Earlier this week the Washington Post continued the plague of the neoconservatives by running a piece by Elliott Abrams in favor of the Israeli colonies, and including this ugly statement:
An entity. Abrams is free to think anything he likes. The tragedy is that this religious-chauvinist view gets any airtime in a newspaper that still influences policy. Well at least today the Post ran a great letter by Gregory Eow and Brian Rush Simpson, denouncing the settlements. Eow and Simpson have been to the West Bank and had their eyes opened. How unfair that just when J Street and Obama are trying to change course, the Post gives room for Abrams's op-ed, but doesn't give Eow and Simpson space for an op-ed of their own. Eow and Simpson make this point better than I do:
Previously, we had thought it was Palestinian intransigence that
prevented a two-state solution. A look at the settlements demolishes
this explanation. The settlements and the maze of Israelis-only roads
and military checkpoints to sustain them makes clear that successive
Israeli governments — Labor and Likud alike, as Mr. Abrams noted —
have actively pursued policies aimed at colonizing the West Bank.
That prevents the establishment of a viable and contiguous
Palestinian state, and we are saddened that the conversation has
degraded to the point that we now discuss whether illegal land grabs
ought to be frozen rather than uprooted.
