The Geneva Accord has become an interesting part of the Israel/Palestine debate recently. The Sharon government has rebuked Powell for his fairly warm attitude to it, and the accord seem to be accepted by many on the center-left. A recent article on ZNet interested me because of this statement:

Under the accord, Israel is allowed to legalize and retain settlements in the occupied West Bank that house roughly 300,000 settlers, including all the post-1967 Jewish settlements in Arab East Jerusalem; in exchange, the Palestinians receive equivalent territorial compensation from Israel. The Palestinians are granted sovereignty in the territory gained by the land swap and in the remaining parts of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. This sovereign Palestinian entity remains non-militarized. Security for the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, the holy places in Jerusalem, is overseen by a permanent international force while the site’s non-security aspects fall under Palestinian control; full Jewish access to the site is granted. While Palestinians made refugees in 1948 are to receive some compensation, it is up to the sole discretion of Israel to decide how many refugees — out of a total of over 4.1 million registered with the UN — will be allowed to return to their homes in Israel.

The settlements are allowed to stay? That doesn’t seem like something the left would support, though I haven’t seen a lot of support (or mention, really) for it on the farther left, where a pro-Palestinian position is standard. I’m not surprised that the right on return would be quashed; it doesn’t seem like something Israel would ever agree to fully. But I did find the text of the accord, and upon an admittedly shallow read of it, I don’t really see it the same way as the authors do:

Article 4 - Territory

(f) The state of Palestine shall have exclusive title to all land and any buildings, facilities, infrastructure or other property remaining in any of the settlements on the date prescribed in the timetable for the completion of the evacuation of this settlement.

Sadly, the maps on the page are in Hebrew, so I can’t tell exactly what they mean. But the text does seem to say a complete removal of settlements from Palestinian territory. Of course, until I see a map that I can read that shows the land swap from the 1967 borders, I don’t know if this is most of the settlements or not.

They do seem to be correct about the right of return, it’s soley up to Israel how many return, though it does appear all are at least going to be compensated. This has never been something I thought the Palestinians could get, and it’s not something I’ve ever been gung-ho about, but I’m not Palestinian.

The rest of the plan seems acceptable. Palestine has full sovereignty, except for a few Israeli outposts for security purposes, and that may aggravate extremists, but I think it’s an acceptable compromise. Overall, it’s at least a good start, but unlikely to ever be implemented.

UPDATE: From Diane in the comments:

I think it means a complete removal of settlements from what is Palestinian territory AFTER the agreed land swap has taken place. This would account for what ZNet said about 300,000 settlers staying put. There are about 400,000 settlers all together, but the vast majority are in settlements bordering Israel proper. I think that by swapping only about 3% of the heavily-settled border territory of the West Bank over to Israel, you would in effect be “repatriating” about 80% of the settlers. The remaining 100,000 settlers, in the two settlement blocs that basically cut the WB in three (Ariel in the north and Ma’ale Adunim in the center), would presumably be repatriated and their settlements dissolved, in order to give the Palestinians a contiguous state.

That makes it clearer.