I once believed that Jewish settlement in the West Bank was an obstacle to peace and should be reversed. After October 7, and after reconsidering decades of rejected peace proposals, I no longer believe that Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is the central obstacle.

Since 1967, and especially since Egypt made peace with Israel in 1978, there have been repeated attempts to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. During the Clinton administration, Israel accepted the possibility of painful territorial concessions that many Israelis strongly opposed but were prepared to consider in exchange for real peace. Yasser Arafat rejected that opportunity, and later proposals also failed.

Those refusals matter.

Palestinian leaders have been offered frameworks that would have created a state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, often with territorial exchanges. Israel also withdrew completely from Gaza more than twenty years ago. What followed was not peace, but the construction of an underground military infrastructure designed to attack Israel.

That history changes the argument. Settlements alone do not explain why there is still no peace.

Judea and Samaria are not random pieces of foreign territory in Jewish history. They are part of the heartland of the ancient Jewish homeland. That history does not settle every modern legal or political question, but it cannot simply be erased.

International courts and much of the world consider Israeli settlements unlawful. That position should be acknowledged, but I do not regard it as the final word on the moral or political reality. In my view, it reflects an international approach that too often ignores the facts on the ground, treats Israel as the only party responsible for creating peace, and gives too little weight to repeated Palestinian rejectionism.

Israel is not........

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