Those who deny the Jewish people’s right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland often insist that their objection to Israel is not directed against the Jewish state itself, but only against the presence of Israeli communities—commonly referred to as “settlements”—in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. According to this argument, if Israel were to dismantle these communities, peace would naturally follow.

History tells a quite different story.

If settlements are truly the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, what explains the decades of violence against Jews before a single Israeli settlement existed in Judea and Samaria or Gaza? Why were Jews attacked long before Israel captured those territories in the 1967 Six-Day War?

The answer is unmistakable. The conflict did not begin with settlements; it began with the refusal to accept the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Land of Israel.

In November 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate for Palestine into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. The proposed Jewish state was small, fragmented, and strategically vulnerable. Nevertheless, the........

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