Cute. Someone steals your car and has it painted. According to her logic, shouldn’t have to give it back because the paint job was expensive.

An honest title for the opinion piece might have been:

“Abandon Reason, All Ye Who Read”

Tell big enough lies, stack them up, follow them with silliness, and someone, somewhere, will quote you as an authority. That sounds silly in itself, sure wouldn’t happen with anyone we know, they’re too smart to do that, but I promise it can happen.

Now, would you like to believe her opinion, or maybe that of someone authoritative.

"Without them [the settlements] the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population." -- Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (quoted in Geoffrey Aronson's Settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Institute for Palestinian Studies.)

Apparently Dayan thought they were on “foreign” territory.

And, some other people do, also, including Bush.

The settlement folly

“International condemnation, easily anticipated, has been swift and harsh. The European Union states have uniformly denounced the policy initiative. The Bush administration, to date mild in its criticism of the new Israeli government, has called the plan an act of provocation. France went further, suggesting that the Sharon government is now openly exhibiting its true and dangerous colors. The Palestinian Authority has called once again for international intervention. Not only the opposition within Israel, but also some key personalities in the coalition, have questioned the move.”

The lowest number I could find for them was 200.
Land is the issue. Land is confiscated, stolen, kept

“Behind the drama of shootings, stone throwing, fighter attacks, tank incursions, and razing of houses and orchards - that have attracted the world's attention in the eight-month low-intensity Israeli-Palestinian warfare - lies something undramatic: land.
That is, the unceasing, illegal seizure of Palestinian land by Israel in train for the past 34 years, which has created 200 Jewish settlements, including 13 in Arab East Jerusalem, with 400,000 residents.”

And some Israelis have an opinion. The Jewish mayor of Jerusalem is not considered an extremist. The part about equality is interesting.

Settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip

“In an interview with Ma'ariv newspaper on October 10, 1990, former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek gave an explicit and candid explanation of Labor's settlement policy. He summarized what was happening in East Jerusalem, and admitted that the interests of the Palestinians did not figure among the city's developmental plans: "We have uttered a lot of nonsense, but have failed to implement anything. We have declared, on several occasions, that we would extend equal rights to Jews and Arabs in the city--- but those were empty words. Levi Eshkol and Menachem Begin made commitments to grant equality to the Arabs, but neither of them kept his promises and never provided them even with a semblance of equality under the law; they were and remain second- and third-class citizens... I did something for Jewish Jerusalem during the past 25 years, but in East Jerusalem nothing! What did I do? Schools? Nothing. Pavements? Nothing. Cultural centers? None. Yes, we did build a sewerage system for them and we improved the water supply. Do you know why? When several cholera cases were declared on the Arab side [early 1970s], the Jews panicked at the prospect of the disease reaching them, so we set up the sewage and water networks to contain the cholera."

Arf