Trust the settlers to lose the West Bank

[bemildred]

Barack Obama cannot and will not compel Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and free up land for a Palestinian state. Neither will the international community as a whole, nor Hamas, and certainly not the Palestinian Authority, nor what remains of the Israeli left.

Trust the settlers, though. They alone will make it possible. Sooner or later, they'll lose the West Bank all by themselves.

There's no one else to do it. The president's sway over a client ally is limited by a host of constraints, not least, the contingencies of a congressional election less than 11 months from now. The world huffs, puffs, and blows nothing but smoke. Hamas has problems of its own, one of them being the bitter fact that the best way to boost its popularity among Palestinians is to negotiate a prisoner exchange with a Jewish state that, it asserts, does not, and should never, exist. For the Fatah PA and the Israeli left, existence itself has become the problem.

If past experience is any guide, only the settlers themselves are capable of doing what is needed to bring about a pullout. And if present indications hold, at some point, they will do just that.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1133342.html

Edit: I do want to say that he makes an error in omitting the withdrawal from Lebanon under Barak, however it is an understandable mistake in his context.