Leave the settlers there

When diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians resume, the question of the settlers' place in any agreement will once again come up. In recent years, the Israeli left has repeatedly compared them to Hamas, based on the following logic: The Israeli majority is the equivalent of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which recognized Israel and is willing to make peace with it, while the settlers are equivalent to Hamas in their refusal.

Clearly, this false symmetry is extremely problematic, and not only because the settlers, for all the serious violence they have engaged in over the last few years, are still far from Hamas' "achievements" in this realm. The comparison of the moderates is also flawed, because even the most moderate Palestinians have yet to voice consent to the ideas that most moderate Israelis have been promoting for many years - see, for instance, their demand for the refugees' "return" to Israel.

But even granting for the moment there is room for such a comparison on the diplomatic front, it is still fatally flawed. After all, most of those who equate the settlers with Hamas also generally argue that Hamas must be treated as a significant player in the negotiations. But the settlers, they say, should be ignored. And it seems this is the main reason for the rise in the level of settler terror, because it is absolutely clear that what made Hamas into "a player that must be taken into account" is not the West's sympathy for its religious vision, but the terror it perpetrates. So now the settlers also want to become a significant player via terror.

Lest there be any doubt, I do not intend this as a justification of settler terror. But if we stick to this comparison, we need to remember the wise statement often made about Palestinian terror: It is not enough to fight terror; it is also necessary to dry up the swamp in which it breeds.

So what role can the settlers be given in diplomatic negotiations that will fall short of the right to veto any agreement? The answer is they should be given the right to remain in their settlements, with Israeli citizenship, even after Israel has vacated these areas to make way for Palestinian sovereignty.

This proposal has several advantages. First, it is morally preferable. For the moral problem with the settlement enterprise is not its existence per se, but that it has perpetuated a situation in which millions of people are not citizens of any state. Had it been possible to annex the territories and grant Israeli citizenship to all their inhabitants without endangering Israel's Jewish identity, there would have been no moral problem with this solution - or at least, no more than when Israel forced its sovereignty and citizenship on those Arabs who lived within the Green Line. In any case, if it is possible to enable Palestinian sovereignty without uprooting 200,000 Jews from their homes, this would be the most just and moral solution of all.

There is also a practical advantage: If the settlers do not accept the offer, the justice of evacuating them will increase. Even Charles de Gaulle, who very much wanted to get out of Algeria, refused to sign an agreement until the Algerians agreed to allow the French settlers to remain, because he understood that he could not violate the principle of natural justice, which holds that a person should not be forced out of his home unless it is absolutely necessary.

This is not "giving a prize to criminals." After all, no one would suggest evacuating residents of the United States just because their forebears conquered the land via horrendous massacres. And the Jews even have an advantage over America's founding fathers. Our case is that of a people that returned to its historic homeland, in which it dwelled long before Arab colonists established settlements in it 1,400 years ago.