Unless Israel criminalizes pistachio ice cream, there will be no peace

The Palestinian Arab negotiators have successfully created a linkage in the collective minds of the world that simply doesn't exist.

Here's the latest example:

The chief Palestinian negotiator said Monday there are no "half solutions" in the dispute over construction of Israeli settlements.

"Either there is a halt to settlement building or there is not," Saeb Erekat told reporters in Sharm el-Sheikh. "We hope that if the Israeli government is given the choice of either peace or settlements, it will choose peace. If it chooses any kind of settlement building, this means that it has destroyed the whole peace process and it would be fully responsible for that."

For years, the only building permits that Israel has allowed in Judea and Samaria were within the existing boundaries of the towns there. In other words, no additional disputed land is being affected by any new buildings or extensions.

There is no relationship between any building that is done within existing settlements and peace. It is a complete fiction. The linkage only exists due to its incessant repetition, but it has no basis in reality. It has an aura of believability, because building in these communities is being represented as a physical expansion, but that is quite simply a lie.

The settlements are a red herring, a propaganda ploy on the part of the Arabs and their anti-Israel allies. The goal is the same as it was in 1921 and 1929 and 1948 and 1967, just the words and tactics have changed.

So the next time that you read about how any building in settlements endangers peace, just mentally substitute "building in settlements" with "allowing pistachio ice cream to be sold." They both make exactly the same amount of sense.

The latest Latma seems appropriate: