Washington – Israeli settlements are not the main obstacle to peace and their prospective limited expansion does not preclude the eventual emergence of a Palestinian state, according to a Washington Post editorial published Wednesday.
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In their article, “Overheated rhetoric on Israeli settlements,” the Post’s editors denounced as “counterproductive” the international community’s incessant criticism of prospective Israeli plans to build thousands of new housing units across the Green Line, primarily in Jerusalem, as doing so “reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible.”
Nevertheless, the paper’s editorial board came out against any unilateral action, whether on the part of Israel or the Palestinians, which “complicate[s] the negotiations that are the only realistic route to a Middle East peace.”
With respect to settlement construction, in general, the Post’s editors highlighted the fact that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had adopted the policy of his predecessors by “limit[ing] building [in settlements] almost entirely to areas that both sides expect Israel to annex through territorial swaps in an eventual settlement.” According to the Post, citing a study by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, this will enable 80 percent of Israeli settlers to be incorporated into Israel as part of a future peace deal through agreed upon land swaps approximating 4% of the West Bank – or less than the 5% proposed by US President Bill Clinton 12 years ago.
With respect to the E1 building plans, in particular, the Post attributed Israel’s motivation to “prevent[ing] Ma’ale Adumim – which will almost certainly be annexed to Israel in any peace deal – from being isolated”; which “is the same reason the Palestinians claim that Israeli annexation of the land would cut off their would-be capital in East Jerusalem from the West Bank.” Accordingly, the Post believes that the future status of E1 “is a difficult issue that should be settled at the negotiating table, not by fiat,” and that it is “hardly the ‘almost fatal blow’ to a two-state solution that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described.”
The article concludes by emphasizing the hypocrisy of such “exaggerated rhetoric” – at the same time “the Security Council is refusing to take action to stop the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, including many Palestinians, by the Syrian regime” – and calls on the Security Council to “press [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas to stop using settlements as an excuse for intransigence – and cool their own overheated rhetoric.”
Content provided as courtesy of The Jerusalem Post
I guess one of their New Year’s resolutions was to wake up and smell the coffee.
But nobody criticized the unilateral UN recognition vote.