The confusion this week between Washington and Jerusalem regarding the future of Israel’s “major settlement blocs” in the West Bank was not really about substance. All signs point to the Bush administration having decided that, in any future Israeli-Palestinian settlement or lack of one, these blocs will remain part of Israel.

The differences between the two countries have more to do with public exposure. Israel would like the American position to be as loud and clear as possible, both to convince the world of its existence and to allay concerns about its durability. America prefers to understate the matter. Even while tilting toward Israel on the question of its future borders, it wants to keep the appearance of even-handedness.

Yet all this should not be allowed to obscure an essential fact that has gone unrecognized in today’s anti-settlement atmosphere. Despite all the problems that Israel’s settlement policy has caused and will continue to cause in the days ahead, it has succeeded in its main goal: The redrawing of the country’s 1967 borders to rectify dangerous constrictions in the coastal plain and around Jerusalem, and to enable both areas to breathe more easily.

Today, when Israeli settlements dot the entire West Bank and appear as a major obstacle to any peace agreement, we tend to forget that the annexation of the entire West Bank was never Israel’s initial settlement policy as first articulated by the Labor governments that ruled the country in the years after the 1967 war. Until Labor lost to the Likud in the 1977 elections, Jewish building activity in the West Bank was concentrated, with a small number of exceptions, in three regions alone.

The first of these was in and around Arab Jerusalem, including the “Etzion Bloc” – a pocket southwest of Jerusalem, between Bethlehem and Hebron, where several Jewish villages had been overrun by the Arab Legion in 1948. From 1948 until 1967, Jewish Jerusalem had stood at the narrow end of a geographical funnel, extending to it from the coastal plain, that was both militarily dangerous and precluded urban expansion. Immediately after the annexation of Arab Jerusalem in 1967, the construction of large Jewish neighborhoods was begun in the north, south, and east to ensure Jewish control of the larger metropolitan area, while the satellite town of Ma’aleh Adumim was built still further east to dominate the city’s approaches from the Jordan Valley. Today, with a Jewish population of close to 300,000, these areas are all safely in Israel’s hands.

The second region was the foothills of the northern West Bank. Here, in the high ground overlooking the flat strip of heavily populated coast between Tel Aviv and Netanya, in some places barely 10 miles wide, the military situation had been potentially catastrophic. The settlements constructed in these foothills, on the former Jordanian side of the 1967 “green line,” were all meant to push the border eastward. The largest of them Ariel, established in 1977, has a population today of close to 30,000, and there are tens of thousands of other Jews living nearby.

The third region was the Jordan Valley, stretching on the west side of the Jordan River from slightly south of the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Thinly populated by Palestinians, this extremely hot, largely arid lowland was intended as a Jewish buffer between Jordan and the Palestinian West Bank, and many small agricultural settlements were established in it after 1967. Yet, due to its remoteness and difficult conditions, in which summer temperatures can soar to 120 degrees or higher, none of these places prospered. Today there are less than 10,000 Jews living in them.

The result? Both greater Jerusalem and the foothills opposite Tel Aviv comprise “major settlement blocs” and will be incorporated into Israel. The Jordan Valley will be returned to Arab rule, along with most of the West Bank.

The conclusion? Wherever Jewish settlement in the West Bank has been massive enough, so that the Jews living there today outnumber the Palestinians by a sufficient margin, Israel’s borders will change for the better. Wherever it has been too sparse, they will not.

In a word, Israel’s settlement policy has, overall, worked. Eighty percent of the settlers (over 90% if one includes metropolitan Jerusalem) will stay where they are, under Israeli sovereignty, no matter what happens. Because of them, the Israel of the future, whatever this turns out to be, will be a safer and less claustrophobic country. If it were not for them, the Bush administration would today be calling for Israel’s total return to its 1967 borders.

It is true that many of the smaller and more outlying settlements deep in the West Bank will in the end have to be evacuated, just as the settlements in Gaza are due to be evacuated this summer. A cogent argument can be made that these settlements should never have been created and that any rational calculation should have made clear that the demographic and political facts would never permit their becoming part of Israel. Large sums of money were wasted on them and their removal in the future, though inevitable, will not be easy.

Yet those who claimed all along that the very idea of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories was foolish and misguided and could not possibly bring Israel any benefit have been proved wrong. In the end, the settlers have made all the difference. The map of the future will be their work more than anyone’s.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.