The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are so closely linked in the consciousness that it’s easy to forget that these two parts of Palestine are very different. They are not adjacent to each other geographically. They are different religiously, topographically and socially. Their fates are linked through an accident of history which left them as the only parts of Mandate Palestine which weren’t conquered by Zionists during the 1948 war.
Since 1967 the two places have had a common experience of brutalisation at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers. In the court of world opinion, the West Bank and Gaza have been designated, at once understandably and ludicrously, as the future site of a Palestinian state.
But still the two places are very different. Gaza, the most crowded place on Earth, is tiny, containing a few towns and many refugee camps. Nearly all Palestinians in Gaza are Muslim. The West Bank by contrast is relatively large and diverse. It contains half a dozen cities, as well as many towns, villages, farms and mountains. It has a substantial Christian population.
To use an anatomical analogy, the West Bank is Palestine’s mountainous spine, Gaza its superfluous appendix.
Israel has always viewed these two pieces of “war booty” very differently. Gaza, with its staggering birth-rate, its appalling poverty and its absence of natural resources has been viewed either as a burden or as a threat. Gaza’s only use is as a source of cheap labour. Yitzhak Rabin spoke for many Israelis when he lamented that Gaza didn’t sink into the Mediterranean.
The West Bank is a very different proposition. It provides what Israeli militarists like to call “strategic depth” in the case of attack from the East. Its mountains are a valuable strategic and psychological asset. It also contains important religious sites including the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb just outside Bethlehem.
In Gaza there are currently around 6 000 settlers taking up 35% of the land. The remaining 65% is surrounded by an electrified fence. Not one suicide bomber has passed from Gaza into Israel during this intifada. However dozens of Israeli soldiers have died defending the Gaza settlers, causing public resentment in Israel that keeping so few people in the Strip causes so much pain.
In the West Bank by contrast there are as many as 200 000 settlers. Their settlements vary from large commuter towns like Ma’aleh Adumin to tiny outposts like Kiryat Arba in the heart of Hebron. Some of these settlers are motivated by a deep religious conviction that the West Bank belongs to the Jews for eternity. Others are motivated by the high cost of apartments in Tel Aviv.
In international law though, every settlement is as illegal as the next one. Moving civilians onto land taken by force is not a legitimate practice. Outside of the US and Israel there is remarkable consensus that the settlements must go if there is ever to be a just and lasting peace in the Holy Land.
In Israel the attitude towards the settlements is much more complex. A few are in favour of annexing the lot; a few are in favour of abandoning the lot. Most Israelis are somewhere in the middle, not willing to take on the formidable task of annexing the West Bank in its entirety but also wary of returning to the 1948 border which they feel “invited attack”.
Because of this, the concept of “consensus settlements” has developed over the past few years in Israel. These are the settlements which are so large, so strategic or so historically significant that all but the arch-peaceniks agree that they must remain. Significantly all the consensus settlements are in the West Bank.
Then there are, to coin an inelegant phrase, the “debatable settlements” where no consensus exists. These include the Gaza settlements and the West Bank “outposts”. Many Israelis see these smaller settlements as a drain on their economy and army. They believe that some or all of these should be traded in return for Palestinian peace or American money.
For many on the right, no settlement should be abandoned as a matter of principle. For them the creation of a Jewish state stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is their historic mission. Evacuating settlements is a backwards step for these people.
For decades Ariel Sharon has been closely associated with this hard-line tendency. As Housing Minister in the late 1980s, Sharon oversaw a massive expansion of settlement building in the occupied territories. A decade later as leader of the opposition he urged settlers to “take the hilltops” of the West Bank to scupper Ehud Barak’s attempts to make peace with the Palestinians.
His efforts earned him the nickname “The Bulldozer”. Right-wing Israelis expressed their gratitude by purchasing a house in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem for him. He doesn’t live there and rarely visits but he did take the trouble to hang a three-storey long Israeli flag out one of the windows.
However it seems that Arik has joined the good settlement/bad settlement school of thought. This week he announced that his government will evacuate all of Gaza’s settlers as well as four small settlements in the West Bank. Perhaps because of the burden of leadership, perhaps because of his advancing years, Sharon has finally accepted that Israel can't keep sovereignty over every last inch of the Holy Land. He has tried to sugar the pill by promising that losing a few unpopular settlements will help Israelis, militarily, financially and politically, to strengthen their hold on those which they intend to keep for eternity.
And so the West Bank and Gaza are still very different. The Palestinians can harbour realistic hopes of recovering Gaza in its entirity. In the West Bank though they may have to settle (no pun intended) for a lot less. Perhaps even nothing at all.