Ahead of the Jewish New Year, which began Oct. 2, the Central Bureau of Statistics made an announcement that heartened those who oppose the division of the land into two states and to devotees of the settlement enterprise: in 2015 the Judea and Samaria region saw a growth of 4.1% in its Jewish population — from 362,900 in the beginning of the year to 377,900 at its end. This rate of growth is slightly more than double the national average, which stands at exactly 2%.

It seems this is an impressive achievement for the settlement enterprise: Here you have further proof that there's no way back from "Judea and Samaria" (namely the settlement enterprise), and that the two-state solution is obsolete. Could it be that the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi party, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, was right when he said Oct. 6 that the settlement project (or "settlement in the land of Israel," in his words — using the preferred right-wing term for "settlements") is the realization of the will of the people? Is there truth to the education minister's claim that the left, in its call to freeze construction in the territories, distorts the Jewish people's deeply held feelings?

While it seems that the heart of the Israeli people is indeed on the right, at least according to opinion polls, its feet are planted deep on the left side of the map of the land of Israel. The Central Bureau of Statistics' numbers show that there is indeed a way back from the occupation and that the two-state solution is not dead; the settler population in Judea and Samaria is no more than 4.4% of the "Israeli people" (the Jewish population) and only 13% of the population of the West Bank. This is the case after 50 years of efforts to create irreversible facts in the territories, the investment of tens of billions of shekels in infrastructure and incentives, and untold damage to Israel's international stature. What happened to the 1977 promise made by then-Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon (later prime minister), who was appointed that year as chairman of the ministerial committee for settlement issues, that within a decade a million Jews would live in Judea and Samaria?

A look into the sources of growth of the Jewish population in the West Bank does not promise a regular supply of residents for the settlement enterprise. Only two out of 10 new Jewish residents in the settlements came from outside the occupied territories; the rest came from maternity wards. The number of Israelis who moved to live in settlements in 2015 reached about 3,000, while in 1996 some 6,000 Israelis had moved to live in settlements.