The American Jewish community bears a heavy burden of responsibility for the situation today in the occupied territories. For decades, American Jews and our community leaders and organizations have made excuses for Israeli policies, including with respect to settlements, and have worked to inoculate Israel from criticism and pressure. For decades, elements within the American Jewish community have actively supported and funded settlers and settlement projects whose clear mission is to prevent a peace agreement with the Palestinians and obstruct a two-state solution.

Now, 50 years into the occupation, it is time for the U.S. Jewish community to, belatedly, start to act responsibly – before it is too late. American Jews who care about Israel must end their head-in-the-sand approach to Israeli government policies, especially with respect to settlements. Israel’s future and its position in the world are in real jeopardy today, in no small part due to a U.S. Jewish community that has overlooked, made excuses for, funded (directly and indirectly) and otherwise enabled its self-defeating, immoral pro-settlement policies. Supporting Israel today means speaking truth to our Israeli brothers and sisters and to the Israeli government, and letting them know that American Jews, like the rest of the world, cannot rationalize or accept permanent Israeli occupation, and that we won’t be taken in by alternative facts or cynical manipulations meant to convince us that settlement expansion inside or outside the “settlement blocs” is consistent with peace and the achievement of a two-state solution.

Israel needs to stop building settlements and end the occupation urgently. It must do so not as a concession to the Palestinians but for Israel’s own sake.

Israel has for most of the past 50 years shown to the world the face of a nation that does not truly seek peace. This period has been punctuated by various efforts to reach peace, the most serious of which was cut short by the assassination of a courageous peace-seeking Israeli prime minister by an Israeli extremist seeking to sabotage peace. Subsequent peace efforts have been undermined and discredited by the refusal of Israeli governments to put an end to policies on the ground that perpetuate and entrench the occupation and expand settlements, including with the trick called “settlement blocs.”

Rather than show it was serious about wanting peace, successive Israeli governments have – for reasons of ideology or political expediency – exploited the asymmetry of power in this conflict to turn peace talks into a fig leaf to cover actions on the ground that are antithetical to the achievement of peace and a two-state solution. By their own actions and statements they undercut talks, eroded the credibility of negotiations as a means of achieving an agreement in the future, and undermined their Palestinian partners. Today, members of Israel’s government are openly celebrating the demise of the two-state solution and are dropping even the pretense of supporting negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

In this way, for nearly 50 years a vast amount of Israeli resources have been squandered on the self-defeating and immoral settlement enterprise, including the ever-expanding “settlement blocs.” Five decades of Israeli military energies have been hijacked and morale eroded as military service has become an exercise in the subjugation and policing of the lives of Palestinian civilians. For 50 years occupation policies have generated more Palestinian grievances, anger and hatred, sowing the seeds for future conflict and violence and alienating potential allies regionally and internationally.

Occupation and settlements – including the “settlement blocs” – are destroying Israel. They have hijacked Israeli politics, and undermined Israel’s own interests and values. They are pushing Israel toward becoming an international pariah and are threatening Israel’s survival as a Jewish state and a democracy. Promoting and defending the occupation and settlements has eroded Israel’s claims to military self-defense, while leaving Israel increasingly demonized, defensive, and isolated – a nation of many virtues that has come to be viewed by much of the world exclusively through the prism of the occupation.

Based on past negotiations, including the unofficial Geneva Initiative process (which yielded the Geneva Accords, the only detailed agreement ever achieved between Israelis and Palestinians) it seems likely that Palestinians will be willing to accept a peace agreement under which Israel retains control of some settlements, but only in return for (a) the evacuation of all other settlements and (b) land swaps, equal in size and quality, to compensate for the land kept by Israel. This is an important principle that, in the context of serious peace negotiations, could play a key role in the achievement of a viable final status agreement. However, it is disingenuous to cherry-pick this principle in order to justify new settlement construction outside the context of such negotiations and absent a peace agreement.

Under the Geneva Accords, the Palestinians (many of whom were and remain senior and influential political figures) agreed to Israel's annexation of some settlement blocs, in exchange for equal land swaps. However, such a negotiated agreement is far different from Israel acting unilaterally to annex territory, and it is important to note that the areas the Palestinian agreed would be ceded to Israel were far more modest than the expansive blocs of settlements and surrounding lands that Israel has de facto annexed with the security barrier. Indeed, the Geneva experience makes clear that any serious peace effort will have to recognize that settlement "fingers" stretching deep into the West Bank (like the Ariel and Kedumim blocs), and inflated settlement 'balloons" that effective block territorial contiguity of the West Bank (like the E-1/Ma'ale Adumim bloc) are inconsistent with the achievement of a peace agreement or the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. And, notably, further construction also threatens to make any agreement impossible, given that Israel does not have sufficient land reserves adjacent to the Green Line to compensate for all the areas that it wants to keep in the West Bank through one-to-one land swaps. If such land swaps become impossible, an agreement will likely be impossible as well.

