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Why Keep Pretending that Jews Building Homes Prevents Peace?

(JNS) Jonathan S. Tobin - The U.S. foreign-policy establishment has always held to the farcical notion that the presence of Jews in Jerusalem and in the territories is the primary obstacle to ending the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The building of any homes in what the world calls the "West Bank" is a problem because of the assumption that all of it is stolen property that must be returned to their rightful Palestinian owners. That is false. Jews have every right to live in the territories even if the ultimate disposition of the land is something that can and should be negotiated by the parties - assuming that the Palestinians ever chose to negotiate seriously to reach an agreement that will end their century-old war on Zionism. The Biden administration is well aware that the Palestinian Authority leadership has no intention of ever negotiating seriously with Israel. But each time they resurrect the line about wanting to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution that the Palestinians don't want, they reinforce the conviction of both Fatah, which runs the PA, and their Hamas and Islamic Jihad rivals that Israel can be pushed out of the territories as a first step towards its ultimate elimination. Biden knows that the places where new homes will be built in Judea and Samaria will never become part of even a theoretical Palestinian state. Already, more than 500,000 Jews live in the parts of Judea and Samaria that were labeled as "Area C" in the Oslo Accords. None of them are going to be chucked out of their homes to create a Palestinian state. The more the world continues to act as if that were a possibility, the less likely it is that the next Palestinian leadership understands that if they want sovereignty over any part of the country, they'll have to concede the areas where Jewish communities exist. If foreign governments and so-called human-rights groups really wanted to end the cycle of violence, then they would ditch the cycle of diplomatic condemnations of Israel that help reinforce the Palestinian mindset that Israel is an illegitimate nation that can eventually be destroyed.
2023-02-23 00:00:00
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