WASHINGTON: One of the consequences of the Palestinians’ attacks on Israel over the past 18 months has been to draw attention away from the wrongheaded policies of the Israelis.

Basically, the reference is towards the long-term Israeli practice of building and then expanding settlements in the territories it captured in the 1967 war. And nobody has been a greater architect of that policy than the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

The irony of that came home last Thursday when Sharon, in an unusual address to his nation, made a new policy proposal that has been largely overlooked: He said he wanted to create a buffer zone between Israel and the Palestinians.

The purpose of such a zone would be to keep Palestinian terrorists out of Israel in an effort to put an end to the bombings, drive-by shootings and direct attacks on Israeli citizens and soldiers that have significantly increased lately.

This concept of separation between the two populations is not a new one. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin talked of the same concept before he was assassinated in 1995.

But when Sharon talked about separation last week he was deliberately vague about what he meant or how it could be accomplished. And for good reason.

It will be difficult, at the least, to develop a real buffer zone without Israel withdrawing from the most controversial settlements - those deep inside the West Bank.

At least some Israeli commentators said that if Sharon was serious about a buffer zone then there was a significant implication in his remarks: that he was prepared to dismantle some of those settlements.

It would be a recognition from the chief Israeli settlement hawk that in order for there to be peace, not all the settlements could stay.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak had made it clear he was ready to dismantle these settlements deep inside the West Bank in order to implement his peace proposal.

But Sharon’s coming to a similar conclusion would be far more significant. It would be like Richard Nixon, who built his career on being the leading anti-Communist, going to China in 1972.

But the point is not that Sharon has had a sudden epiphany about what needs to be done or is even pulling a Nixon.

There are many Israeli commentators who find that inconceivable. To them it would repudiate much of his life’s work.

The point is rather to illustrate just what a serious problem the settlements are to an eventual peace agreement and how foolish Israel has been to build those settlements.

In fact, there is a flurry of interest this week in the Saudi trial balloon: a proposal, not yet officially made, to support a peace agreement if Israel withdraws from all the land it occupied in 1967.

That would require the abandonment of all the settlements, not just those away from the Green Line (the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank).

But until proved otherwise, the Saudi plan is best viewed as a public-relations ploy to get the kingdom off centre stage after all the negative publicity coming from Sept 11.

The settlements fall into two categories. There are those built along the Green Line to change Israel’s borders, to make the country’s lowland, where the vast majority of its populations lives, more defensible.

The border question has never been settled going back to Israel’s creation and the Arab declaration of war against it.

And then there are the settlements well inside the Green Line, in the interior of the West Bank, built because some Israelis, namely those in the Likud Party, including Sharon, felt the territory was part of historic Israel, part of its homeland.

Those settlements are difficult to defend and have even required the building of a separate system of roads to link them with Israel proper.

And they have been a constant irritation to Palestinians who see them as part of a larger Israeli plan to drive them out of their homeland and, more generally, an assault on their sovereignty.

A significant majority of Israelis (most polls would suggest more than 80 per cent, at least) do not support the colonization of the West Bank.

Altering the Green Line to make the country more secure is a different matter. But that is also a different issue. The dilemma Israel will face is that the settlers and their supporters will fight to keep their land.

They are going to be an obstacle not only to a possible peace agreement but also if Israelis come to believe that separation, as Sharon suggested, is desirable. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday.