Cross-posting this comment from PG's:



Read this article for a rough breakdown of how many of the settlers are militant religious Zionists. Less than half, in actuality.



Keep in mind that the dreadful bloodshed of the past three years of intifada are not the norm in Israel, nor in the settlements. It's tough to remember that when every other story about the conflict waxes on about how much blood has always been shed, but throughout most of the '90s, and certainly in the last few years before the violence erupted in Sept. 2000, it wasn't that dangerous, statistically, to live in most of the settlements. They just weren't attacked very often (thanks in no small part to the large amount of military resources devoted to defending them).



Many of the settlements are quite close to the '67 boundaries, not interfering much at all with the possible demographics of a future Palestinian state. Most of them can (and should) be annexed into Israel as part of a final agreement. Of course, the main problem is that many of the settlements are built deep into the territories, like the insane enclaves in Gaza and near Hebron. Those settlements are the real disaster, but as the above article shows, even some of the residents of those crazy outlying settlements are not militant or extreme in any real way.



I've seen plenty of stories about the fanaticism of some of the Israeli settlers. I think the US media is usually pretty balanced when it comes to the bad actors on both sides.

Hmm...that was supposed to be multiple paragraphs, but the comment box didn't read the blank spaces. The last two sentences above are separate from the rest, and they're sort of a response to what you said about the media coverage in this post.

Linebreaks should be fixed... at the moment you actually have to type in the html tags to get them, but maybe I will alter that. There are several minor formatting issues that I've needed to look at for a while...



Thanks for the article. It's interesting that some of the folks (though clearly not all) are basically just responding to economic incentives... although the policy that puts those incentives in place is certainly flawed. I definitely agree that the settlements along the borders should be an easy problem to resolve.

Yeah, the incentives are all screwed up. My post from a couple of months ago on the settlers as a "special interest group," politically speaking, mentions an important angle to the whole story. Plus the comments on that post, which should still be there, although the Haloscan counter appears to say they aren't.

I've actually heard this idea before - that the settlers form a sort of special interest group - but I'm not sure I understand how this works in the context of the Israeli political system. Without a separate party, it seems like they'd have to vote as an organized block to get any attention... but I'm no expert on Israeli politics.

It's not just the settlers themselves, but also their enablers in the political system. They've had the unqualified support of one of the two major parties, the Likud, over the past 25 years. Check out the details at this link to a Ha'aretz info page on the numbers over the years. If you look at the number of settlers, which they give for each year since 1980, you'll see that it was still less than 35,000 in 1984. But if you look at the number of new settlements each year, you'll see an explosion from 1977-1984, which coincides precisely with the first Likud government in Israel (there was basically one party rule from 1948-1977, by the Labor Party and its forerunners).

I think the main point is that while there was never an enthusiastic majority in Israel for building settlements in far-flung areas of the territories, and while a land for peace deal with a credible representative for the Palestinians(including evacuation of some settlements) would have been acceptable across a wide range of the political spectrum at almost any time since 1967, it just didn't matter to most people when the very existence of the country was unacceptable to the other side. The prevailing reality in Israel was, who can really be bothered to worry about settlements when the Arabs are demanding our own destruction? So the settlers and their supporters, like all effective special interest groups, managed to do very well for themselves because major opposition to them never materialized. They didn't have majority support across the political spectrum, but they didn't have active majority opposition either. Nowadays, while most Israelis acknowledge the reality that many of the settlements will have to go in a final agreement, the suicide bombings and the lack of a credible partner have again rendered the settlements to a lower level of concern than day-to-day security.

Something that it is extremely important to realize is that the entire Palestine (Israel and the rest, skipping transjordan) is really only about the size of the four county Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex or Los Angeles County.

"Settlements" are not as far from Jerusalem (for example) as many commuters are from Los Angeles or San Fran or D.C. or New York (heck, the New York commute area is much larger than the area of the conflict).

Any public discussion ought to include overlays of Israel on a scale map of a major metro area -- Chicago one time, Los Angeles the next, etc. It would provide some perspective that is sorely lacking.

Unfortunately, most of the people moving into the territories now are not ideologues who want to protect "biblical Israel" but people who simply cannot afford a home within Israel proper. The government's misguided policies subsidize housing in the territories and give the residents lots of other perks, making it much more affordable to live there than inside Israel.

I did enjoy reading through these posts, will come back and post something more interesting soon.