On Sunday, September 13, 2009, as George Mitchell traveled to Israel to further advance negotiations, Israel’s Consul General in New York, Asaf Shariv, published an op-ed in the New York Daily News regarding the often misunderstood issue of settlements.

Israeli settlements: a red herring, not the key to peace

By Asaf Shariv

U.S. special envoy George Mitchell has just arrived in the Middle East with the mission of jumpstarting peace talks. On the top of his agenda, yet again, will be a push to freeze or roll back Israeli settlement activity.

However, this issue is deeply misunderstood. Though settlements are long held up as a prime obstacle to peace, that’s a gross distortion that glosses over Palestinian rejectionism.

A quick glimpse at history tells the whole story. Two decisions gave modern international recognition to the bond that has existed between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel for thousands of years. The right of the Jewish people to its own independent state was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of 1917; it was reaffirmed in the 1947 UN resolution declaring the Land of Israel home to the Jewish people.

It is a sad historical fact that both were roundly rejected by the Arabs, who launched a war against the newborn Jewish state.

There were no settlements in 1948. Yet we immediately found ourselves fighting for our lives. And if no Israelis lived outside of Israel’s tiny borders until 1967, it makes one wonder what the Palestine Liberation Organization intended to accomplish when it was founded … in 1964.

Needless to say, we survived. Ever since 1948, Israel has sought an end to the conflict, its leaders extending their hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace.

It was for the sake of peace that in 1982 Israel’s government evacuated thousands of Jews from their homes in Sinai as part of a sustainable peace treaty with Egypt. The broad Arab war against Israel continued.

Four years ago, in late August 2005, Ariel Sharon tried to salvage the hope for peace with the Palestinians. He was even prepared, despite constant terrorism, to accept the assumption that what the Palestinians truly desired was self-determination and their own independent state – not the elimination of Israel.

I watched Sharon struggle to make one of the most difficult decisions he had ever had to make – to unilaterally leave Gaza. It was heartrending to see Jews forced from their homes by order of the Jewish state.

At first it reminded us of the 1982 evacuation of the Sinai, except this time peace did not follow. Quite the opposite – practically as soon as the gate closed behind us, Palestinians in Gaza destroyed what we had left behind and began to fire thousands of rockets into southern Israel. Our children could no longer play in their playgrounds; they never knew when the next rocket would strike.

As terribly as our people have suffered since 2005, it pales in comparison to the brutality we have witnessed in Gaza, aimed at the Palestinian people by Hamas. Political opponents have been tortured and thrown from windows; rival factions have forced children to literally stand between them and bullets; innocent Palestinians have been blown up by explosives stored – or manufactured – in neighboring houses. This is what the Palestinians made of their newly Jew-free home.

It is time to realize that the settlements won’t settle it, after all.

Peace in the Middle East does not hinge on settlements. And in Israel, a country governed by democracy and rule of law, a country that has made and will still make sacrifices for peace, settlements are no obstacle to progress.

We Israelis cannot afford the luxury of seeing the world in black and white. We know that peace will not be found at either extreme. What the Palestinians need now is leadership that understands this as well, and is brave enough to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people.

History has shown that settlements don’t stand in the way of peace. Continued rejection of our unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, however, just might.

Shariv is the Israeli consul general in New York. From 2002-2007 he served as personal media adviser to Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, and was a member of the special task force that worked with the U.S. government.

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