The Other Housing Crisis

[UPDATE, Jan. 5: At the moment, the temptation is to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a zoom lens that shows the battles in Gaza up-close, in detail. But a zoom lens flattens the picture you see, and entirely leaves out the panoramic view.

In the panoramic view, Israel's strategic problem remains ending its rule over the Palestinians safely, in order to avoid the alternative of an unstable binational state. That means leaving the West Bank, and giving up settlements. Indeed, the reason Ariel Sharon insisted on leaving Gaza unilaterally three years ago is that any negotiated agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would have meant taking down most settlements. But the unilateral withdrawal empowered Hamas, and is at the root of the current crisis.

The longer the challenge of removing West Bank settlements is evaded, the more overwhelming it becomes.

-- Gershom Gorenberg]

Each time I drive out of Jerusalem into the West Bank, it strikes me: The hills are changing. Israeli settlements are redrawing the landscape -- daily, insistently. While governments change, while diplomatic conversations murmur on and stop and begin again, the bulldozers and cranes continue their work.

From my home in West Jerusalem, the road that Israelis use to head south toward Hebron runs through two tunnels in the mountains. Known simply as the Tunnel Road, it was built in the mid-1990s during the Oslo peace process, when Bethlehem was turned over to Palestinian rule and Israelis wanted a way to bypass the town on their way to settlements that remained in Israeli hands.

A turn from the Tunnel Road takes you past the Palestinian village of Hussan to Beitar Illit, a settlement covering two hills. The streets are lined with apartment buildings, faced in rough-cut, yellowish-white stone, all with red-tile roofs, so alike they could have been turned out by the same factory. In 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands and peace seemed close enough to touch, about 4,000 people lived in Beitar Illit. Now, 34,000 live here, and more will soon move in.

The message written on the landscape is simple: Every day, the settlements expand. Every day, Israel grows more entangled in the West Bank. To a large degree, the Israeli and Palestinian publics have accepted the need for a two-state solution. But time, and the construction crews, are working against it. No one knows exactly where the point of no return is -- when so many Israelis will have moved into so many homes beyond the pre-1967 border that there is no going back. But each passing day brings that tipping point nearer. If a solution is not achieved quickly, it might soon be out of reach.

The failure of slow-motion diplomacy can be told in numbers. In 1993, when the Oslo process began, 116,000 Israelis lived in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (excluding Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem). Seven years later, when negotiations collapsed, the settler population had risen to 198,000.

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