An op-ed in today’s New York Times condemns Jewish settlements in the West Bank for comparing their existence to Kibbutzim, small socialist collectives in Israel founded to help settle the countryside. Many Kibbutzim obtained funding from the government and praise for helping to expand the Jewish presence in Israel, with an added emphasis on settling the Negev desert in southern Israel. The author claims that all settlements in the West Bank, according to international law, remain illegal and should not obtain explicit or tacit U.S. support.
Notably, the author writes:
“But the settlers are no mere marginal interest group. To appreciate their significance, spread as they are over a dispersed archipelago of urban installations protected from Arab intrusion by 600 checkpoints and barriers, consider the following: taken together, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights constitute a homogenous demographic bloc nearly the size of the District of Columbia. It exceeds the population of Tel Aviv itself by almost one third. Some “settlement.”
If Israel is drunk on settlements, the United States has long been its enabler. Were Israel not the leading beneficiary of American foreign aid — averaging $2.8 billion a year from 2003 to 2007, and scheduled to reach $3.1 billion by 2013 — houses in West Bank settlements would not be so cheap: often less than half the price of equivalent homes in Israel proper.”
(Full disclosure: My grandparents helped found Kibbutz Gevim in the Negev desert.