CRAZY SUBURBAN SETTLERS AND THE PUNDITS THAT HATE THEM

Eric Alterman, the official keeper of the who's naughty and nice to the Palestinians, comments on the existence of the suburban settler - the non-ideological ones that live just across the 1967 border in the West Bank.

Some of the people who piss me off most in the world are fanatical American Jews who relocate their families to the occupied West Bank, making peace harder and harder to achieve while furthering the legitimate anger of the Palestinians over the daily humiliations they must endure under Israeli occupation. Even worse, however, are those who do it for convenience, like this person writing in Salon today.....

Hello lady, it’s a war zone! At least the fanatics have the excuse of being a little deranged. But you, ma’am, are putting your family at risk as part of an illegal occupation that is recognized by approximately zero governments of the world and directly contravenes Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. There can be no defense of suicide bombings, but the West Bank denizens have chosen to make themselves targets on land to which Israel has no legal or moral right...

Yes, the proud parents of suicide bombers make me sick, but what kind of mother or father would send their kinds on this kind of ideological mission? Marcy Spiegel Oster should go back to Cleveland — or Tel Aviv — I don’t care. But if, God forbid, something should happen to her children in the occupied territories, she will have only herself to blame.

Alterman and I agree on one thing - we can't stand the fanatical settlers. For me, its a religious matter - they've warped my beautiful religion into a fundamentalist cult that holds land more holy than life. For Alterman, though the worst part is that they are settlers - on foreign soil. So, according to Mr. Alterman, Marcy Oster and family are "even worse" than the Baruch Goldstein Fan Club in Kiryat Arba. She's as a bad as the parents of suicide bombers, placing her children in a "war zone" where their massacre would be "defensible."

The key to Alterman's vitriol is the phrase "land to which Israel has no legal or moral right." That simply is not true. Israel has two claims on the West Bank - one on the grounds of security, another on the grounds that Judea and Samaria are the historical heartland of the Jewish people. The Arabs have a powerful counter-claim, the right of self-determination on the lands they live. This, and not the sanctity of the 1948 armistice lines, is the fundamental justification behind a partition of the West Bank. Thus, who and where the settlers are matters greatly. The fanatics on isolated hill tops outside of Hebron and Nablus are an obstacle to peace - they make a continuous Palestinian state impossible, and are going to leave kicking and screaming. The surburban settlers on the other hand are on land Israel needs for secure borders, and are the very Israelis that the Palestinians can someday live in peace with, if they are willing to someday value peace above land.