Regardless of who may end up in control of or with sovereignty over these areas under a future peace agreement, if Israel is serious about wanting to make peace with the Palestinians, the future of these areas must be left to negotiations and not determined by unilateral acts. Unilateral acts by Israel only undermine those Palestinians who remain committed to a peaceful, negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who still support a two state solution. Such acts also waste goodwill towards Israel around the world, fuel boycotts and other activism targeting both Israel and the settlements, and pointlessly consume valuable Israeli political capital.

Many Israelis assume that what is on the Israeli side of the barrier is part of the "blocs," and what is on the Palestinian side of the barrier is not. However, this ignores the fact that the route of the barrier has been gerrymandered to include as many settlements as possible and to encompass huge areas of adjacent land – the total area of West Bank land that is de facto annexed by the barrier is some twentyfold the size of the built-up area of the settlements in these areas.

This gerrymandering of Israel’s border for the benefit of settlements comes at the cost of vital Israeli interests. First, it undermines the possibility of a two-state solution – without which Israel cannot remain both a democracy and a Jewish state. And second, it sacrifices Israeli security, leaving Israel with a long, convoluted border running near or through the heart of Palestinian populated areas, and leaves large numbers of Palestinians within Israel’s lines of defense. For example:

• In the case of the "Ma'ale Adumim bloc" (east of Jerusalem), the barrier route takes up land many times the size of Ma'ale Adumim, including the area of the planned mega-settlement of E1, a settlement whose construction successive US administrations have recognized as potentially fatal to the two-state solution.
• In the case of the "Givat Ze'ev bloc" (north of Jerusalem), the barrier route extends so far north of the existing settlement that if construction were permitted to fill the bloc, the settlement could expand at least 5 times in size and reach the very edge of Ramallah - bearing in mind that construction is now underway in this "bloc" for a new ultra-Orthodox settlement (whose residents have an average of 7 children).
• In the case of the "Etzion bloc" (south of Jerusalem), the route of the barrier not only captures a huge amount of territory that is not part of the built-up area of the settlements, but it extends deep into the West Bank to include the settlement of Efrat, and in doing so severs Bethlehem completely from the southern West Bank (leaving the city of Bethlehem an isolated enclave between the southern Jerusalem barrier and the Gush Etzion bloc).
• Further north, in the case of the "Ariel bloc" and "Qedumim bloc," these blocs are actually narrow fingers reaching deep inside the West Bank - with the settlement of Ariel, for example, located almost exactly halfway between the Green Line and the Jordan River. Regardless of ideology, it is difficult to imagine a viable peace agreement that leaves these areas under Israeli control.

The term “settlement bloc” has no official, legal definition even in Israel. Rather, it is informal, extremely flexible, and entirely political. In the early years of the settlement movement, the term was used rarely, and then only to refer to areas in the West Bank (and Gaza Strip) where groups of settlements had been established in genuine close proximity to one another and near the Green Line. In contrast, today the term is used to refer to huge and ever-expanding swathes of the West Bank. These “blocs” encompass settlements that are located at great distances from one another and from the Green Line. In this way, the “blocs” are being used to take control over large areas of West Bank land, both through settlement construction and related expansion on the ground aimed at thickening the “blocs” and at expanding them to include settlements located at ever-greater distances from their centers.

Likewise, the term “settlement blocs” has no meaning or legitimacy under international law, which views all settlements as illegal, regardless of their proximity to one another or to the Green Line, irrespective of whether they are located east or west of Israel’s separation barrier, and notwithstanding any alleged Israeli “national consensus.” Consequently, neither settlements located in blocs, nor the blocs themselves, are recognized by the Palestinians or the international community as having any special status. Moreover, construction in the blocs is clearly barred under Phase I of the 2003 U.S.-authored Roadmap, which states: "[The government of Israel] freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)."

And notably, these “blocs” don’t just include settlements. Many of the “blocs” – as de facto defined by the route of the Separation Barrier – include what even Israel recognizes to be private Palestinian land. Moreover, if one were to take a radius from the center of a “bloc” like Gush Etzion, Givat Ze’ev, or Ariel, a large percentage of the population – in some cases a majority – is Palestinian.