Buy Out the Settlers

“The United States can offer a very innovative solution to a seemingly intractable conflict: Pay Israel to withdraw its settlers.”

In his 1949 classic, The Vital Center, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. joins the debate on the unfolding Cold War. His advice is pertinent to how we should approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. When discussing European powers’ oppressive land policies in their African and Asian colonies, and the famines that resulted from the Soviet Union’s crude policy of land expropriation, he offered an alternative to both. He proposed that the United States intervene peacefully to help redistribute land to local farmers and help those farmers thrive. He writes:

“American funds can buy out landlords; American methods of scientific farming and of land rehabilitation can increase production; American study of village sociology could help us to understand how we may most effectively release the energies so long pent up in the villages of Asia.”

American funds can buy out landlords. While this proposed use of American economic power did not come to pass during the Cold War, the United States has an opportunity to enact something similar in the long-lasting, highly contentious fight over the West Bank. The United States can offer a very innovative solution to a seemingly intractable conflict: Pay Israel to withdraw its settlers.

An American-funded withdrawal would have three elements. First, the United States would pay the monetary cost (or at least part of it) of moving settlers from the West Bank to Israel proper. Second, it would increase its military aid to Israel, particularly aid that funds defensive weapons systems. Third, it would upgrade the American-Israel defense relationship from an informal partnership to a mutual defense treaty, making Israel an ally on par with the United States’ fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members and Pacific allies, like Japan and South Korea. Together, these measures can increase Israel’s security (and its citizens’ sense of security) while taking a large step in the direction of an eventual peace.