It is often claimed that Israeli communities east of the 1949 armistice lines (the so-called “Green Line”) are on the verge of rendering impossible the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank. If, the argument goes, the demographic growth of settlements and the building of new houses continue unchecked, Jewish and Arab populations will become hopelessly entangled. But a careful look at the details show that this is false, as David Makovsky explains:
If we want to parse out territorial solutions, we need to distinguish between two groups of settlers . . . : one group lives west of (i.e., within) the Israeli security barrier, constructed by the Israeli government during the second intifada to stymie the flow of Palestinian suicide bombers from the West Bank. The second group lives beyond or east of the security barrier. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 85 percent of Israelis living east of the Green Line but within the security barrier’s delineated area live in approximately 8 percent of the West Bank, in areas largely adjacent to [cities west of the Green Line]. This translates to just under 556,000 Israelis living inside, or west, of the security barrier and more than 97,000 living outside of the barrier. . . .
Two settlements out of a total of 139 currently account for almost 30 percent of all West Bank settlers and 46 percent of the [population] growth over the last year. These are both ultra-Orthodox settlements, denoting a shift since the settlement movement was launched in the late 1960s, largely by religious Zionists. . . . In contrast, the ultra-Orthodox are largely motivated by socioeconomic concerns, especially affordable housing, [rather than ideology].
In other words, Makovsky argues, demographic growth in the settlements is not driven by nationalist zealots, as the Western media frequently claims; and most of the settlements can be annexed to Israel through land-swaps without threatening Palestinian territorial integrity.
Read more on Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/11/29/70-years-after-partition-a-two-state-solution-is-still-possible/