I think all those settlements, or most of those settlements, will have to go", to fit his vision of an Israel within pre-1967 borders; and because he has never been silent on the matter of settlement and occupation.
Basically, he replaced the contentious issue of settlements with an even more contentious matter: boundaries.
They are analyzing evidence handed to them by the celebrity publicist Max Clifford in the matter of a settlement he reached with Rebekah Brooks, then chief executive of News International, after he had initiated legal proceedings against the company in 2009.
Was "empire" itself a matter of land and settlement or, as he thought, of ports and islands and trading opportunities?
It was not a sensitive or complicated policy matter, like the "thorny" issues of settlements, land confiscations, collective punishments or other violations of international law.
According to Steven Blum of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, "If it was widely understood that government agencies barred the tax deductibility of settlements as a matter of course or policy, it would strengthen their hand in the negotiation leading up to the settlement," Blum said.
One reason for the stickiness of this subject is the whole matter of deciding when a settlement becomes a city at all – some argue when it abandons simple self-sufficiency and establishes trade, others when it develops plumbing.
Yet as the focus splinters in the final third – our mysteriously placed narrator taking the stage to deliver a gnomic coup de grâce – I most felt the novel's emotional clout in its portrait of a marriage with hints of past wrongdoing, forgotten in the fog or as a matter of convenience: a fragile settlement of its own, like love despite itself.
In some markets it's just a matter of sorting out the settlement infrastructure before the dollars start flowing in.
"What matters is a settlement, not lots of settlements," says Mr Kerry.He hugs the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a former firebrand who vilified Palestinians and was cordially detested by them in return, whereas his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, used to shun him.
