Nahmani, who immigrated to Israel from New Jersey in 1984 and was active for years in left-wing projects, never thought she’d live across the Green Line. But Palestinian violence had hardened her views and, at 38, she was more focused than ever on providing a home for her family. “It was a financial issue. We paid $100,000 less and we got a house that’s big enough for our family,” she says, sitting in the Maaleh Adumim home she purchased last summer.
However you do the calculation, it doesn’t add up to better peace prospects. Even Washington, Israel’s closest ally, regards the settlements as a growing problem. Just last month President George W. Bush said, “Israeli settlement activity must stop.” Yet thousands of new housing units are under construction in the West Bank, and Jewish ideologues have thrown up 40 new outposts since Ariel Sharon was elected last year. Although Sharon would rather focus on Yasir Arafat’s peace-deal breaches, Palestinians argue that settlement expansion fuels popular rage toward Israel and Israelis, hindering negotiations and making a final peace deal increasingly remote.
The incentives are all the more bewildering against the backdrop of Israel’s crashing economy. At a meeting earlier this month, Sharon’s cabinet passed emergency measures to contain an exploding deficit, including new taxes–already among the highest in the world–and deep cuts in government spending. Though the cuts will affect Israelis on both sides of the Green Line, no one in the government thought to revoke hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits bestowed on settlers. “We’re in the worst economic situation we’ve known in a long, long time,” says Arie Arnon, an economist at Ben-Gurion University. “So it’s really mind-boggling that these incentives aren’t cut.”
Mind-boggling until you factor in the politics. For years Sharon was the patron of Israeli settlement expansion, both as Agriculture minister and later as the minister of Housing. He was dubbed “the Bulldozer,” in part for his determination to plow new construction sites in the territories. The 200,000 Israelis who now live in the West Bank and Gaza still form a key support base for Sharon (though many now prefer the harder-talking Benjamin Netanyahu). “Sharon’s government relies on settlers for its support. So it’s silly to think he would be the one to limit their development,” says Avraham Shochat, who served as Finance minister under the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin.
Throughout the current uprising, militants have ambushed settlers on roads and fired at their homes, causing some families to leave. But the fighting and the resulting economic downturn have also acted as a boon for some communities in the West Bank. The larger ones are relatively safe, and offer some of the most attractive deals. The smaller and more ideological ones, like Neguhot, south of Hebron, are recruiting new residents from a pool of fervent right-wingers. The 25 families that live in Neguhot, at the end of a narrow, dusty road, are surrounded by Palestinian villages and guarded round the clock by a platoon of soldiers. “We’ve absorbed 12 new families in the past year,” says Naama Leibner, surrounded by religious books in the living room of her hilltop trailer home. “I think people feel this is an important time to join us and strengthen us.”
Construction is also underway 20 miles north at Tekoa, the site of a grisly double murder a year ago. Two teenage boys who had ventured to a cave in the area were stoned to death; Israel suspects the killers were Palestinian militants. Although Tekoa hasn’t grown during the current Palestinian uprising, it hasn’t lost members either, despite numerous shooting attacks on the road to Jerusalem, where most residents work. “I think the murder strengthened us,” says Arieh Haskin, who moved to Tekoa 10 years ago. “Maybe some people thought about leaving, but overall we became a tighter-knit group.”
Expansion at Tekoa, a diverse community of religious and secular Jews, had been stalled for years after a Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin froze much of the government-initiated West Bank construction in 1992. The freeze didn’t halt settlement expansion. In fact, during the peace-negotiating years of the 1990s, the number of Israelis living in the West Bank doubled from 100,000 to 200,000. But Haskin could begin building his house only six months ago–he’s been living in a trailer home with his wife and three children–and an additional 19 residents have recently been granted permits. The government is charging residents only a few thousand dollars for the land (compared with tens of thousands or more for similar parcels inside the Green Line) and subsidizing its development.
Nowhere is the building surge more evident than in Ariel, a massive community of 17,500 in the northern West Bank. Billboards at the entrance to the settlement advertise apartments as low as $75,000. Ron Nachman, the town’s ambitious mayor, says 4,000 units are under construction and more are planned. “We want to become a city of 60,000 residents,” he says, using his finger to draw the future boundaries of his town on a map. Ariel sits on about 1,500 acres but has already appropriated 6,000 more for expansion. “In the Bible,” says Nachman, “there is no West Bank, there is no Green Line and no occupied territory.”
Ariel’s schools have resources not usually seen in Israel. It also has wireless broadband in homes and offices, computers in the pre-schools, and elementary schools that teach Web design and robotics. (According to the Adva Institute for Equality and Social Justice, the government provides settlement municipalities with a budget per resident that is 50 percent higher than what it allocates inside the Green Line.) A boy who has cancer in this town and can’t get to school watches his class in streaming video on the Web. Shlomo Roimi, who directs education in Ariel, says some of the extras are paid for with the added funds Ariel gets as a settlement. But much of it is a matter of priorities, he says. “We emphasize education and we also have our own fundraising arm. So we can do things other towns can’t do.”
Shochat, the former Finance minister, estimates government subsidies to settlers at $300 million a year, about 10 percent of the amount Israel wants to slash from its deficit. Instead of eliminating the incentives, the government has proposed deep cuts in Israel’s social programs and a re-evaluation of the deficit target. But economists say the $300 million is only a fraction of what the settlements really cost. Israel has raised its defense spending by $1.5 billion in the past year, in part to defend the outposts in the territories. “The real price of settlements is that they prevent Israel from reaching a political agreement with the Palestinians,” says Arnon, the economist. “And that causes Israel to lose untold billions in tourism, industry and everything else.”
Many Israelis argue that Palestinian violence, not Israeli settlement activity, is the real problem with the peace process. As proof, they point to Israel’s offer two years ago to dismantle many settlements and consolidate the rest. But can large numbers of settlers really be transferred back into Israel? Arnon believes the vast majority of settlers–up to 80 percent–moved to the West Bank to improve their standard of living, not to spoil the chances for peace with the Palestinians. He says Israel will realize eventually that it is cheaper to resettle them inside the Green Line than continue paying the cost of their presence in the West Bank and Gaza. “It would take $6 billion to build houses for them inside Israel. That’s a lot of money but it’s not unfeasible,” Arnon says. Lisa Nahmani, who will mark a year in Maaleh Adumim this summer, would not object to resettlement. “I like this place but I’d rather be in Jerusalem,” she says. Even for many settlers, a peace dividend might be the best incentive of all.
