The New York Times · New York, New York · 22 July 1984

CP-1984-037

ISRAEL’S BITTER WEST BANK HARVEST

By Anthony Lewis

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Transcribed from the clipping

IT IS NOT OFTEN THAT A PIECE OF SOcial science research becomes the symbol of a fateful national debate. That has happened in Israel with a report bearing the disarmingly dry title, “The West Bank Data Project.” The author is Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem.

Benvenisti and a team of researchers dug out for the first time the basic facts of life in the West Bank and Gaza, territories occupied by Israel since 1967: demography, land use, agriculture, industry, law. Their report, published by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, fills 97 large-sized pages with maps, tables and analysis. But it is much more than that.

From the findings, Benvenisti drew a conclusion of profound political import. Israel’s de facto annexation of the two territories, he said, had passed the point of no return. The continuing process — Jewish settlements, road and water links to Israel, economic dependence, the administrative and legal apparatus — was irreversible.

“For the foreseeable future,” he wrote, “all of Palestine will be ruled by an Israeli government.” The conclusion confounded Benvenisti’s own wishes — he is a dove who did not want annexation — and outraged his political friends.

It delighted the annexationists in power in the Likud coalition Government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Yet there was discomfort for them, too, if they thought about his words. Would the 1.3 million Palestinians in the territories be treated as a subordinate caste in a Greater Israel, he asked, or would they have political rights?

He said the choice would come to this: “Is Israel to be a Jewish state or a democratic one?” The future of the West Bank is an emotional question in Israel, and understandably so. It goes to the very nature of the society and the state; it engages history, religion, the sense of Jewish destiny.

So it was not surprising that Benvenisti should touch a nerve by saying that the question had in fact already been decided.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead — this is a magazine feature opening, page 32, with the folio “32” at the bottom left. Nothing on the page names the publication or the date.

Internally the article says the Benvenisti report “coincided with the start of the Israeli election campaign that ends in voting tomorrow”; the Israeli Knesset election was held on 23 July 1984, which is consistent with a Sunday, 22 July 1984 magazine.

The contributor note reads “Anthony Lewis is a columnist for The New York Times”, consistent with `pub`.

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