Construction inside the settlement “blocs” isn’t a non-issue. When Israeli and Palestinian negotiators start talking seriously about settlements, they won’t be spending a lot of time debating the future of isolated settlements, because these settlements would unquestionably have to be removed under a peace agreement. The real negotiations, the very difficult ones, will actually be over the so-called “settlement blocs”: their size and contours, the way they will be connected to Israel, and the land swaps that will be used to offset them. This is why settlement expansion in these areas is equally if not more harmful to the two-state solution than construction in the isolated settlements.

Given the facts on the ground today, reaching agreement on these blocs will already be challenging. Expansion of these blocs – of the settlements in them and of the blocs themselves (both to include outlying settlements and to create new blocs, like the “Beit El bloc” that has recently been raised in pro-settlement talking points) – threatens to make the issue even harder, if not impossible, to resolve. And notably, the blocs – which are actually large land enclaves – include not only settlements but also large numbers of Palestinians in adjacent villages.

The demand that the Palestinians not only recognize Israel - something they have done repeatedly, starting in 1993 - but that they recognize Israel as “a Jewish state,” or some similar wording, is relatively new. No such demand was made of Egypt or Jordan, nor was it mentioned in the Oslo agreement or subsequent Israeli-Palestinian documents. It made a brief appearance in the Annapolis talks of 2007, but only as a marginal issue. Only in 2009 did it truly come into play, courtesy of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s decision to introduce the issue into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating dynamic seemed to be a cynical one. It seems to have been intended to hinder the negotiations rather than to advance them. Netanyahu was faced with a U.S. president determined to forge ahead with peace and a Palestinian president who embraced the two-state solution, rejected violence, and was actively cooperating to fight terrorism. This left Netanyahu scrambling for a pretext to argue that Israel had no Palestinian partner for peace, as cover for his own anti-peace, pro-settlement policies. Thus was born the “recognition-plus” demand, which today is accepted by many Israelis and supporters of Israel as a condition for any peace agreement, and even as a precondition for continuing to sit at the negotiating table with the Palestinians.

There is little doubt that the reasons behind the introduction of the “recognition-plus” demand into the political debate were cynical, seeking to create a new obstacle to peace. That said, for many Israelis, the “recognition-plus” demand has taken root not because they are looking for an excuse not to make peace. It has taken root, at least in part, because it taps into two popular Israeli sentiments that relate to peace with their neighbors. One is the longing of Israelis to not simply be tolerated in the Middle East, but to be embraced, in the region and the world, as a legitimate, indigenous nation, consistent with Israel’s founding Zionist narrative of the return of the Jews to their historic homeland. The other is the Israeli anxiety that even after a peace agreement, Palestinians will not be content with a state in the West Bank and Gaza, but will continue fighting to “liberate” all of Palestine, which they believe belongs to them and not Israel.

For Palestinians, rejection of the “recognition-plus” demand – as that demand has thus far been articulated – is a function of their own historical and political narrative. According to this narrative, they are an indigenous people living for generations in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, only to be unjustly expelled or occupied as the result of the creation of Israel and subsequent disastrous wars. Israeli insistence that the Palestinians adopt the Israeli-dictated formula of “the Jewish state of Israel” or similar wording is thus understood by many Palestinians as effectively requiring them to renounce their national narrative and accept the delegitimization of their own history, suffering, and grievances. It is viewed as asking them to recognize, in essence, prior Jewish claims that erase their own rights, both in terms of lands lost and as refugees. Moreover, this demand is seen by many – on both sides of the Green Line – as requiring Palestinian President Abbas to “sell out” the more than one million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, sabotaging their own efforts to play an effective role in influencing the future character of the state of Israel and break down the barriers to equality inside Israel.