Israeli settlements in territory they captured in the 1967 war are intended to make it politically impossible for any Israeli government to relinquish that territory. There isn’t any other purpose to building these illegal settlements. So, I don’t want to hear a bunch of whining from Netanyahu about how a settlement freeze should be part of final status negotiations. Illegal settlements are a major source of danger for American citizens and property because our acquiescence in and subsidization of the settlement activity is the single biggest grievance Muslims have with American foreign policy. We are paying Israel to paint a bullseye on the back of every American city. Simply monitoring the resulting terrorist activity costs us billions of dollars and puts strains on our civil liberties. It would be hard to overestimate the cost to American taxpayers of illegal Israeli settlement activity. There is no single policy or action anywhere in the world that is more directly endangering and costly than Israeli’s settlements. Anyone that argues otherwise is a liar.
Israel would have to pay us more than a trillion dollars to compensate us for the true cost of their illegal settlements. And no amount of money can compensate us for the lives that have been lost and the damage that has been done to our civil liberties as a direct result of our unwillingness to force a stop to settlement activity.
We have no incentive to tolerate any growth (natural, or otherwise) of illegal Israeli settlements. We should consider them the equivalent of handing over a weapon of mass destruction to our sworn enemies. They are not a bargaining chip. They are a danger that needs to be eradicated. I don’t care one whit whether the Bush administration had an informal agreement with Ariel Sharon that he could keep certain settlements. If Bush agreed that Hamas could have a nuclear bomb, that agreement would not be respected by the Obama administration. And any agreement that Israel can keep settlements is the equivalent of handing a nuclear bomb to Hamas. It places us is the exact same position of taking on needless and senseless risk for no good purpose.
There is only one thing that Israel needs and deserves. That is peace and recognition within their U.N. approved pre-1967 borders. They can have that peace and recognition tomorrow if they are only willing to accept it. It is our job to make it politically possible for Israel to accept it. And that can only be done by the credible threat of abandonment. The most pro-Israeli position possible is the position that Israel must be forced out of the settlements completely. If Israel were to do that, no one would ever complain again if they needed to use force to protect themselves. America would assure their security in perpetuity. The rest of the world would come to their defense just as surely as they came to Kuwait’s defense. But, until then, Israel’s settlements cost America too dearly for them to be tolerated.