How Israeli settlements have reached a crucial juncture
SHILOH, West Bank — Through eight years of escalating criticism from the world’s most powerful leader, Israeli construction in these sacred, militarily occupied hills never stopped.
Thousands of homes were built. Miles of roadway. Restaurants. Shopping malls. A university.
And here in Shiloh, a tourist center went up, with a welcome video in which the biblical figure Joshua commands the Jewish people to settle the land promised to them by God.
Israeli settlements may be illegal in the eyes of the U.N. Security Council and a major obstacle to Middle East peace in the view of the Obama administration.
But every day they become a more entrenched reality on land that Palestinians say should rightfully belong to them. As the parched beige hilltops fill with red-tiled homes, decades of international efforts to achieve a twostate solution are unraveling.
And global condemnations notwithstanding, the trend is poised to accelerate.
Already, Israel has a rightwing government that boasts it is more supportive of settlement construction than any in the country’s short history. In less than two weeks, it will also have as an ally a U.S. president, Donald Trump, who has signaled that he could make an extraordinary break with decades of U.S. policy and end American objections to the settlements.
The combination has delighted settlers here and across the West Bank who express hope for an unparalleled building boom that would kill off notions of a Palestinian state once and for all.
“If America interferes less, everything will be much easier,” said Shivi Drori, 43, who runs a winery in a Jewish outpost deep in the West Bank that the Israeli government considers officially offlimits to building but has tacitly backed. “I’d like to see bigger settlements. Major cities.”
Mr. Trump, Mr. Drori predicts, will help make that a reality simply by looking the other way.
“Obama was very confrontational,” Mr. Drori said. “The Trump administration seems much more sympathetic.”
Israel’s military conquered the West Bank in a matter of days 50 years ago this June in a war against neighboring Arab states. But settling the land has been the work of generations, accomplished hilltop by hilltop as temporary encampments and caravans have given way to suburban-style homes rooted firmly in the bedrock.
All the while, much of the world has opposed the settlements as an illegal infringement on occupied land. U.S. governments — Democrat and Republican alike — have urged Israel to halt the project and allow negotiations to dictate control of land that Palestinians say is vital to the viability of a future state.
Today, some 400,000 Israelis live in roughly 150 settlements scattered across the West Bank. That’s up from fewer than 300,000 when Barack Obama was elected. An additional 200,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as their future capital.
Unable to halt settlement growth, a frustrated Obama administration lashed out last month with a twin-barreled diplomatic assault.
First, Washington abstained in a U.N. Security Council vote that demanded Israel end all settlement activity — enabling the resolution’s passage. Days later, Secretary of State John Kerry delivered an impassioned speech accusing Israel of putting the two-state solution “in serious jeopardy” by building “in the middle of what, by any reasonable definition, would be the future Palestinian state.”
Rather than be chastened by the criticism from the nation that has long been its closest ally, Israel’s government was furious. Settlers, meanwhile, brush it off as an irrelevance.
“There’s no implication,” said Oded Revivi, chief foreign envoy for the Yesha Council, which represents settlers.
Mr. Kerry, Mr. Revivi said, is fixated on an idea that, because of decades of Palestinian violence and intransigence, can never become reality — two states for two peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
But not everyone in Mr. Trump’s incoming team backs expansion of Israeli settlements. Retired Gen. James Mattis, Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, has condemned expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, repeatedly said the U.S. must find a way for a two-state solution in the region and praised Mr. Kerry’s efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal as “valiant.