I fail to understand how a Jewish family building a house down the road from a Palestinian village, raising their children and studying the Torah, is an "act of terror" of the same magnitude as blowing people up at bus stops and pizza parlors. I simply can't see how these two things are equally evil or that the settlement thing is "more evil" than mass murders.
Now, Israel has to decide what those territories are. Are they now part of Israel proper? Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu says "it is not the occupied territories" but Samaria and Judea. It belongs to Israel. Israelis have the right to build homes and settlements on it.
According to UN resolution 242... these occupied territories should not have settlers and settlements transfered to them.
Politicians like Peres, Abba Eban, Moshe Dayan (at first), Rabin, etc. say these lands belong to the Palestinians. It is our intent to always turn them back over and make a Palestinian state...
This divide is crucial. If the territories are indeed occupied, promised to the Palestinian Arabs for their own state... then should Israel be building settlements in another country? How do you draw borders?
According to Oslo, the PA has been given authority and self-rule in the Gaza Strip... but Israel constantly builds new settlements. If the Palestinians get their state, what becomes of the settlements? Of the Israelis who have built their lives there? Right now, those settlements are armed camps.
The Religious Parties also build in the settlements. They have been careful to build on unoccupied lands, but in places like Hebron, those settlements live on top of Arab cities. How do you divide that up?
Every time a new settlement goes in, it proves to the Palestinians that Israel has no intention of ever giving them self rule.
So, this divide is huge is Israeli politics. According to the world and in American foreign policies... from Johnson on... Israel is an "occupying" force - illegally building settlements on land that does not belong to them.
Likud on the other hand said no sovereignity for Palestine. Self rule in their cities and municipalities, but those territories conquered in 1967 are Israel's.
This is how I understand the situation. Others can add there understanding.
I fail to understand how a Jewish family building a house down the road from a Palestinian village, raising their children and studying the Torah, is an "act of terror" of the same magnitude as blowing people up at bus stops and pizza parlors. I simply can't see how these two things are equally evil or that the settlement thing is "more evil" than mass murders.It would not be. But the settlements are rarely that benign, and the entire settlement movement is based on the premise that the West Bank should be annexed to Israel. Typically, the settlements are armed camps. While many of the settlers are people who are there for cheap housing or because that's where Israel put them, a large number are zealots who hate the Arabs and believe they should be expelled from their homes.
In the past this has lead to tensions, and the IDF has sided with the settlers. If there was trouble between a settlement and a Palestinian village, the IDF would destroy houses in the village, regardless of who started the trouble.
Even today, the settlements get preferences which harm the Palestinian villages. They have "by-pass roads" which chop up the Palestinian territories, making travel and trade difficult or impossible. They have preferences on water, up to 85% of the water in some areas is reserved for the settlements. They fill swimming pools and water lush lawns while Palestinian groves and farms dry up and fail.
As I said, many of the settlers are as hateful as any Hamas activist. If an Arab community in Israel built a shrine to a suicide bomber, the outcry would be tremendous, for good reason. In the settlement of Kiryat Arba, a shrine was built at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who shot and killed 29 Palestinians while they prayed in a mosque. This was too much even for the IDF, who dismantled it after getting a court order to do so. Zealots protested the dismantling and even threatened to desecrate the grave of Yitzak Rabin, the former PM who was killed by a zealot.
So in the eyes of the Palestinians, the settlers aren't the innocent family you described. Their viewpoint is largely justified, and international law is on their side. Indeed, the situation is a textbook example of why the Geneva Convention forbade the transfer of a Power's citizens into occupied territories.
-Eric