1 Boring Old Man

Israel isn’t a very big place. If it were a State, it would rank 48th in size [between NJ and CT] at a bit over eight thousand square miles. Space is a pretty big deal. Palestine occupies the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a combined area of around two thousand two hundred square miles. The population figures are fuzzy because of settlements, but there are about twice as many people in Israel [on almost four times the amount of land], but the population density is high in both places by any standard. In other words, these disputes about land area are a huge deal. The red line on the inset map on the right is the Israeli-built "fence"…

The map on the left is colored dark pink in for the areas of the West Bank that are Israeli settlements, yellow for Palestinian areas. The white area in under Israeli Military control. The area in white controlled by the Israelis where many of the large settlements are located is geographically separated from the rest of the West Bank by mountains. The "settlements" are substantial. Obama said "no more settlements" and now the bickering begins. It’s easy to see why there is such a bitter contention between the Israelis and the Palestinians about these "settlements." So, now Obama and Hillary are in the fray between them. We are advocating two states, but even if they agree, there is a lot of argument over where those two states might be defined, and about these settlements.

Here’s another map of the settlements:

Clinton Rejects Israeli Claims of Accord on Settlements
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post
June 6, 2009

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deepening the impasse between the two countries.

"We have the negotiating record, that is the official record, that was turned over to the Obama administration by the outgoing Bush administration," Clinton told reporters after meeting with her Turkish counterpart in Washington. "There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements."

President Obama in recent weeks has pushed Israel to halt settlement growth, including expansion that results from population growth, on the grounds that it violates commitments made by Israel in the 2003 "road map" peace plan. Israeli officials have protested, saying that they had reached a series of understandings with Bush administration officials – some written, some spoken – under which growth was permitted under certain conditions.

The Washington Post documented some of those understandings last year, quoting Dov Weissglas, one of the Israeli negotiators; at the time, the Bush White House insisted that no such understanding existed. But last week former White House aide Elliott Abrams acknowledged that there had been unwritten understandings between Washington and Jerusalem.

Weissglas detailed this week in an opinion article for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot some of the talks, though he noted that "the Americans completely denied the existence of such understandings." If such understandings were reached, "they did not become part of the official position of the United States government," Clinton said. "And there are contrary documents that suggest that they were not to be viewed as in any way contradicting the obligations that Israel undertook pursuant to the road map. And those obligations are very clear"…