When the Israelis and Palestinians signed an interim peace agreement on the White House lawn in 1993 amid soaring optimism, the Jewish settlers in the West Bank numbered a little over 100,000.
As renewed peace talks open Wednesday in Jerusalem, the settlers now total more than 350,000. Their number is growing rapidly, a point driven home when Israel announced Sunday it was ready to build a new batch of houses in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — a move that angered Palestinians.
Two decades after those initial peace talks, all the core issues remain unresolved and the settlement question is one of several that appear even more intractable than when the negotiators first sat down to the table.
So have the two sides been moving closer to, or further from, a peace agreement over the past 20 years of frustrating, on-and-off talks?
"Many Israelis are doing very well, but they are living in a bubble and have gone into a sense of denial about the conflict. They no longer see it or hear it, and they can even pretend it doesn't exist," says Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. "On the Palestinian side, their ability to influence the Israelis is really very limited. It's not a good place for either side to be."
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