Throughout the last seven years while the Palestinian peace process has been on hold, the Israelis have supposedly been “freezing” the growth of new settlements on the West Bank. Yet despite all government protests that this freeze was a key platform of their peace offer and despite the illegality of further land grabs from the occupied Palestinians, the new settlements program has continued inexorably.

It is this consistent evidence of bad faith that so undermines any Israeli settlement offer in advance of the Annapolis talks and bedevils the chances of any useful agreement from the talks. Releasing 450 of the 2,000 Palestinian detainees held — most without legal process in Israeli jails — is a mere gesture and hardly the foundation for substantive negotiations. Besides, Israeli snatch squads can quickly storm into the Occupied Territories and seize these people again. It is at best a temporary concession.

The real concession has to come over the settlements, which, day by day and month by month, appear ever more permanent. Many of these developments began illegally. However, once they reached a critical mass, the authorities legitimized them. Only on rare occasions, when the world’s media needed to be impressed, has the Israeli government moved in and ejected a group of settlers in the early days of their land grab.

What makes this offer to freeze the creation of new settlements even more dubious is that the Olmert government has made it clear that it will not block the continued expansion of existing settlements. What, in the final analysis, is the difference between seizing another piece of Palestinian land at a distance from other illegal developments and building out from an already established settlement? Either way, Palestinian land is annexed for the exclusive use of Israelis.

This becomes particularly insidious around East Jerusalem, where Israeli settlements are expanding to meet each other in the area known as E1. The prospect is a ring of Israeli developments that will bisect any future Palestinian West Bank state.

There are now 450,000 Jewish settlers on land stolen from the 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. This substantial Israeli influx constitutes what George W. Bush characterizes as “the facts on the ground.” Bush obviously means the settlements constitute a reality that the Palestinians must somehow bring themselves to embrace. But in legal terms, these “facts” also constitute damning evidence of the way that Israel has contravened international law since it seized Palestinian land in the 1967 War.

If the Israelis and Americans imagine they can argue that the “facts on the ground” are irreversible, since it is unthinkable that almost half a million Jews could now be relocated, how come it was ever thinkable that 750,000 Palestinians could be driven from their homes by the Israelis by 1948 and a further 250,000 in 1967?