Remember when you were in high school and your parents wanted you home by a certain hour from a party and they told you, "Just let me be the bad guy. You don't have to say you want to leave, just say, My parents will kill me if I'm not home by 12."
Maybe your parents were geopolitical geniuses, because that's exactly what Barack Obama has to do with little kid Israel right now. Despite demands from the Palestinians, the Arab League, the United States, and the left in his own country, Bibi Netanyahu complains that he can't muster the political gumption to freeze settlement building-- the right would freak out. I can understand that; he did, after all, get elected on a conservative platform. But look: right now America's president has made a conspicuous effort to reach out to the Muslim world and risked his own popularity at home by putting unprecedented pressure on Israel's leaders. Meanwhile Fatah has just had its first party-wide conference in 2 decades. If Israel keeps building settlements in the West Bank, it may well sabotage the best shot at a peace deal that has appeared since the Oslo accords.
Enter Dad Obama. And by "enter" I mean "invade." That's right. America invades (liberates?) the Israeli-occupied West Bank, doesn't kill anyone, gently but firmly escorts the building crews away from the settlements they're working on, and vaporizes every trace of settlement construction.
Before you hyperventilate, think about it. Israel's settlements in the West Bank are in defiance of UN resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention. The existence of the settlements--inasmuch as they represent a deliberate obstacle to Palestinian statehood and therefore a grievance of young, unemployed, potential Muslim extremists all over the world--constitute a far more serious and deep-rooted threat to American security than did the situations in either Afghanistan or Iraq before the invasions.
Who could then give Netanyahu any guff for halting settlement construction? To his conservative base, he could holler in shock and outrage, but he'd be totally powerless to do anything in the face of US Army-shaped "facts on the ground." And everyone would know it. We could even offer compensation to help displaced Israelis resettle in Israel proper. The Palestinians could remove the settlements from their list of objections and focus more energy on unifying themselves, improving security, and reducing corruption. The Europeans, long champions of Palestine, wouldn't even have to make any token noises about respecting sovereignty, since we wouldn't invade Israel at all, just the West Bank, and even then it would be Afghanistan-style: a friendly liberating force helping the locals against an oppressive tyrant. In fact, the American government is already helping to train Palestinian Authority security forces (with admirable results as internal security continues to improve in the West Bank). Of course the hardcore right-wing Zionists would hate us, but the increased goodwill from the Muslim world would be staggering. And isn't that what we've been trying to accomplish lately in those other Middle East lands we've invaded? Let's send our troops where they can really combat Arab Anti-Americanism. The only real front in the war on terror has always been Palestine.
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