Misunderstood project
There is much misinformation regarding Israel’s legitimate settlement projects in and around Jerusalem as evidenced by Trudy Rubin’s “The grim death of the two-state solution” [Opinion, Dec. 10].

She focuses on the one-and-a-half mile wide E1 corridor that will connect Jerusalem with the Ma’ale Adumim settlement to the East. Per the Oslo II Interim Agreement, Israel retained the right to zone and plan this area, something every Israeli prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin has supported.

Rubin claims the E1 corridor will bisect the West Bank, impede Palestinian access to Jerusalem and prevent a viable, contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel, which she assumes will be the death of the two-state solution. However, these claims are not true.

Israel has planned for a multiple-lane Palestinian bypass road without roadblocks that will facilitate Palestinian traffic on Palestinian land from the South to the North. And E1 development will not impede Palestinian access to Jerusalem from Bethlehem or Ramallah. How does this kill the two-state solution?

—Belinda Timpke, Tacoma