland, in State‐Building Failure in British Ireland and French Algeria (Lustick 1985) strongly suggests that settler communities that conform to the demographic proportions outlined above are very likely, despite their stated intentions, to prevent the institutionalization of the core‐to‐territory tie beyond the hegemony threshold. Hegemony requires habituation, routinization, and naturalization. If settler demands for local supremacy regularly subvert central state policies that could satisfy native majorities (or at least their elites), these processes will be repeatedly disrupted.

Thus, in Algeria, settlers helped push the project of state expansion known as Algerie française past the regime threshold but not the hegemony threshold. Settler subversion of the French Third and Fourth Republic's efforts to grant land and citizenship rights to Muslims in Algeria prevented the habituation of Muslims to French rule, triggered bloody revolts (including, of course, the Algerian Revolution), and eventually produced within France a large segment of the population that not only did not see Algeria as part of France but actively worked to disengage France from it. In other words, the settlers succeeded, with their metropolitan allies, in pushing the status of Algeria across the regime threshold and helped destroy the Fourth Republic when its governments showed signs of moving toward state contraction. But they could not prevent French President Charles de Gaulle, having reconstituted the French regime under the Fifth Republic, from contracting the state over the regime threshold and then leaving Algeria altogether. By 1961, the feeling on the part of the French public was that Algeria was not important, and withdrawal went unopposed.

In Britain in the early nineteenth century, the governing class did see Ireland as a natural and inevitable part of the United Kingdom. But decades of oppression of Catholics in Ireland, largely at the hands of Protestant settlers, led to circumstances — famine, mass starvation, land hunger, anarchy, terrorism, and a mass‐based nationalist movement — that stripped Ireland's hegemonic status in British politics. Settler opposition to crossing the regime threshold — which was expressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as extra‐legal and even violent opposition to “Home Rule”— was eventually overcome, at least in part, by Lloyd George's partition of the island and the emergence of an independent Ireland in the south.

In Israel from 1967 to 1980, the occupied territories were in the incumbent stage of institutionalization, not thought to be (or at least not able to be treated as) part of Israel by significant portions of the political class. Since the early 1980s, though, thanks largely to the unintended consequences of the Labor party's decision not to decide the fate of the territories, the dedicated efforts of expansion‐minded settlers, and the policies of successive supportive Likud governments, the occupied territories passed into the regime stage.

Since the early 1980s, the risks of internal disruption in Israel associated with disengagement have included threats to regime stability as well as to incumbent political careers and ruling coalitions. On the other hand, just as settlers interfered with the process of passing the hegemony threshold in Britain and France, so, too, did their demands for massive land expropriations and denial of political rights to Palestinian Arabs defeat their own dreams of “making the Green Line disappear.” Two intifadas (Palestinian uprisings) have pushed the problem of the West Bank and Gaza back against the regime threshold. Indeed, it took the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a settler supporter in 1995 to subvert the Oslo Process that was leading the country toward disengagement.

Now that disengagement from the Gaza Strip has been adopted as the policy of the Israeli government, regime‐level threats of mass disobedience, mutiny, and even assassinations again arise. However, threats of violent and disruptive resistance by settlers and their allies can be part of the solution, not just the problem. As Winston Churchill saw in 1914 (although Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ultimately rejected his plan) and as Charles de Gaulle showed to be true in response to the settlers’ Barricades Rebellion in 1960 and the Generals’ Putsch of 1961, extremism can be used to move territories out of the regime stage back into the incumbent stage. The need to protect the state from extremism and violence can justify decisive measures and redefine the problem for the masses as the stability of their country, the integrity of their bank accounts, and the respect of state institutions like the army.

Indeed, had Prime Minister Rabin used this strategy in response to the massacre of Arabs in Hebron by a settler in 1994, he probably could have imposed a two‐state solution. His timidity, however, gave too many chances to extremists on both sides to disrupt and discredit the process of deinstitutionalizing the West Bank and Gaza from the Israeli polity.

When compared to Britain and France, it would seem that, on balance, contraction will be easier for Israel. The Israeli military supports getting out of the territories, whereas most commanders in the British and French militaries opposed abandoning Ireland or Algeria. For many decades, British and French public opinion was massively opposed to any break in those countries’ control over Ireland or Algeria, while opposition to permanent rule of the West Bank and Gaza has always been significant within Israeli public opinion. In both Britain and France, the outlying territories were legally absorbed into the state — not so in Israel. Additionally, the geographical separation of Ireland and Algeria from the metropolis convinced most Protestants in Ireland and the pieds noirs (French settlers) in Algeria that, if they lost the battle against disengagement, they would lose their entire way of life. This created in many of them a willingness to fight to the bitter end. The fact that Israeli settlers can move just a few kilometers and actually improve their standard of living suggests the mass base for violent resistance will be smaller in Israel than in British Ireland or French Algeria.

In other respects, contraction will be more difficult for Israel than it was for France. The Israeli settlers are better organized than the French settlers were. Aid from the U.S. creates a political cocoon around the Israeli political system that insulates the masses from the gravity of their problem. In addition, Israeli leaders seem unwilling to exploit settler extremism and tolerate risk of regime instability. Absent daring leadership, then, a solution to the West Bank and Gaza problem may resemble Britain's partial withdrawal from Ireland. If this technique is adopted by Israel, the comparison suggests the possibility of a “Northern Ireland”‐type problem continuing between Israel and the Palestinians for a very long time to come.

