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Netanyahu and the Settlements

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In this Dec. 3, 2014, file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a faction meeting at the Knesset, Israel's parliament in Jerusalem. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolved his unwieldy coalition and called new elections last month, he appeared to be a lock to return to office. But a new center-left alliance has suddenly surged in the polls past his ruling Likud party to become the largest parliamentary faction and turned the March 17 vote into a toss-up. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

In this Dec. 3, 2014, file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a faction meeting at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

ELI, West Bank (New York Times) — Singing and dancing greeted a triumphant Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Eli, then a young settlement of 959 residents, shortly after first becoming Israel’s prime minister in 1996. “We will be here permanently forever,” he declared in nearby Ariel that day, promising to renew the internationally contentious construction of Jewish communities across the land Palestinians plan as their future state.

Struggling for settlers’ support ahead of Israel’s March 17 elections, Mr. Netanyahu returned last month to Eli, now a boomtown of more than 4,000 people that sprawls across six hilltops amid Palestinian villages and farmland. This time, he did not speak about new building, but his presence was a statement in itself: Eli is among dozens of isolated settlements whose expansion and entrenchment threaten the prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Steady growth of settlements across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which most world leaders consider violations of international law, complicates both the creation of a viable Palestine and the challenge of someday uprooting Israelis, who are now raising a second and third generation in contested areas.

Along the road from Eli to Ariel one recent afternoon, a Palestinian man grazed a few cows and sheep on a grassy hillside, and scores of teenagers in white Islamic head scarves walked home from school. Inside the settlement’s gate, where a new shopping complex opened last year, bulldozers were at work on construction of a $3.8 million, 300,000-square-foot community center.

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