Rick Santorum has deep thoughts on the occupied territories:
SANTORUM: How did we get New Mexico and Texas?
QUESTIONER: Through war.
SANTORUM: How did they get the West Bank? [inaudible] Through a war. Should we give Texas back to Mexico?
QUESTIONER: Well I don’t think you should recognize recent annexations.
SANTORUM: Oh, so it depends whether it’s recent or not? So we should have given New Mexico and Texas back 150 years go?
No one comes off looking very clever in this exchange. The United States peacefully annexed Texas after Texas had previously seceded from Mexico. This is not an obscure or little-known fact. The pretext for the Mexican War was a dispute over where the new U.S.-Mexican border was after the annexation took place. The dispute allowed Polk to precipitate the border crisis that led to the 1846-48 war, which advanced the expansionism favored by his party.
It’s true that New Mexico, Arizona*, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and California were captured during the Mexican War, but these territories were only legally American after the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. There has never been a negotiated settlement similar to this treaty that recognizes Israeli possession of any of the territories seized during the 1967 war. The comparison is utterly and totally flawed. Besides, it probably isn’t helping Santorum’s case that he is comparing the 1967 war to a gigantic expansionist land-grab, and it says something about him that he thinks that this makes the occupation more defensible.
* Some of what is now Arizona and New Mexico was not acquired under the treaty, but was later purchased as part of the Gadsden Purchase.
Aaron in Israel 
IanH 
Santorum doesn’t even know his basic facts. With his “to the victor go the spoils” attitude (did he oppose Gulf War I and the liberation of Kuwait), he should take a moment to introduce himself to the fact that Israel has not annexed the West Bank. It has annexed large chunks of the West Bank that it fully intends to maintain as part of Israel following any settlement, but it’s leaders are not so stupid that they don’t understand the implications of actually annexing the entire West Bank – and either formalizing an apartheid state or granting its occupants Israeli citizenship and the rights of citizens.
When he declares, “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians” is he declaring himself to be a proponent of the “one state solution”, or is he revealing himself to be as woefully ignorant on foreign policy issues as Herman Cain.