I am not going to critique or engage Ian Lustick's theory itself, but I do want to look at the case of Algeria as a comparison. Historical analogies should be rigorously examined.

In Algeria, 1.2 million French settlers lived among eight to nine million native Muslims. There are two important differences between Algeria and the Israeli‐occupied territories. First, the underlying rationale of the occupation of Algeria was the civilizing mission underlying the larger French colonial project. Colonialism collapsed as an ideology internationally around the time of French withdrawal. Colonizing states realized that the game was up. In 1962, 92 percent of the French people indicated that they accepted the independence of Algeria. The radical transformation of norms in such a short time period is unlikely to be replicated in the Israeli case to a comparable extent.

Second, even at withdrawal, there was the feeling that Algeria and France were powerfully tied. There was a symbiotic relationship between their economies.

Another difference between the two situations is that the scale of violence in Algeria was much greater than in the Israel–Palestine conflict. In the second intifada, 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians have died, whereas 18,000 French soldiers, 4,000 French settlers, and around 140,000 Muslim Algerians died in Algeria.

I want to comment on the analogy between Israel and Algeria. What we are discussing here is a unilateral disengagement process. The disengagement between France and Algeria was a negotiation process that resulted in an agreement. It was not unilateral. This is a major difference. The second point I want to make is that disengagement is a default plan. It is not the preferred plan but rather the least objectionable alternative to us right now. We cannot wait until there is a legitimate negotiating partner on the other side. The time for withdrawal is now. The internal dialogue needs to back off from slogans and become an in‐depth discussion of interests.

I support unilateral withdrawal. There was a unilateral proposal in France in the 1950s to create a partitioned territory along Algeria's coastal region, including Algiers and Oran, to remain under the control of French Algerians. It was called the “Palestinian plan,” and it ultimately was not endorsed. Its weaknesses were seen as including the weaknesses many see in the Sharon plan: with no partner, there is no commitment that can be relied upon to end the violence or end irredentism after the withdrawal.

The opposition to the “Palestinian plan” came from both sides: the settlers and, obviously, the Algerians. The settlers did not want disengagement like that.

I talked about the law of the conservation of risk and suffering in a 1994 article and a book. Unionists objected to giving Ireland to the Catholics through the Home Rule program. Churchill made the recommendation and put into effect a plan to provoke the Ulster forces to revolt, then come down with the full force of the state on top of them and get out of Ulster. But there was a mutiny in the British army — soldiers refused to go into Ulster. Instead of risking a regime crisis (as Churchill wanted to in 1914) that easily could have been absorbed, and then getting out, Asquith forced Churchill to back down. Asquith avoided a painful regime crisis by not imposing the Home Rule Bill that Parliament had adopted. Ireland was eventually partitioned, and the suffering and instability associated with continued British rule of Northern Ireland stretched over the next eighty years.

The focus of the first panel was on the identity interests at issue and what steps could be taken to reconcile the interests, how we could get the settlers to accept leaving the settlements. But with this panel, the theme is that Israel should get tough and withdraw, no matter what the settlers want. Is there a way to bridge this? Is a more reconciliatory approach possible?

In Ireland, there were attempts to get Unionists to join Gladstone to implement Home Rule. But any settler who showed a willingness to talk about withdrawal options lost political clout in the community. Not until some Ulster politicians — facing complete abandonment by a Unionist government after the Anglo–Irish War (the Irish Republican Army's “intifada”) — showed themselves willing to abandon the small minority of Protestants in the South in order to preserve British rule of Northern Ireland, did a kind of “bridge” become possible.

In the 1960s to 1980s, no one thought that South African apartheid could end without massive violence, but it happened. Granted, there is no Nelson Mandela on the Palestinian side with whom to negotiate. But Israel can learn from South Africa.

The settlements are killing us. They are fracturing Israeli society. I do not think a prolonged debate and negotiation with the settlers is in our interest. There are so many issues here (religious, political, legal, etc.). An action needs to be taken by the decision makers in Israel. Unfortunately, there is no legitimate partner on the Palestinian side with whom to negotiate.

Sher's statement that there is no partner is a political statement, not an analytic one. Israel does not think it has a partner. But potential partners exist. The most popular and effective Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, for example, is sitting in prison, sentenced by an Israeli court he did not recognize to five life terms plus seventy‐five years. The question is when Israel will be willing to recognize an effective Palestinian leader as a partner.

The negotiating partner needs to be the person making the decisions for Palestinians. We cannot identify this person.

Perhaps Israel needs to find the person it is willing to lose to, like South Africa found in Mandela. This person must have some basis for making a moral or ethical claim that Israel is comfortable with.

Israel has withdrawn from territories many times, from Sinai, Lebanon, and was willing to withdraw from the Golan Heights — when it hurt too much to keep them. The political cocoon around Israel allows Israel to put off making tough decisions about the occupied territories. The U.S. keeps funneling money to Israel, prolonging the problem. Eisenhower told France that it must negotiate with Algeria or it would not get a $100‐million dollar loan guarantee. That had a huge influence on France's willingness to negotiate a withdrawal.