A New Settlement in the West Bank

The Real News Network

Phyllis Bennis on a two-state solution: "From what I
saw in this trip to the West Bank, I would say
that if it's not already impossible, it is so close as to be virtually the
same. The division of Palestinian land within the West Bank, has divided the West Bank, as have the series of roads that connect
settlements but bypass Palestinian villages, towns, refugee camps. The
checkpoints—imagine 567 checkpoints, according to the United Nations, in this
tiny territory the size of the US
state of Delaware.
It's insane."

JESSICA WEATHERUP, PRODUCER (VOICEOVER): Is Israel about to
build the first settlement in the West Bank in
nearly a decade? The only hurdle that remains is final approval from Defense
Minister Ehud Barak. According to the daily Maariv, the settler population in
the West Bank grew by 15,000 last year.
Settlements in the occupied territory are illegal under international law, and
Palestinian officials were quick to criticize the proposal. Saeb Erekat, a
senior Palestinian negotiator, said, "This is destroying the process of a
two-state solution." (July 24, 2008) We spoke with Phyllis Bennis, senior
analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington,
DC, who recently returned from the West Bank.

PHYLLIS BENNIS, INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: It had been more than two years
since my last trip, and although I knew that things had deteriorated, I was
quite shocked at the speed of the deterioration, the speed of settlement
expansion, the speed of the creation of new apartheid roads throughout the
occupied West Bank—I was, of course, unable to go to Gaza on this trip—the
speed in which Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller
territory, smaller and smaller lives, resulting in smaller and smaller
identities, is proceeding at a pace that I found absolutely shocking. Well,
there's a serious question right now whether a real two-state solution in the
viable sense of two real states is any longer possible. From what I saw in this
trip to the West Bank, I would say that if
it's not already impossible, it is so close as to be virtually the same. The
division of Palestinian land within the West Bank, which is partly about the
so-called apartheid wall, which does not, of course, divide Palestinian
territory from Israeli territory—it's almost entirely within Palestinian
territory, dividing Palestinians from which other—has divided the West Bank, as
have the series of roads that connect settlements but bypass Palestinian
villages, towns, refugee camps. The checkpoints—imagine 567 checkpoints,
according to the United Nations, in this tiny territory the size of the US state of Delaware. It's insane. And if you look at
the maps, particularly the very good maps produced by the United Nations, you
see an incredible swiss cheese arrangement, where Israeli-controlled land is
the cheese, and the Palestinian towns, villages, camps are the holes in the
cheese. They are disconnected from each other, they're not contiguous, and new
roads are being built, new bridges are being constructed, new tunnels are being
dug to link these non-contiguous enclaves, bantustans if you want to call them
that, and so that they can be called contiguous when they're clearly not. So
you have some towns, like the city of Qalqilya
in the northern West Bank, completely
surrounded by the wall. The city next to it, a tiny little town, is also
completely surrounded by the wall, each with one gate. And you can't get from
one town to the other through those gates—they're on opposite sides. There is
now a tunnel that's been created between the two towns. But it's a very
isolating kind of existence for those 40,000 people who live, for example, in
the city of Qalqilya, once a market town right on the Green Line. Israelis and
Palestinians mixed freely for years. It was a market center for produce, a very
rich agricultural area. In that town now that's now completely surrounded by
the wall, there is virtually no commerce in and out. And the key figure of all
this, again according to the United Nations, if you add up the 10 percent of
West Bank land that was appropriated to build the wall, the amount of land
taken by settlements, their expansions, and the land they claim as security
zones around them, the land that's been expropriated to build these new roads
and bridges and tunnels, most of the Jordan Valley, which has all been declared
a closed military zone, and the new set of Israeli-declared Green Zones or
nature preserves, what you find is that a full 60 percent of the land of the
West Bank is now prohibited for Palestinian residential or commercial or agricultural
use. It is now under Israeli military control. So what is up for negotiations
is now only 40 percent of the land of the West Bank, which of course itself is
only about 18 percent of historic Palestine.