The New York Times · New York, New York · 2 September 2001

CP-2001-040

Separate and Unequal on the West Bank

By Amira Hass

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Transcribed from the clipping

RAMALLAH, West Bank From my living room window in Ramallah, a Palestinian city, I see the lights of the Israeli settlement Pesagot on the opposite mountain. Across the eastern road of my neighborhood, there is an Israeli military base, protecting another settlement, Beit El.

Had I wanted, as an Israeli Jew, born in West Jerusalem, I could have moved at any moment to any of these settlements. My Palestinian next-door neighbors in Ramallah, whose grandparents were born in what is now Israel, could not even think of moving to, say, Tel Aviv.

There is no way to understand the current Palestinian uprising without examining the moral, economic and social reality that Israeli settlement policy has created in the last 34 years.

Since the 1967 war, Israeli governments — both Labor and Likud — have built settlements all over the occupied West Bank and the small Gaza Strip, in the midst of Arab-Palestinian communities that are centuries old. About 390,000 settlers now live in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and in Gaza.

The construction and development of these outposts have essentially allowed Israel to create the infrastructure of one state, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.

Israel’s governments have determined the overall character of these lands and the fate of their people while the three million Palestinians who live there and have paid taxes to Israel’s Treasury could not vote for these governments. Yet Israeli Jews in the settlements have the right to vote.

A network of large, well-maintained roads now connects Israeli outposts — even the smallest and most remote ones — to Israel proper. While Israelis can at any time move to the West Bank or Gaza, Palestinians are not allowed to live legally in an Israeli city or settlement, even if this settlement is built upon their family land.

From the river to the sea, within the contours of what is now de facto one state governed by Israel, live some 4 million Palestinians. These people are classified in three different categories: One million of them are Israeli citizens, who live within Israel’s 1967 borders and who have the right to vote.

Some 200,000 Palestinians are residents of East Jerusalem, which was annexed to Israel’s West Jerusalem in 1967.

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Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, page folio or printed date line appears on this clipping — it is trimmed to the article itself, which begins at the headline. Nothing on the clipping confirms or contradicts 2001-09-02, and nothing on it names the newspaper either; the only internal dateline is the standing place line “RAMALLAH, West Bank”, which carries no date.

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