Of course, no Palestinian state will emerge on a West Bank blanketed with settlements, and the future of the larger, more far-flung settlements must ultimately be decided by a negotiated agreement.
Life among thousands of deserted buildings would be bleak, and a city shorn of much of its tax base would be hard-pressed to provide services to sparsely inhabited, far-flung settlements.
Israel continues to hold on to far-flung settlements plunked in the middle of Gaza, where they consume the best land and water, surrounded by one million destitute Palestinians crowded into tiny spaces.
While Mr. Netanyahu had appeased Washington by not proceeding with new settlement projects this spring, plans already approved for the West Bank have continued to move ahead, including more than 1,000 housing units in the far-flung settlements of Itamar and Bruchin pushed forward last week.
But the suicide bombings, which have made the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities as dangerous as far-flung settlements, have given new cogency to the settlers' argument.At the same time, the bombings have aroused an Israeli yearning for "separation" between the two nations.
But it is a travesty that Mr. Bush did not act to "re-accredit" Israel, too, as a peace partner for a two-state solution with the Palestinians by insisting that Israel begin pulling back from some of its far-flung settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.
Far-flung Jewish settlements in this area would, if this state were set up, presumably be dismantled or re-established in Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank.
The discovery of these fertile fishing grounds set off a centuries-long struggle among Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishermen, and established a pattern of far-flung coastal settlements, called outports by Newfoundlanders, that ring the island.
Yet these warriors of the Archaic period were not coarse barbarians; by this time the Homerids (reciters of Homer) and the rhapsodists (singers-reciters and sometimes creative poets) were taking the great epics of Homer and Hesiod throughout the far-flung Greek settlements of the Mediterranean, and a new, cultivated civilization was already emerging.
FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS piece about the Portuguese colony of Angola.
