The Migron outpost, which was established on privately owned Palestinian land, and whose dismantlement the United States has been demanding with fake determination, is already an established locale: It is seven years old, with well-tended gardens, swings, a nursery, a kindergarten, infrastructure in which NIS 4 million of state funds have been invested and inhabitants who look not like "hilltop youth" but like ordinary citizens, the sort who work for their living in Jerusalem and come home every night and never even dream that anyone might dare to evacuate them some day.
And the Migron outpost is just one example. There are outposts that already have more than 500 residents, and outposts that are in effect expansions of veteran settlements in which thousands of people live. The term "outpost," with its implication of "temporary," is a meaningless one. The falsity of the distinction between a legal settlement and an illegal settlement − as if anyone recognized the legality of the veteran settlements, and as if the outposts had been established in violation of government decisions and not with the government's active help - has by now become obvious.
The Israelis think they are fooling the world, but they are only fooling themselves. The outposts are the essence of the Israeli bluff. For 40 years now, Israel has been settling in the occupied territories while pretending that it is prepared to withdraw at any moment if only a chance for peace develops. With its own hands, Israel has been rendering the two-state solution irrelevant, while declaring to all and sundry that this is the only possible solution. When Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Monday, on her first (!) visit to the West Bank, that "there must be no winking" in the handling of the outposts, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai explained to her that there are already 89 outposts in the West Bank, as though Livni were a visitor from another planet, and not a partner in this national disaster.
The president of the United States is also complicit. Therefore, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's declaration that he will work to take down the outposts, as he has promised President George W. Bush, is tantamount to empty words. The United States is not seriously demanding that the outposts be taken down - because if it ever had made such a demand unequivocally, the outposts would have been eliminated long ago.
The term "outposts" embodied a change in the settlers' perception of their struggle for the greater land of Israel. Whereas in the past, they sought to move as many people as possible into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in order to defeat the Palestinians demographically, at some point, they decided that it was easier to gain control of the territory physically, one hill after the other. Wineries, farms, orchards, pastures, industrial zones, pre-military academies, yeshivas and outposts together encapsulate the idea of taking over territory while totally ignoring the demographic factor. Ariel Sharon and Ze'ev Hever (Zambish)urged the settlers to seize the hilltops during the period of the Wye Agreement, and former chiefs of staff Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Ya'alon, along with former GOCs Central Command Moshe Kaplinsky and Yitzhak Eitan, abetted the outposts' establishment and fought their evacuation. All of these officials, and many others, will not escape history's commission of inquiry when someone tries to document how Israel lost its Jewish majority, and how it was forced by international pressure to change from the state of the Jews into a state of all its citizens, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Bush's visit to Israel and Olmert's talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are meaningless as long as the facts on the ground - the outposts that keep expanding - clearly show just how unserious the Israeli government's declarations are, and to what extent the U.S. administration is collaborating with it.
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