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Negotiators must treat Israeli settlements as barriers to peace

David Makovsky, the newest member of the US secretary of state's negotiating team, must realize that the settlement enterprise remains an "intentional, clear and winning" Israeli policy.
Men work on the roof of a house under construction in the unauthorised Jewish settler outpost of Havat Gilad, south of the West Bank city of Nablus November 5, 2013. Israeli and Palestinian officials said on Tuesday the three-month-old peace talks pressed on them by Washington are going nowhere, painting a grim picture for a visit this week by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Both sides have been airing their frustration over a lack of progress in the U.S.-brokered talks aimed at resolving core issues su
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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.

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