My support for Israel’s battle against terrorism by Palestinian militants doesn’t mean they get a blank check to keep building settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
While Jewish settlers — most of them, anyway — aren’t running around blowing up Palestinian Arab civilians, they are doing a great job of fanning the flames of the conflict, and of weakening Israel’s moral position. They justify Arab fears that Israel will end up taking everything, and leave them in even more tenuous of a refugee status. They lend credence to the idea that Israel is a bully, taking what it wants simply because it has bigger guns. They give ammunition to Moslems who see Israel taking over Jerusalem as a whole, by hook or by crook.
One can debate the question of whether Israel can survive without the West Bank territories. But the question of the final status of Jerusalem is still, in the mind of most, still open. By continuing its settlement policy, trying to subvert that question by establishing a fait accompli, Sharon’s government (alongside every Israeli government since 1967) is, in fact, trying to settle the question through force of arms, exactly what it accuses its Palestinian opponents of doing.