I will now try provide some information as to the settlement disputes. I appreciate because of its complexity it is lengthy and so Granny or Waldo will not read it but it will show why Granny is focusing on issues without understanding how they evolved and try explain why they have come about and how they are not as simple as she claims:
1- 90% of all Jewish settlements have been established on barren undeveloped land throughout the West Bank.
"This is evident even in photos taken by anti-settlement advocacy groups such as Peace Now and B’tselem.63 Since 1980, all settlement activity has been on public land. The process of establishing that settlement land is not private land owned by Arabs is “an exhaustive investigation process” monitored by the Israel Supreme Court.64 West Bank Arab residents who feel wronged when their private land is acquired (with compensation) for public purposes (such as new roads, public services, military installations, etc.) have the right of appeal directly to the Supreme Court."
sources for above: “Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank,” B’tselem, p. 49, quoting a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Interior, Israeli Settlements and International Law,” prepared by the legal advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 2001, at:
http://www.gamla.org.il/english/docs/gen.htm , Chaim Herzog, ibid.
2. 80% percent of Jewish settlers reside adjacent to the Green Line along Israel’s ‘narrow hips,’ and many others are in strategically sensitive areas.
"The actual developed areas of Israeli settlements occupy less than 2% of the landmass of the West Bank.
Peace Now, which favors unilateral withdrawal and dismantling of Jewish communities in the West Bank, estimates the Jewish communities there take up only 1.36 percent of the land. The human rights organization B’tselem, which monitors Jewish building construction on the West Bank and reports its scope to parties abroad, also found the extent of Jewish settlement to be marginal. A B’tselem study published in 2002 found the percentage of developed areas of Jewish settlement on the West Bank comprises 1.7% of all land on the West Bank; if one includes non-developed municipal areas (almost all of which is unpopulated and zoned to meet expansion needs), 5.1% of the West Bank is ‘occupied’ by Jewish settlements.66 The other 94.9 percent is either land owned by local Arabs and registered in the Land Registry, IDF military installations, public lands administered by the government or undeveloped public land zoned to local councils."
source:
http://www.mythsandfacts.org/Conflict/2/territories2.htm3. Jews did not just suddenly show up on the West Bank
"Following the 1967 Six-Day War, the rise of Jewish settlements symbolized the restoration of a dimension of history often ignored by Arabs and unknown to most non-Israelis, which is that Jews had lived in the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem during Mandate times. That period ended only after they were killed or driven out in the aftermath of the 1948 war - when Jewish communities were obliterated. Between 1949 and 1967, Jordanian military personnel razed Jewish settlements, destroyed 58 synagogues, and used headstones from the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives to build roads.In the course of the 1948 War, the West Bank was rendered judenrein – ethnically cleansed of Jews – by Jordanian invaders."
source for above: Jeff Jacoby, “When Jerusalem was divided,” Jewish World Review, January 9, 2001, at:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby010901.asp.
" The mountainous areas of Judea and Samaria were the cradles of Jewish civilization – from Bethel, where Jacob fought with the angels, and Shilo, where the Ark of the Covenant resided, to Hebron, the city of the Patriarchs. The Old City in Jerusalem, Hebron in Judea, Safed and Tiberius in the Galilee, were four holy cities where the Jews were concentrated throughout the ages. In 1898, on the eve of the first wave of Zionist immigration, Edwin S. Wallace, Consul General of the United States, visited Palestine and Jerusalem and wrote:68
Of the eighty thousand Jews in Palestine, fully one-half are living within the walls, or in the twenty-three colonies just outside the walls, of Jerusalem.
Where the Jewish population [in Jerusalem] outnumbers all others, three to one [a full 75 percent], the Jew has few rights.
Although permitted to settle anywhere west of the Jordan River, Zionist settlements were concentrated first in the coastal area, the Galilee and the Negev, in Jerusalem and Hebron in Judea. Jewish settlement elsewhere was more sparse.
During the 1948 War of Independence, the Jewish inhabitants - the men, women and children - living in communities north of Jerusalem and in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, in the Etzion bloc between Hebron and Jerusalem and in the Jordan Rift Valley, were either evacuated to save their lives, killed as combatants while defending their homes, massacred after they surrendered or taken as prisoners of war and not allowed to return to their homes. 2,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Old City, who lived next to the holiest site in Judaism – the Western Wall of the Temple Mount - were an intolerable presence to the Arabs. Not one Jew was allowed to reside in or visit Jordanian territory, including the Old City, for 19 years.
After illegally annexing the West Bank in 1950, Jordan adopted a law in 1954 granting Jordanian citizenship to residents of the West Bank. The law covered those who had been subjects of the British Mandate and stipulated “any man will be a Jordanian subject … if he is not Jewish.”69 Jordan also prohibited Jordanians from selling land to Jews by penalty of death; the Palestinian Authority adopted a similar law in the 1990s."
source: cited in a speech by Chaim Herzog, Israeli ambassador to the UN (1975-78) – “Jewish settlements in ‘the Territories’ Aren’t the Problem,” republished by FrontPage magazine.com, at:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7142.
cont.