He should stand firm on this. The evacuation of Gaza was supposed to bring peace, but brought only more jihad, as I predicted it would. The Israelis have nothing to apologize for in building houses on land that belongs to them historically, by UN declaration, by British government action, and by the otherwise universally recognized right of conquest (after the Six Day War).
“Netanyahu: I won’t evacuate settlements,” by Tovah Lazaroff in the Jerusalem Post, January 26 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has promised not to evacuate West Bank settlements. He made the comments Friday in Davos, Switzerland, amid three separate meetings he held there with US Secretary of State John Kerry on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“I have no intention of evacuating any settlement or uprooting any Israelis,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew during a briefing for Israeli journalists on the nine-month negotiating cycle, which ends in April.
His statement, which runs counter to the assumption that a final-status agreement would involve the evacuation of settlements, was not republished by the Prime Minister’s Office.
An Israeli official cautioned on Saturday night not to equate territorial concessions Israel might make to the Palestinians with statements about settlement evacuations.
Netanyahu is “against uprooting settlements, but irrespective of where the final borders are going to be.
He thinks Jews should be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state,” the official said….
The “Palestinians” have said that that is not going to happen, and even if it did, these people would be persecuted, harassed, endangered and ultimately driven out, like the Hindus who remained in Pakistan (and what became Bangladesh) after 1948.