A Piece Of The Peace

Hazem Maali's only warning was his wife's clipped scream. The 34-year-old Palestinian salesman was driving his family through the stony hills and olive groves of the northern West Bank, on their way to a wedding. As they sped past the turnoff for the Israeli settlement of Yitzhar, a Frisbee-size chunk of asphalt came crashing through his windshield. His wife, six months pregnant, started to vomit; blood poured from her head. Only when Maali screeched to a stop at a nearby Israeli Army checkpoint did he pivot to check on his children. The projectile had ricocheted into the back seat, knocking his 7-year-old daughter unconscious.

At Yitzhar, an Orthodox religious settlement high on a Samarian hilltop, Israeli authorities arrested 19-year-old Daniel Avraham and charged him with the attack. Even in the West Bank, where tit-for-tat stone-throwing is part of the landscape, Yitzhar has earned a nasty reputation this year. In June, settlers attacked Israeli police with stones and tear gas as they tried to evacuate an illegally built trailer. In July, a Jewish seminary student from Yitzhar was arrested after trying to launch a homemade rocket toward a nearby Palestinian neighborhood. Last month, after a Palestinian snuck into the settlement and stabbed a young boy, a mob of dozens of settlers stormed through a neighboring Arab village, smashing windows, firing wildly and injuring six Palestinians. Even Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert condemned the retaliatory rampage as a "pogrom."

The uptick in violence is worrying Israel's security services, which have convened anxious strategy sessions in recent weeks. At one such meeting, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, officials reported 429 attacks in the first half of 2008, compared with 551 in all of 2007. And the problem is likely to get worse: settlement construction has surged nearly twice as fast this year as it did last year. According to the Israeli watchdog group Peace Now, some 2,600 new housing units are currently under construction throughout the West Bank. Tenders for new structures have climbed 550 percent in the past year, and in East Jerusalem the numbers are even more stark—38 times higher this year than last (1,761 since the start of the recent peace talks, compared with 46 the year before). Even as Bush administration officials have demanded a settlement freeze—furiously trying to cobble together a peace deal by the end of the year—Yitzhar settlers have erected 10 new caravans in a dusty lot on the hilltop's fringe.

The uncomfortable truth is that those peace talks are probably fueling the building boom. Violence may be spiking, but it's still far quieter than during the height of the intifada; that relative calm makes settlers feel more at ease risking their money and lives in the occupied territories. The Israeli ruling party often turns a blind eye to (or encourages) such expansion, rationalizing that keeping its parliamentary coalition together and protecting the prime minister's right flank is a more important short-term goal. At the same time, the prospect of returning land to the Palestinians under any deal—however distant—intensifies the settlers' determination to build. Olmert's bold acknowledgment in a farewell interview that Jerusalem will ultimately have to be divided is certain to redouble the settlers' efforts.

In fact, the current situation is the worst of all possible worlds—enough movement to scare the settlers, but very little prospect for a genuine deal. The relationship between diplomatic initiatives and Israeli settlement growth tends to work like a ratchet: it's easy to crank up construction, but, failing a peace deal, hard to reverse it. "If you pursue negotiations without an absolute determination to reach an agreement, you end up with more settlements," says Gershom Gorenberg, author of "The Accidental Empire," a history of the settler movement. "It's been a consistent pattern for the past 40 years." With all three key diplomatic players hopelessly weak, the most recent peace initiative, which takes its name from a summit in Annapolis, Maryland, convened last year, is a textbook case. Olmert's successor, Tzipi Livni, will need to rely on fringe parties if she's to form a governing coalition; Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is facing his own bleak re-election prospects; and George W. Bush, of course, is preoccupied at the moment.

In theory, at least, any American involvement in the process should be better than none at all. In their smart recent book, "Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace," Daniel Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky point out that "large asymmetries of power require a robust third-party role"; without one, unequal parties are "unable to reach viable negotiated agreements on their own." Jaw-jaw is probably still better than war-war. But the historical record is discouraging. The first settlement in the Gaza Strip, Kfar Darom, emerged in the wake of the Rogers Initiative, a 1970 push by the then U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers to end the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt. During the mid-1970s, the ultranationalist Gush Emunim movement built one of the first settlements near Nablus, fearing the outcome of negotiations between Israel and Jordan. In 1998, after President Bill Clinton's Wye River summit, Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, exhorted his countrymen to fan out and settle the West Bank. "All of those hilltop outposts are a specific result of Oslo," Gorenberg says.