Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series by James Sunshine on the present state of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Click here for last week’s column, which focused on the Palestinian government.

A few months ago I watched a special on CNN on religious extremists, and one of the individuals interviewed was an Israeli settler in the West Bank. The reporter was asking the man where the boundaries of his settlement ended because there didn’t appear to be any fences around it. The settler, with a smile, simply answered the reporter’s question with one that was more chilling: “How far can a bullet from an M-16 rifle go?”

The obstacles to peace do not exist on one side of the border. The political roadblocks that exist on the Israeli side are just as dangerous to the peace process as those on the Palestinian side, if not more so. It is always difficult for nations to give up hard-won gains, let alone land, but the Israeli political system as well as the cultural bond to the territories have made it nearly impossible for any peace agreement to matriculate.

Something Americans need to accept is that our concept of Israel being a workable parliamentary democracy in the Middle East is wrong, at least in the sense most of us have of the concept. Israelis, when they go to the polls, do not vote for individuals but instead vote for individual parties. Parties give the electoral commission a slate of candidates and once the final tally is in, parties are awarded a certain number of Knesset seats depending on the percentage of the vote they received. There are no districts that MKs (members of the Knesset) represent, merely their own interests and the interests of their party’s base.

This leads to several difficulties, the first being that fringe parties are given a great deal of influence in the Knesset. The United Kingdom recently ran into the same problem during the European Parliamentary elections, when because of party-proportional voting being the rule for allocating MEP seats, the fascist British National Party was able to capture two seats. Ultra-orthodox parties like Shas and United Torah would probably not wield the king-making influence in Likud’s, and before Kadima’s, coalition if MKs were chosen by individual districts rather than by a party’s turnout. But year after year, ultra-orthodox parties receive around 16 to 20 seats out of 120. No majority can be made in the Knesset without at least one ultra-orthodox party backing them and, therefore, most coalitions are born leaning to the right out of political necessity.

Another problem that emerges from this system is that it eliminates the political center. When I was in Israel last spring, I asked the owner of the tour company I was traveling with how Israel could have ever elected a nut-job like former Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. “It’s not that we liked him,” he responded. “It’s just that people liked Likud. A blind monkey could be their prime ministerial candidate.” The current party-proportional voting system gives candidates no slated constituency except for those who agree with them. The more radical you are, the more likely you are to be near the top of the slated list because you can turn out the ideological base. And the closer one is to the top, the less likely it is, even in a bad election year, to be personally voted out of office. This creates an over-polarized, uninventive Knesset that is usually unable to form a stable coalition.

Despite this polarized culture, there is at least one issue that crosses party and ideological lines: the settlement movement. Since Israel’s conception, the belief that the Jewish homeland would include all the land of Israel resonated. Before independence was declared, Labor youth hiked the Judean Hills navigated solely by their Bibles. A love affair between the early Labor party leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Yigal Allon, Levi Eshkol and Yitzhak Rabin, and the West Bank began. It was perceived as history correcting itself when Israel finally conquered the land during the 1967 War. This is probably why, until the First Intifada, it had been the Labor party’s policy to silently support the settlement movement as they set up “new facts” and realized the Zionist vision. Only one government since 1967 has halted settlement creation in the West Bank, let alone settlement expansion. However, this initiative spurred by President George W. Bush’s Road Map for Peace has been ignored and partially reversed.

The prospects of a lasting peace dim with each settlement built and every new settler born. Today, the population growth rate in the settlements is hovering around 5 percent, while in Israel proper, growth is at a stagnant 1.7 percent. Most settlements are well armed; they enjoy widespread support across every demographic group in Israel, and because they believe they have a mission from God, they have the potential to be exceptionally dangerous. No Israeli leader that hopes to survive dares go near the issue of settlement dismantlement. The only three leaders that have done so have been Rabin, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. Rabin was assassinated by a settler, Barak was quickly voted out after his failed attempt to forge a lasting peace and Sharon only dismantled the Gaza settlements before he had his massive, debilitating stroke.

Today, with a right-wing government that is supportive of the settlers and as the children of the first settlers become more and more integrated into the army, the possibility that Israel will ever leave fades. In 2005 at the small settlement of Amona, the IDF was ordered to demolish the homes of just nine families. It took 10,000 soldiers and police to do so. Do the math of how many it would take for the rest.

James Sunshine is a College freshman from Boca Raton, Fla.