Tomorrow night, CNN will broadcast a two-hour show with Christiane Amanpour that CNN describes as the first part of a six-hour “television event”: “God’s Jewish Warriors” (to be following on successive nights by “God’s Muslim Warriors” and “God’s Christian Warriors”).
Here is the “Production Note” for “God’s Jewish Warriors,” with emphasis added by JCI staffer Mr. Notso Subliminal:
This is the story of God’s Jewish Warriors, people who risk their lives – and their children’s – to live in and claim what they believe is their religious birthright: East Jerusalem, with its holy Temple Mount, and the rocky hills of the West Bank, steeped in the history of patriarchs, prophets and biblical kings.
When God’s Jewish Warriors used guerilla political tactics to build a settlers movement after the 1967 Six Day War, their goal was to incorporate the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip into Israel. After 40 years, they have created situations that are difficult – maybe impossible – to change as long as religious fervor on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict stands in the way of territorial compromise.
God’s Jewish Warriors believe they are commanded to live on this biblical land and that doing so will hasten the coming of the Messiah. At their most extreme, Jewish zealots are even willing to murder in God’s name to cripple land–for–peace negotiations.
Meanwhile, the United States’ staunch support of Israel inflames much of the Muslim world and puts America in the crosshairs of jihad.
Through this episode of God’s Warriors, we cut to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a knot tied so tightly by religious “fundamentalists” that it could strangle U.S. attempts to stabilize the explosive Middle East.
The "heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"? Since Arabs have rejected no less than four formal two-state solutions — offered by the U.K. Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations in 1947, Israel at Camp David in 2000, and the United States through the Clinton Parameters in 2000-01 — and then responded to both the 2003 Roadmap and the 2005 Gaza withdrawal with increased terror, followed by the 2006 election of a terrorist-controlled government, it is a little disingenuous to blame the current situation on the settlers.
The settlers were not there in 1937 and 1947; in the 2000-01 plans they would have been withdrawn almost completely; and they were in fact withdrawn completely from Gaza in 2005 with no effect other than the creation of Hamastan.
Not only are the settlements not the problem; they are, as Hillel Halkin persuasively argued in 2002 in “Why the Settlements Should Stay,” part of the solution — a test of Palestinian willingness to live with a Jewish minority in a new state protected with civil and political rights, in the same way an Arab minority lives in Israel. If such a state is unacceptable to the Palestinians, it can only be because they have a much higher priority than a state, which might explain the absence of peace in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2003 and 2005 — and get a lot closer to the "heart" of the conflict.