Two state policy, settlements on Benjamin Netanyahu’s agenda

Israel’s future will top the agenda when Benjamin Netanyahu visits Australia.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump at the White House last Wednesday. Picture: AP

It is a bleak, miserable night in ­Bei-tar, one of the biggest Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Beitar sits just across the green line from Jerusalem. Its residents are not rich and as the winds of a harsh winter swirl around, seeming to push the fitful, sleety rain ­directly against the dark-clad ­figures making their way homeward, bus stops are crowded and people walk briskly to get out of the cold.

On the corner is a small synagogue and walking towards it is a thickset figure with ginger locks spilling out from under the broad, round, black hat, and on to the padded black frock coat of the ultra-Orthodox man. Women are in long skirts and their hair is covered. The only person I see not dressed in religious garb is a soldier in the Israeli army.

With 55,000 people, Beitar is a small city, but it’s set to grow and keep growing rapidly for a long time. About 35,000 of its people are aged under 18, part of a demographic bulge brought about by the high birthrate of the ultra-­Orthodox. Before 1988, the present Beitar didn’t exist at all.

Beitar is just next door to a Palestinian village and about 1000 Palestinians work in Beitar each day. But the Beitar residents are all ultra-Orthodox, divided within — or at least differentiated within — by their varying ethnic origins and religious practices.

Before going to Beitar I had a coffee at the nearby Gush Etzion bloc of settlements. Even bigger in population than Beitar, it is also a very short drive — less than 20 minutes without traffic — from Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish settlers in Gush Etzion, or at least the ones I’ve met on a couple of reporting trips, are what Israelis call ­“national religious”. They sometimes call themselves modern ­Orthodox. They serve in the army, engage fully in the workforce, inter­pret the religious elements of Judaism in a manner that doesn’t discomfit modern living. What strikes me at the coffee shop is how many cars outside have Palestinian numberplates. A lot of Palestinians use the Gush Etzion shopping centre.

That morning my day began at one of the least religious settlements, Maale Adumim, a princely 7km from Jerusalem. I went there to visit ­Michael, a well-known professional who works in Jerusalem. What struck me was how small his nice apartment was. Perhaps three bedrooms, with a combined living, dining and television area that we’d regard as suitable for a starter apartment in Sydney or Melbourne.

Benny Kashriel, the mayor of Maale Adumim, tells me that fewer than a third of his more than 40,000 constituents are religious at all and only 1 or 2 per cent ultra-Orthodox. At lunch at the shopping mall, I don’t see a single person in religious, or even recognisably Jewish, attire. Instead it has the air, and most of the shop brands, of any outer suburban shopping mall in any big Australian city. I can’t even find a sal­mon bagel.

Michael tells me he and his wife moved to Maale Adumim for one simple reason: apartment prices. They have four children and their apartment in Maale Adumim, modest enough as it is, was better than anything they could afford in Jerusalem.

A cosmopolitan, urbane and liberal man, Michael nonetheless makes two ideological points to me. He takes me out to his tiny balcony and we survey the bald, empty landscape around Maale Adumim. He says this is the road down which for hundreds of years attacks on Jerusalem have come.

The other is that the second ­intifada, at the turn of the millennium, was in his view as big a turning point for Israel as the wars of 1967 or 1973. He tells me of all the residents in his building who suffered some loss or damage from the terrorism of that time.

The second intifada soured the Israeli population on the idea that a permanent peace with the Palestinians could be achieved anytime soon, he says.

But Michael is also steadfast in his opposition to the idea that ­Israel should annex much or most of the West Bank. He wants Israel to keep the big settlement blocs but not much more.

“Do Israelis still want peace?” he asks. “Of course we do.” He’s just not sure how it’s going to be achieved.

In Beitar the discussion is much less political.

Rabbi Yitzak Ravitz, Beitar’s deputy mayor, receives me in his small office and plies me with Pepsi and cakes. His wife, who works for the Israeli President in Jerusalem, translates, for the rabbi doesn’t speak English. He wears a conventional black suit and black skull cap, and only a modest beard. His wife is wearing a wig. Ultra-­Orthodox women typically don’t display their hair.

Some secular and even national religious Jews resent the ultra-Orthodox for not serving in the army and not fully participating in the modern economy. Rabbi Ravitz tells me that 50 per cent of the men in his community engage in paid work — and that is enough, he believes. The rest study the Torah full-time.

Ravitz says that, like ­Michael at Maale Adumim, people came to Beitar at first because of price. “They didn’t have money to buy apartments in the city,” he says. “But today people come here ­because it’s a calm place, it ­offers better education. It offers everything an ultra-Orthodox person needs. On Shabbat (the Sabbath) the streets are closed, there is a ­kosher market on every corner, a shul (synagogue) on every ­corner.”

But Ravitz is uncompromising on one thing: not territory or politics in the conventional sense, but on the overriding value of the lives his people lead. “Learning the Torah (Jewish scriptures and commentaries) also requires living by the rules of the Torah. The highest value is learning the Torah and living to its values. This is more ­important than the city, the state, the media or public ­opinion.”

