On a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, I was struck by something officials kept repeating (albeit always off the record): that their leaders would love nothing better than to cozy up to Israel on security matters. I've heard the same thing in the Gulf emirates and Jordan as well.

This sentiment, implausible as it sounds, is not being driven by some mysterious new wave of brotherly love in the Levant. It is based on something much more primal and powerful than that: fear. The one country that scares most Sunni leaders more than Israel is Iran. Yet they also know that Israel happens to be the only country in the region strong enough to stand up to the Islamic Republic. What's keeping these emirs from joining forces with Israel against Iran is the opposition of their own publics, opposition that is based overwhelming on Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Were Israel to end that oppression, the popular opposition might well soften, freeing up Sunni Arab leaders to at least quietly join forces with Jerusalem against Tehran.

So if the benefits of ending the occupation are so powerful, why hasn't Israel started doing it already? The answer one hears most frequently is that time is not ripe, that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace. There's something to this: despite pledges of reconciliation, Palestinian rule is divided between Hamas, which is still sworn to Israel's destruction, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is too weak and corrupt.

This is a real problem. Yet Israel doesn't need to wait for the Palestinians to make progress on the occupation. While it would be preferable for the two to strike a deal before either took action, Jerusalem retains the ability to act on its own.

In the seven years since the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, the idea of unilateralism has become highly unpopular in Israel. But it's suddenly being talked about again, and a variety of Israelis -- from Barak to a new peace movement drawn from the security establishment, called the Blue and White Coalition -- have begun pushing for it. This discussion stems in part from Israelis' frustration with the deadlocked peace process. But there are several other key facts that make unilateralism a plausible alternative.

There are currently about 500,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. It's unlikely that any Israeli leader would have the political capital to pull all of them out, short of a comprehensive deal. But Israel could still make great progress in the meantime, because about 375,000 of those half million settlers live in settlement blocs that either straddle the Israeli border or are located just a few kilometers away. These settlement towns function, in a sense, as suburbs of Jerusalem and greater Tel Aviv. They are already practically part of Israel proper -- something even the Palestinian Authority effectively acknowledged when it provisionally agreed, as part of a final deal that was never sealed, to cede most of these blocs to Israel in return for swaps of territory elsewhere. What's remarkable is how little land these blocs actually represent. Trading just about five percent of Palestinian territory for five percent of Israeli land would bring some 85 percent of all Jewish settlers in the West Bank into Israel proper.