Ten years ago, Frank Lowenstein, then the United States special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, presented President Barack Obama with maps of settlements by Israeli Jews in the occupied West Bank. The maps showed that the expansion of settlements crisscrossing the West Bank threatened the hope of establishing a contiguous Palestinian state there. Lowenstein’s maps helped persuade Obama, who was in the final weeks of his Presidency, to let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution condemning the settlements, which most of the world had long considered violations of international law.
Ten years later, Lowenstein, now a policy fellow at the liberal Zionist advocacy group J Street, is still updating those maps, which show the breakneck expansion of officially authorized settlements and unauthorized (or not yet authorized) settler “outposts.” Lowenstein told David D. Kirkpatrick that the evolving maps have drained the meaning from those Obama-era debates about the viability of a Palestinian state, forcing a revision of the vocabulary that American politicians use to talk about the conflict.
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