In the middle of an article about a plan to relocate Bedouins, The Guardian‘s Harriet Sherwood worries that Maale Adumim might one day bisect the West Bank:
Many Palestinians see this as part of a strategic plan to close a ring of Jewish settlements that would cut East Jerusalem off from the West Bank. By stretching down to the Jordan valley, an expanded Ma’ale Adumim would also bisect the West Bank, making a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
But as for her sense of geography, we heard the same hot air in 2005 over a parcel of land known as E-1.
The inconvenient fact for Sherwood and her Palestinian fixers is this: Even if Maale Adumim morphed into a sprawling metropolis up to the borders of its designated area, the Palestinians would still have a waistline of nine miles (15 km) connecting their north and south. Our colleagues at CAMERA published this useful map making the very point.
To put it in perspective, the narrowest point of Israel’s waistline is the roughly nine km distance between Netanya and and Palestinian city of Tulkarm.
But who worries about Israel’s contiguity?