Peace Through Superior Building Power, Part 2

If you're wondering what's so awful about Israel's "retaliatory strike" of building more settlements, as Emily L. Hauser explains, it's where the settlements are that matters.  As with any real estate issue, it's location, location, location. (emphasis mine:)

Yet if we’re to be brutally frank, bluster and threats are entirely unnecessary. Israel doesn’t need to convince the world of its position or to take extreme measures to make sure that Palestine’s nascent statehood dies in the cradle. All Israel needs to do is stay its decades-long course and keep sending out bulldozers.

Witness the report that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s morning-after response to the statehood vote is 3000 new housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as expedited work in the E-1 “envelope,” a development project intended to geographically join Jerusalem to the settlement of Maaleh Adumim and thus cut the West Bank in half. And thus destroy territorial contiguity for any Palestinian state. And thus drive a final nail in the coffin of the notion of two-state peace.

Though impressive in scope, there is, in fact, nothing new in these plans—indeed, even though Netanyahu committed to President Obama upon taking office that he would not build in E-1, that piece of it can’t be considered a breach with the past either. After all, Israel is forever promising the U.S. one thing and then doing quite another, in particular with regard to the settlements.

So yes, the reaction of the Israelis to the Palestinian recognition vote is very much an act of war.  Building a settlement corridor that would cut the West Bank in two is pretty despicable.  And yet, most Americans will shrug and say "Well how could that be bad?  Why are those awful Arab terrorists complaining about that?"

Now you know.