Maybe We Shouldn’t Have Made All Those “New Jewish Settlements” Invisible

By Avigdor Liberman, Minister of Defense

Having served as Minister of Defense for ten months now, I can give a number of observations as to certain strategic mistakes our country has made over the last several decades, but principally in the last eight years. Chief among them, I would argue, was the decision to make all those new settlements everyone says we’ve been building invisible.

To read media reports, international pronouncements, and all manner of anti-settlement NGO statements – not to mention the panicked rhetoric among some of our own homegrown left-wingers – the pace of Jewish settlement construction in Judea and Samaria is such that unless action is taken now, there will be no hope for a contiguous, viable Palestinian state, and all incentive for a peaceful resolution of the conflict will disappear, leading to endless violence, Apartheid, and general apocalypse. Especially galling, of course, is all those Palestinian communities that were bulldozed to make room for Jewish settlements. So I believe it was unwise to make all that bulldozing, construction, and populating of those settlements mostly invisible. In the case of the last twenty years or so, one hundred percent invisible.

Let that sink in. We’ve been sending invisible bulldozers out to destroy invisible Palestinian homes, displacing thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of invisible Palestinians from those invisible homes – in fact the number could be much higher; we have no way of knowing, as they’re invisible – building hundreds, maybe thousands, of new Jewish settlements, and inviting hundreds of thousands of invisible Jewish settlers to live there. For all that work, however, in the entire Judea-Samaria region we have only 228 visible settlements and illegal outposts combined. Not a single new visible settlement has been established this century.

Putting all of our eggs in that invisible basket will come back to bite us. If we were really serious about rendering the area Jewish, we’d make all those new settlements visible, traceable, and demonstrable in their existence. We haven’t been doing that. And even if we were to uproot Jewish settlements as part of a final status agreement, it would nigh impossible to do so to the invisible ones.

Beyond the strategic question, I want to get to know my invisible neighbors. It seems plain wrong to have hundreds of thousands of my fellow Israeli Jews living near me, but I have no way of interacting with them. I would welcome the opportunity to relate to them as I do my other neighbors. We already share an appreciation for the settlement lifestyle, and I would wager we have much more than that in common.

This was not a well-thought-out idea.

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