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This Report explores the glaring contradiction between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s statements that Israel will be “finished” if it does not end its occupation of the Palestinians, and his government’s policy of expanding settlements that ensure permanent conquest and settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

According to a recent report from Peace Now in Israel, settlement construction has almost doubled over the past year. One thousand new buildings containing 2,600 new housing units are underway, construction tenders are up 550 percent, and plans for new housing units in east Jerusalem have jumped to 6,843 from 1,734. This burst of settlement activity is on both sides of the separation barrier, belying the notion that the barrier defines Israel’s concept of its final borders and a smaller Palestinian state east of the barrier. On the contrary, continued settlement building is strategically located throughout the West Bank to preclude absolutely the emergence of any Palestinian entity that could be called a state. This aggressive settlement expansion is occurring while Olmert is going through the motions of negotiating a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians by the end of 2008.

It is clear that Olmert and the majority of Israel’s secular political leaders now understand that settlements are bad for Israel, but have become hostage politically to a settler lobby that has seized control of this issue. Yet, as Jeff Aronson points out in this issue, Olmert and his colleagues are also paralyzed by a syndrome in Israel’s political culture that has not reconciled an urge, based on its embattled history and centuries of Jewish powerlessness, to prove strength and defeat their Palestinian adversaries, with an intellectual recognition that this would be a hollow victory that would lead to Israel’s own defeat as a Jewish, democratic state. 

 East Jerusalem Settler Population, 2000 - 2006