...the major settlement blocs are necessary in order to create defensible borders for Israel...major settlements are near the Green Line and protect the cities behind them, or are located on high ground or other militarily essential points. There are no defensible borders without them.
The remaining “minor” settlements are not an obstacle to anything: if Arabs can live in Israel, Jews should be able to live in any Palestinian state...
Preventing “natural growth” within settlements necessary for Israel’s defense will make them eventually wither and die, as the “peace process” drags on inconclusively and it proves difficult or impossible to reverse even a “temporary” freeze. Moreover, the other settlements—every one of them, including any future natural growth—are consistent with a viable Palestinian state, unless the state is to be an apartheid one. And because the settlements are necessary to insure that a Palestinian state represents a solution, not the first stage of a different problem, the Obama administration’s effort to change the understandings that have governed all parties of the peace process since 2003 is more than a mistake: it is an obstacle to peace.
Read my earlier LA Times op-ed.
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