Kane Starkiller wrote:Ari'el, the settlement you mentioned, was established in 1978 and is 16km deep inside West Bank.
There were from what I understand it, two main drivers behind settlements by the Israelis after 1967:
1.)
Re-establishing Destroyed Jewish villages.
Gush Etzion is a group of settlements with a population of 55,000. It's built on three prior Jewish villages:
1927-1929: Driven out by 1929 Palestine Rioting
1932-1937: Driven out by 1936-39 Arab Revolt
1943-1948: Destroyed in 1948.
In '48 everyone was going around massacring villages in response to perceived atrocities by the other side -- the Arab Legion destroyed Gush Eitzon while shouting "Deir Yassin"; and later the Israelis then destroyed Al-Dawayima as it was thought the people involved in Eitzon hailed from it.
But anyway, we're getting a little side tracked. Before Eitzon was destroyed; a convoy managed to escape from it; and it contained the village's children and quite a bit of it's women. When Israel ended up in control of the land in 1967; several children who had been in the convoy had set up a group and petitioned to allow the reestablishment of Eitzon, which occured in September 1967.
2.)
Establishing Strategic Control of Certain Key Locations.
One of the major objectives for the initial settlements was to secure Israeli security via controlling key strategic points. This accounts for a lot of the settlements from 1967-1980s.
(Remember that Israel did not get some form of peace treaty with her neighbors until 1979; and even then, it was not sure wether it would last as long as it did.)
It makes a lot of
THIS MAP CIRCA MAY 2002 make sense.
Black and Dark Blue are Definite Israeli Control. Light Blue is where the Israelis have jurisdiction; but that can be negotiated away.
Deep Red and Orange are 100% Palestinian Control; Yellow are areas where the PA has jurisdiction, but the Israelis provide security.
You can see how there's a line of settlements on the road north of Jericho (Route 90).
It makes no sense, until you look at Google Earth and see that Route 90 wends on a line that overlooks the Jordan River Valley, specifically the Jordanian side.
It also explains why there's virtually no settlements near the Dead Sea; since you don't have to worry about Jordanian PT-76 Amphibious tanks swimming it.
It further explains the logic over PA Control/Jurisdiction regarding roads, especially the seemingly bizarre arrangement near Nablus.
It also does help explain the logic of this
May 2008 Partition Proposal by the Israelis
And this map is pretty interesting as well:
LINK
You can see how the Israeli aim is to:
- Secure the Region around Jerusalem
- Secure the Jordan Valley
- Secure the East/West Routes to the Jordan Valley
It seems to me that an important step towards achieving a IvP agreement would be for the United States to fund and build a series of barriers along the Jordan river and in the Jordan Valley -- something of sufficiently gargantugan proportions that it would impede the movement of an army.
This would undercut the Israeli Arguments for specialized roads and enable the formation of much more contiguous PA-controlled blocks; since Israel wouldn't need to maintain the capability to deploy the IDF to the Jordan Valley rapidly -- they could just send the IAF to cluster bomb a hypothetical A-rab army as it slinks through the small openings in the American-built defensive fortifications.
The Israelis have shown that they are willing to uproot fairly long-standing settlements -- but in many places there are just too many people to evict.
So any logical peace plan is going to result in the borders of the West Bank shifting east on average about 15-20 kilometers, with major changes in the Ar'el region and Jerusalem region.
The problem is that the PA's current crop of negotiators; who are very much in the vein of TOTAL RESISTANCE are opposed to any form of 'land-swapping'.
