Friday, February 27, 2009

Debating the difficulty of dismantling Israeli settlements.



Gorenberg is talking great sense here and David Frum is talking the usual nonsense. Israeli settlements are not "trailer parks" as Frum claims. In many cases they are fully functional towns stealing local Palestinian water resources. And, again as Gorenberg points out, the people living in these places are not suburbanites, in many cases they are living there because of ideology.

Successive US governments have ignored the issue of the settlements, which is highly dangerous, as each new settler makes eventual peace ever less likely.

Gorenberg argues that dismantling the settlements is vital to the security which Frum is demanding that the Israelis need. When Frum and others discuss Israel's security threats they certainly never view the settlements as part of the problem, as you can see from the casual way Frum writes them off with, "people move". But I'll give Frum his due, he certainly allows Gorenberg to make his case without interruption.

This excerpt is actually from a much wider and very interesting conversation which they both had. You can watch the whole thing here.

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