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Will Ariel Block Peace?

(CNN) Elliot Abrams - This week Israel announced a plan to construct 277 more housing units in Ariel, a West Bank town of 18,000. The new units are to be constructed in the center of the town, so Ariel will expand in population but not in land area. It is not, in the usual Palestinian Authority parlance, "taking more Palestinian land." When I worked on these issues in the Bush Administration, we discussed settlement expansion thoroughly with the government of Israel and reached agreement on some principles. These were that Israel would create no new settlements and that existing settlements would expand in population but not in land area. New construction would be in already-built-up areas, and the phrase we used was "build up and in, not out." That way whatever the chances of a peace deal were, construction in the settlements would not reduce them. This agreement the Obama Administration ignored or denounced, suggesting at various times that it never existed, and that all construction must be frozen - even in Israel's capital, Jerusalem. (To be more accurate, construction by Israeli Jews was to be frozen; construction by Palestinians could continue.) The announcement that new units were to be built in Ariel evoked a new denunciation from Washington. The Administration still does not understand the difference between expanding a settlement physically and expanding the population of a settlement by building in already-built-up areas. Why not? In the real world those new units in Ariel do not make a final peace agreement harder. The writer is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2011-08-18 00:00:00
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