After Taking The Tour, Karl Vick Is Back

Yesterday, in Karl Vick Takes The Tour, I wrote about how the journalist who wrote the Time magazine articleWhy Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace, was invited to take a tour of the settlements.

A day later, we see the result in his new article Despite Peace Talks, Israel's Settlers Are Dug In. It may not be a glowing tribute, but it is balanced:

"How'd we get here in the first place?" says Daniel Dayan, head of the Yesha Council, which formed in the 1970s as Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful). "We got here because of an Arab war they fought winner-take-all."

Though settlers account for a small fraction of Israel's population of 7 million, and what Dayan terms the "lunatics" who attack Palestinians a tiny fraction of that, forcing them out of their homes is not something Israelis take lightly. Israeli society remains bruised by the 2005 forced evacuation of 25 settlements, most from the Gaza Strip.

But the point that settler advocates are making now is that removing settlements would also mean evacuating most if not all of the 10,000 Israeli troops now stationed there to guard them. And in recent years, wherever Israel has pulled back its forces, the empty space has soon been filled by extremists — Hizballah in southern Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza — and their missiles.

"There are people who say we're messianic and all this, but we are the people with our feet most on the ground," says Dayan. "The ones who say a Palestinian state will solve everything, they are messianic. They are the ones detached from reality."

Read the whole thing.

And apparently, unlike last time, no real estate agents were interviewed in the writing of this article--though Vick does quote an architect.

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