PLO: Israel defaulted on Oslo when it failed to remove 'outposts'

Bethlehem - Ma’an - “Outposts serve an important function for Israel politically and territorially,” explains a new PLO Negotiations Affairs Department report on the facts around Israeli settlement outposts.

“Since the early 1990s,” the report continues, “successive Israeli governments have committed not to build new settlements. However, they have circumvented this commitment by facilitating (and often sponsoring) the creation of new settlement ‘outposts,’ or ‘neighborhoods’ of existing settlements. On the ground, outposts expand the amount of land under the parent settlement’s control, and serve as ‘fillers’ or ‘connectors’ between settlements with the aim of creating contiguity between them.”

The Negotiations Affairs Department in the PLO details the “facts” and “myths” of Israeli settlement outposts in an effort to draw attention to the phenomenon and its detrimental effect on both trust for the Israeli establishment and any possible continuation of peace talks in the future.

“The current Israeli government, like all its predecessors since 2003,” said the report, “has failed to implement its Road Map obligations. In particular, it continues to obfuscate the issue of settlement outposts in an attempt to circumvent its obligation to ‘immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001.’”

The report explains that outposts are “no different” than settlements, in that they take up Palestinian land and are, if possible, more illegal than their parent settlements.

“Outposts are nothing more than nascent settlements,” the report says, “typically established by placing trailers or caravans at a particular site and often resulting in the addition of permanent housing and infrastructure. They tend to be located anywhere from several hundred meters to a few kilometers from more established ‘parent’ settlements.”

The report also points out that settlement outposts are “not a new phenomenon,” and stresses that most to the major settlements on today’s maps were once settlement outposts. Areas like Ma’ale Adumim near Ramallah, which is set as one of the areas in the West Bank that Israel will likely not relinquish control over in any final agreement, was once a small area of trailers on the hills for 22 families. It has now been seemingly irrevocably taken over by Israeli housing developments.

Sharon: “Move, run, grab more hills, and expand the territory”

The Negotiations Affairs Department traces the surge in settlement outpost growth to just after the development of the Oslo peace process. In 1998 Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon encouraged Israelis to make bold land grabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The report centers on the failure of Israel to meet its Road Map obligations, and details the continuing expansion of settlements and settlement outposts, as well as the few “insignificant attempts” by the Israeli military to limit their growth. The failure of Israel to limit settlement growth, according to the report, nullifies the accords, as the “purpose underlying the obligation as articulated in the Road Map was to nullify attempts to exploit the absence of a peace process and to reverse the prejudicial effects of any additional settlement activity.”