The growth of Israeli settlements, explained in 5 charts

“Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish, democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is literally what is at stake.”

Those are the words of US Secretary of State John Kerry, who on Wednesday leveled the most scathing attack on Israeli settlements ever uttered by a top US official.

In his nearly 80-minute-long speech, Kerry, who tried and failed to revitalize the moribund peace process, warned that Israel’s rapidly growing settler population — nearly 600,000 Jews live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank — could kill off any last chance at a two-state solution to the conflict and endanger Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.

Kerry rolled out a string of depressing statistics to bolster his case. He noted that the settler population in the West Bank alone — not including East Jerusalem — had increased by nearly 270,000 since the 1990s-era Oslo peace accords and by 100,000 since President Barack Obama took office in 2009.

He also pointed out that the Israeli government recently approved the construction of a new settlement well east of the separation barrier dividing Israel and the West Bank — one that will be closer to Jordan than Israel.

But these numbers can be hard to grasp in the abstract. To really understand why Kerry — and many others, on both sides of the conflict — see the settlement issue as such a dire threat to the viability of a future Palestinian state, you need to grasp two important things.

The first is that the entire area of land we’re talking about here, which encompasses both Israel and the Palestinian territories, is incredibly tiny.

This is why even the smallest settlements can cause a major backlash, especially when they’re located in places that, if they were to remain, would break up a future Palestinian into disconnected chunks of land and prevent it from being a contiguous state.

The second is the explosive growth of both the settler population and the number of settlements over the past several decades. The scale of the growth is just staggering, especially in such a relatively tiny area of land and given that Israel’s total population is estimated to be just 8.3 million people.

The following maps and charts show why the settlement issue is so explosive — and why it won’t be going away anytime soon.

It’s important to stress here that Israeli settlements are far from the only impediment to peace. As Kerry himself noted in his speech, even if all the settlements were removed, a number of equally thorny issues would still need to be worked out before any peace agreement could be reached.

These include determining the final status of Jerusalem and access to its holy sites, getting the Palestinians to formally recognize Israel as a “Jewish state,” deciding whether Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) who were displaced when Israel was created will be compensated and/or allowed to return to Israel, and ensuring that Israel is able to defend its people and its borders, especially from terrorism and rocket fire emanating from Palestinian territory.

There’s reason to be pessimistic about whether Palestinian leaders want to, or would agree to, those terms. They have refused to sit down and negotiate with the Israelis even when settlement construction was halted, as it was for 10 months in 2009-10.

They rejected a formal Israeli peace proposal in 2008 in which Israel offered to withdraw from 93 percent of the West Bank plus all of the Gaza Strip and to compensate Palestinians with land in the Negev, adjacent to the Gaza Strip, in return for the remaining 7 percent of territory in the West Bank Israel would retain.

They’ve glorified violence and terrorism against innocent Israelis, including providing financial assistance to the families of Palestinians who died carrying out such attacks.

And the Palestinian leadership itself is horribly divided and completely ineffectual, with the militant Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas ruling with an iron fist in Gaza and the corrupt and dysfunctional Palestinian Authority in charge of the West Bank.

It’s Israel, though, that is a sovereign state the US supports with enormous amounts of money, military aid, and political backing. That means Washington, rightly or wrongly, feels entitled to pressure Israel in a way that it wouldn’t pressure the divided Palestinian leadership.

The settlements continue to grow. The controversy over their future will continue to grow as well.