Even the ultra-Orthodox men who work for money spend several hours a day of their own time studying the Torah, and for those men who study full-time, typically their wives work for an income. He is not easily drawn, because he is not truly that interested, into the political discussions that occupy so many Israelis. His mind, like that of any truly religious person, is not entirely susceptible to secular analysis.

He makes another point both religious and cultural. There are eight million men and boys in ­Israel. Only about 100,000 of them study the Torah. That 100,000, he thinks, is the living and preserving of a precious inheritance.

Beitar, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, all a stone’s throw from Jerusalem, together account for nearly half of the 400,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank, beyond Jerusalem itself. Not a single Israeli, even those committed to the fullest vision of the two-state solution, would agree to giving up any of those three settlements. Given the size of their populations, it would be all but ­impossible as a practical exercise anyway. Yet the territory they ­occupy is small. A recent analysis suggests that nearly 80 per cent of the settler population is contained within just 5 per cent of West Bank territory.

The settlements themselves don’t make a deal impossible. In previous negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel has committed to giving up an equal amount of territory from Israel in ­exchange for something in this order of land.

But where does Israeli public and political opinion now stand on settlements and the two-state solution? Ahead of the visit to Australia this week by Benjamin Netanyahu, the first by a serving Israeli prime minister, I spent a week in Israel asking this question of leaders from most of the country’s mainstream parties.

Let’s go first to a voice too little heard. Isaac Herzog, the Leader of the Opposition and head of the ­Israeli Labor Party, met me in the members’ cafe at the Knesset. He is a smart, witty, engaging guy, full of insider jokes about politics.

Labor, he says, has suffered since the definitive failure of the Oslo Accords in the period around 2000. While it was Israel’s pioneering party and dominated politics for decades, it has not won an election since, though it came close last time.

“Labor paid a heavy price,” Herzog tells me, “but Labor still believes Israel must separate from the Palestinians and move to peace. We are seen by some as naive but we are really nationalist because we are the camp of the two-state solution and that is in ­Israel’s interests.”

He understands that a full peace settlement is not possible in the short term and proposes getting there by several difficult steps, such as establishing a period of 10 years during which there is no incitement or terrorism in the West Bank.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Education Minister, whose Jewish Homeland party is in coalition with Netanyahu’s Likud in government. Bennett, a smooth and highly articulate former hi-tech entrepreneur, is at the maximalist end of Israeli territorial ambition.

In a long discussion in his Tel Aviv office, he tells me he was ­delighted at last week’s summit ­between Donald Trump and Netanyahu. While the Turnbull government will reaffirm its commit­ment to a two-state solution, Trump said he would support whatever the parties agreed on, whether that was one state or two.

Bennett sees the meeting ­between Trump and Netanyahu as a clear move away from the two-state paradigm, which he says has yielded no positive results. His program would be to proclaim ­Israeli sovereignty — he doesn’t want to use the word annexation — over two-thirds of the territory of the West Bank, where about 80,000 Palestinians live. These Palestinians, he says, would be ­offered the choice of full Israeli citizenship or permanent resi­dency. The more than 2.5 million Palestinians left in the remaining 40 per cent of the West Bank would receive heightened autonomy — autonomy on steroids, as he calls it, with better work rights within Israel proper and a land bridge to a sea port through Haifa, which would allow them to engage in international trade. Needless to say, this idea has no support among Palestinians.

“I see the Netanyahu-Trump meeting as very good news for everyone,” Bennett says. “I see it as the sunset of the Palestinian state and now we are entering a new era. There are already two Palestinian states — one in Gaza and one in Jordan. Discussion of a third Palestinian state is now over. After 24 years of the two-state paradigm, we can now explore new ideas.”

Most Israelis do not share Bennett’s views.

Yuval Steinitz, the Energy Minister and a senior Likud figure, whose views I reported in detail in The Weekend Australian, tells me that he and his party regard the two-state solution as the logical best outcome, but regard it as completely impractical at the moment.

One of the biggest problems with international discussion of the settlements and their effect on a possible two-state solution is that the term covers so many different types of neighbourhoods, not only the big settlement blocs but the more radical outposts, many ille­gal under Israeli law. But in the ­recent UN Security Council resolution that Barack Obama managed to have passed, every bit of territory Israel did not control before the 1967 war is ­regarded as an illegal settlement. That includes Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, where Jews pray so publicly, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and many of the city’s Jewish and mixed suburbs.

Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, wants to talk about the Jerusalem economy. But when asked about Obama’s resolution, he says: “The UN Security Council resolution has zero effect on day-to-day life in Jerusalem. It has nothing to do with all the positive trends in this city. The majority of Jerusalem Arabs don’t want Jerusalem divided.”

What is clear is that there is an enormous swirl of divergent Israeli opinion on how to move forward with all this. There is no consensus on the future but there is, among many, an openness to dialogue. From Wednesday, when Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives in Sydney, some of that dialogue will take place in Australia.