Israeli settlements have been a longtime source of dispute between Israel and the international community. But are settlements the reason there is no peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

  • After Israel's War of Independence in 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, but with no international authorization. Jordan expelled 17,000 Jews from what is today known as the West Bank. There were no Israeli settlements in the West Bank during that time, yet Palestinian leadership and the Arab world still sought Israel's annihilation.
  • As a result of the resounding Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel gained the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. Less than a week after the war ended, the Israeli unity government under Prime Minister Levi Eshkol affirmed—and then told —that Israel would return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and the Golan Heights to Syria in return for signed peace treaties. Separate negotiations would then be conducted regarding the future of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the refugee issue. While Egypt accepted the Sinai offer, Syria rejected the Golan Heights offer. Negotiations over the West Bank and Gaza failed.
  • While the Israeli government was trying to figure out what to do with the West Bank, some Israelis took up residence across the 1967 armistice lines without authorization. These Israeli developments, known as “settlements,” only take up around 2 percent of West Bank land. Over time, US administrations recognized that Israel would retain some of these towns in any peace agreement.
  • Many legal scholars question whether settlements are illegal. Eugene V. Rostow, one of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242—written after the 1967 war to create a framework for peace negotiations—stated, "The Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors." Moreover, Rostow contended that "The Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there."
  • Others contend that the Geneva Convention, passed after WWII, makes the settlements illegal (Israel rejects this claim).The December 2016 UN Security Council Resolution 2334 Vote—passed due to the US government’s abstention—declared them illegal and opened the door to future international actions against Israel. Though the international community argues those settlements violate international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention and that Israelis are illegally "occupying" that land, Israeli citizens were never deported or transferred there and were not and are not occupying an already-exisiting sovereign territory.

Thus, Israeli communities in the West Bank are not illegal.

  • The Jewish people are restablishing what was already there before they were expelled in 1948.
  • The UN declaration on the rights of indiginous people, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007, states that indigenous people have a right to land they traditionally owned, and this includes the Jewish people who are indigenous to Judea and Samaria—the West Bank.

However, Palestiniansare building illegally around Jerusalem.

  • All of the governments and international bodies that criticize Israel for building what many claim to be legal communities are silent about the construction of new Palestinian developments surrounding Jerusalem.

  • According to a detailed article by Bassam Tawil of the Gatestone Institute, the questionable construction is primarily in Zone-C, which under the Oslo Peace Accords should be territory controlled by Israel. According to Tawil, Palestinians estimate that in the past few years they have built more than 15,000 illegal housing units in areas surrounding Jerusalem as part of a plan to encircle the city. These are not single family homes, but massive apartment complexes without proper licenses, not built to code, and some without proper sewage. The article claims that many of the "contractors" are land-thieves and thugs who are building without permission on private Palestinian-owned land or on lands whose owners are living abroad.

Settlements do not jeopardize future "land for peace" deals. The major obstacle to peace is Palestinian leadership.

  • The Palestinian leadership's refusal to give up the conflict, recognize Israel as a Jewish State, and renounce the "right of return" for most Palestinian refugees, is the real obstacle to peace. The so-called "right of return" would allow millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees to flood Israel.
  • No Israeli leader would ever accept the "right of return," since it would mean the end of the world’s only Jewish state. Yet, the Palestinian leadership has never told its own people that they must forfeit this claim in order to achieve peace.

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