The Price of the Gaza Withdrawal
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The newly announced “Disengagement Law” soon to be brought before Israel’s Knesset in order to pave the way for Prime Minister Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal plan is draconian and generous at once, in true stick-and-carrot fashion.
It is draconian in the punishments with which it threatens Jewish settlers resisting evacuation: Three years’ imprisonment for violently interfering with it, three years for re-entering any evacuated settlements, five years for doing either of these things while in possession of a firearm. It is generous in the financial compensation offered to the settlers for their homes, farms, and businesses in a remote and unsafe corner of Palestine that few Israelis would want to live in even were it not being abandoned: At least $600 million for the estimated 7,500 individuals or 1,500 families involved, amounting to $400,000 for each family.
This is a large but affordable sum for a country whose annual budget is one hundred times greater. But it is also a precedent for any future withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, which is currently home to 250,000 settlers. If, whether unilaterally or by negotiation with the Palestinians, 100,000 were to be evacuated from the outlying settlements that will not end up within Israel’s borders, a proportionally calculated bill would come to $8.5 billion – a staggering amount for Israel’s economy. Indeed, although not often raised as a reason for not leaving the West Bank, the sheer cost of doing so, which would also include such additional expenses as constructing new roads and relocating army bases, could be prohibitive.
International or American aid might be a way of surmounting this problem. Yet it is unlikely that a world that has repeatedly warned Israel that its settlements in the occupied territories are illegal will want be eager to fork up billions of dollars to compensate settlers, especially if they are evacuated as part of a unilateral withdrawal borders that the Palestinians and Arab states do not accept.
Still, whether these borders are accepted or not, the settlements evacuated, if they are not razed to the ground as were those in the Israeli withdrawal Sinai in 1981, will be occupied by Palestinians, possibly by the families of refugees who themselves were never compensated for the property lost by them in 1948. Since the average Palestinian family is twice the size of the average Jewish one, the comfortable, suburban-style homes of 100,000 settlers could easily house 200,000 Palestinians now living in squalor in refugee camps. An international community that felt no obligation to compensate the settlers might feel very different about helping to clear the camps.
If Israel can legitimately hope for international aid for withdrawing from the occupied territories, therefore, it must do two things:
(1) Resist the temptation, which largely boils down to an “If-I-can’t-have-it-neither-will-you” attitude, to destroy evacuated settlements as it did in 1981.
(2) Do its best to assure, through the mediation of foreign governments, not only that the settlements are handed over to the Palestinians in good condition, but that they are used to house the families of refugees rather than of corrupt Palestinian Authority functionaries seeking to divide the spoils nepotistically.
Israel’s failure to pay the Palestinians restitution for what they lost in 1948 has always been a moral blot on its record – a far more serious one than having helped create the refugee problem in the first place. There are many situations in which governments require residents to leave their homes; the Three Gorges Dam now under construction in China, for example, will reportedly displace one to two million Chinese, i.e., nearly twice to four times the number of Palestinians who fled in 1948.Yet just as it would be morally reprehensible for the Chinese government not to compensate these persons, however justified their relocation may be, so Israel’s displacement of the Palestinians, though thoroughly defensible by the need to establish and protect a Jewish state, remains to this day an unpaid-for expropriation.
The value of this Palestinian property, secretly estimated by a United Nations expert in 1962 at $1.125 billion – a fact revealed in Professor Michael Fischbach’s recently published “Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict” – and worth several times as much at today’s prices, is roughly the same as the value of the Gaza Strip and West Bank settlements that Israel stands to give up in the future. Why not consider it a fair swap?
It has often been argued that the swap already exists, because the Palestinian property inherited by Israel offsets the estimated $11 billion dollars worth of property abandoned by Jews from Arab lands when they fled and/or emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But although there is a symmetry between these two human waves, there is no moral logic to the proposition that Israel can be allowed to steal Palestinian property because the Arab states stole Jewish property. The Palestinians should be paid for what was taken from them. The Jews, too. These are different if parallel events; they do not cancel each other out.
The settlements to be evacuated could go a long way to settling Israel’s financial debt to the refugees of 1948. This should not be allowed to happen bye the bye, but with the clear understanding that it is the case and that the international community should help Israel with the loans to facilitate it. And even if it doesn’t, the Jews of the world still can. A campaign to support Israel and its bonds as a way of enabling the Jewish state to free itself of the burden both of millions of Palestinians and of the homes and fields that were taken from them without payment would surely resonate with the Jews of the world.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.