It Ain't the Settlements, Stupid!

Just as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was packing his bags in London for his initial trip to the region as Quartet peace envoy - a foray which, like its predecessors (Mitchell, Tenet, et al.), undoubtedly will fail - Israeli Prime Minister Olmert was already steering him off-course. "Settlements," he announced, will have to go.

"Anyone living with some kind of dream detached from reality that we can keep all the territories, isn't making a correct assessment," Olmert said. "We will have to leave many areas there."

To make matters worse, on the very day Blair arrived, the IDF publicly confronted Jews who'd returned, in protest, to Homesh, one of four West Bank "settlements" forcibly evacuated with those in Gaza.

But as the Gaza withdrawal and its aftermath have proven to anyone willing to objectively consider the facts, the "settlements" aren't the issue and have never been. Jewish communities in Gaza are gone and so is the IDF from much of Gaza, aside from border crossings, yet violence not only has continued but escalated. Qassem rockets hit towns inside Israel almost daily and, last July, Hamas mounted a cross-border raid that netted an IDF soldier still held captive.

It ain't the "settlements," stupid! Rather, Israel's enemies want the whole thing -- all of what they consider historic "Palestine." Now, rather than have Blair focus on pushing serious reform of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, Olmert has given the Palestinians justification to point their fingers elsewhere.