By Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2010.
I once got an angry letter from Baruch Goldstein's father. Goldstein, remember,
was an Israeli settler who in 1994 entered the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron
and gunned down 29 Muslim worshippers. A decade later, I wrote a column for
the Jerusalem Post in which I described Goldstein as personifying Israel's
lunatic extreme. The father insisted that his son deserved to be celebrated as a
hero. Indeed, his grave site was transformed into a shrine until the Israeli army
eventually tore it down.
It's easy to dislike Israel's settlements, and still easier to dislike many of the
settlers. Whatever your view about the legality or justice of the enterprise, it
takes a certain cast of mind to move your children to places where they are
more likely to be in harm's way.
In the current issue of the American Interest, former U.S. Ambassador to
Israel Daniel Kurtzer persuasively spells out the many ways in which the
settlement movement has undermined Israel's own rule of law, and hence its
democracy. And as last week's diplomatic eruption over the prospective
construction of 1,600 housing units in municipal Jerusalem shows, the
settlements are a constant irritant to the United States, one friend Israel can't
afford to lose.
So it would be a splendid thing for Israel to tear down its settlements, put the
settlers behind its pre-1967 borders and finally reach the peace deal with the
Palestinians that has been so elusive for so long.
Except for one problem: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't territorial. It's
existential. Israelis are now broadly prepared to live with a Palestinian state
along their borders. Palestinians are not yet willing to live with a Jewish state
along theirs.
That should help explain why it is that in the past decade, two Israeli prime
ministers -- Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 -- have put forward
comprehensive peace offers to the Palestinians, and have twice been rebuffed.
In both cases, the offers included the division of Jerusalem; in the latter
case, it also included international jurisdiction over Jerusalem's holy places and
concessions on the subject of Palestinian refugees. Current Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has also offered direct peace talks. The Palestinians have
countered by withdrawing to "proximity talks" mediated by the U.S. It also
helps explain other aspects of Palestinian behavior. For Hamas, Tel Aviv is no
less a "settlement" than the most makeshift Jewish outpost on the West Bank.
The supposedly moderate Fatah party has joined that bandwagon, too: Last
year, Mohammed Dahlan, one of Fatah's key leaders, said the party was "not
bound" by the 1993 Oslo Accords through which the PLO recognized Israel.
Then there is the test case of Gaza. When Israel withdrew all of its settlements
from the Strip in 2005, it was supposed to be an opportunity for Palestinians to
demonstrate what they would do with a state if they got one. Instead, they
quickly turned it into an Iranian-backed Hamas enclave that for nearly three
years launched nonstop rocket and mortar barrages against Israeli civilians....
Israel withdrew from Gaza with assurances from the Bush administration that
the U.S. would not insist on a return to the 1967 borders in brokering any
future deal with the Palestinians.
But Hillary Clinton reneged on that commitment last year, and now the
administration is going out of its way to provoke a diplomatic crisis with Israel
over a construction project that -- assuming it ever gets off the ground -- is
plainly in keeping with past U.S. undertakings.
In the past decade, Israelis have learned that neither Palestinians nor Europeans
can be taken at their word. That's a lesson they may soon begin to draw about
the U.S. as well. Which is a pity for many reasons -- not least because it gives
the settler movement every excuse it needs to keep rolling right along.
