David Makovsky recently joined Secretary of State John Kerry’s negotiating team. He had previously served as the director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In an article he published in The Wall Street Journal in 2009, Makovsky did not leave much room for doubt as to his position on the settlements: “It is foolish to believe that Israel can continue to build settlements for decades without considering the impact that has on the lives of the Palestinians,” wrote my former colleague from Haaretz (and in the interest of full disclosure, my tennis partner as well). He added, “The only way to deal with the settlement issue is to render it moot by widening it to peacemaking and heading straight into the final negotiations on territory.”

Four and a half years have passed since those words were written. In that time the negotiations on permanent borders have been renewed without significant progress in the “peace process.” The building boom in the settlements, on the other hand, has progressed impressively: From 2009 until the end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s second term, 6,867 new housing units have been started in the West Bank, more than a third of them on the eastern side of the separation barrier.

This week, on Nov. 25, it was announced that the Senior Planning Committee of the civil administration has authorized the construction of 800 new housing units. The plans include construction in two outposts: Givat Sal'it in the Jordan Valley, and Nofei Prat (near Jerusalem), an outpost evacuated by the state several times until it was finally decided to authorize it and turn it into a large and flourishing community.

The notion of paving a “settlement bypass route” by drawing permanent borders, as Makovsky has suggested, ignores the main goal of this enterprise — to entrench Israeli control over the territory while damaging the collective and individual rights of Palestinians. Thanks to the currently faltering negotiations, the West Bank has turned into the Wild West. While the statesmen “enter the room,” as Justice Minister Tzipi Livni likes to say, others are establishing facts on the ground in the backyard of Israeli society.