2 CDs Israeli general and later prime minister Ariel Sharon said of the Palestinians: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Sharon said that in 1973. Today, there are more than 600,000 settlers in the occupied territories. They are facts on the ground, as the Israelis like to say. All of the settlements are outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and are unambiguously illegal under international law. Thomas Friedman, in The New York Times, says the settlements constitute “a tacit annexation of the West Bank,” and then he adds, “and is not winning Israel friends in Europe or America.” This event was presented by the Lannan Foundation.