I appreciate Jon Chait's response to Stephen Walt's argument that the two state solution is being quietly drained of viability by the steady growth of the settlements. "There are now about 290,000 settlers living in the West Bank," Walt wrote. "There are another 185,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Most of the settlers are subsidized directly or indirectly by the Israeli government. It is increasingly hard to imagine Israel evicting nearly half a million people (about 7 percent of its population) from their homes." And with the settlements come protections and acquisitions for the settlements: Roads that are inaccessible to the Palestinians and farmland that's controlled by the settlers. What's left under the "Palestine" rubric is steadily less appealing, particularly given the pressures of Palestinian population growth. To this, Chait replies that the settlements can be uprooted. "To make peace with Egypt, Israel abandoned settlements in the Sinai peninsula, forcibly uprooting residents there," he notes. "It did the same when withdrawing from Gaza recently. It was prepared to do the same in the West Bank in 2000 and 2001, though it never had to follow through because negotiations collapsed. Clearly, the larger the settlements, the more political leverage it takes to uproot them. That's why, in addition to being a drain on Israel's economy, the settlements are highly counterproductive." I'm more skeptical than he is: The fight to uproot the settles in Gaza was tremendous. But the numbers were vanishingly small: 8,500 Jewish settlers made their home in Gaza. And most of them got compensation packages in the hundreds of thousands. The political power and physical presence of 290,000 settlers in the West Bank are of another order of magnitude. I'm not sure the settlements can be uprooted and, more problematically, the Palestinians are quite sure they won't be uprooted, and that Israel's promises of a contiguous state are hollow. The rapid growth of the settlements on a parallel track to the peace process was an important part of Arafat's mistrust of Barak. But put that aside for a moment, and assume Chait is right. The settlements are reversible, though not without sufficient pressure. This is one place where most American observers of Israeli-behavior agree. The settlements are a tremendous obstacle to peace. They weaken the Israeli case and amplify Palestinian mistrust. America, through its general support to Israel (money, after all, is fungible), pays for them and their expansion. We also have demanded a total freeze on their expansion. It is our policy that they are an obstacle to peace and Bush has called the outposts -- quasi-settlements subsidized by the Israeli government -- illegal. It seems incumbent on us to exert serious pressure to see them dismantled. We should not fund what we don't support. My question: Do Jon and others agree? Why shouldn't a reversal of the settlement trends be aggressively pursued using the financial and diplomatic leverage we have on Israel? What single alternative policy could we pursue that would be more conducive to eventual piece and to the continued viability of the two-state solution?