Considerations

MA’ALE ADUMIM, the West Bank — So I was dri­ving with a friend from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv a few months ago, and we came to a secu­rity check­point after twenty min­utes. It was then that I real­ized that we were tak­ing a path dif­fer­ent from the one used by the buses — and that I was about to enter the West Bank for the first time.

Route 443, which we had been tak­ing, is the quick­est way to get from Israel’s polit­i­cal cap­i­tal to its met­ro­pol­i­tan one. It goes through the part of the West Bank just north­west of Jerusalem. After Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists began attack­ing pass­ing vehi­cles with bombs and sniper-fire dur­ing the sec­ond intifada in the early 1990s, the Israeli gov­ern­ment blocked access to the high­way from Pales­tin­ian towns. Late last year, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the gov­ern­ment must allow Pales­tini­ans to use Route 443. (This pic­ture is from Wikipedia.)

As my friend and I approached the secu­rity check­point, she slowed down. As she drove through the check­point, an armed guard glanced our way. And that was it. We were back on our way. In Israel and the Occu­pied Ter­ri­to­ries, Israelis (Jews, Arabs, every­one) get yel­low license-plates while Pales­tini­ans receive green ones. So it’s easy to tell who is dri­ving a car.

As we drove through this part of the West Bank, I was struck by how nor­mal it seemed. Hon­estly, I did not know what to expect. Per­haps I thought we would have been stopped at some­thing like Pass­port Con­trol in inter­na­tional air­ports. Per­haps I thought we would be stopped and ques­tioned like that which occurs at El Al ter­mi­nals for every flight com­ing from or going to Israel. But, in real­ity, it was noth­ing. It was almost as though we were dri­ving from Mass­a­chu­setts to Con­necti­cut on the way to New York. In other words, it was all just a dif­fer­ent part of the same coun­try. More­over, once we were in the West Bank, the geog­ra­phy, archi­tec­ture, and loca­tions in that part of the ter­ri­tory were indis­tin­guish­able from those in Israel proper. All of the signs were in Hebrew, and most of the build­ings that we passed seemed to be owned and oper­ated by Israeli Jews. If it were not for the secu­rity check­point, I would have thought that I was merely in another part of Israel proper. After all, there is a pop­u­lar shopping-mall just off the road in the nearby settlement-city of Modi’in.

—

The sec­ond time I went through the West Bank, I was tak­ing a taxi from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv because I was extremely late for an appoint­ment. The taxi dri­ver, an Arab Israeli, asked me which route I wanted to take. I told him: “What­ever is quicker at this time of day.” I didn’t real­ize that this would mean another jour­ney through the West Bank — albeit a dif­fer­ent one altogether.

Once we left Jerusalem, I had thought we would take Route 443 again directly. I was wrong. The taxi dri­ver thought that another way would be quicker, and I trusted his judg­ment because I had hag­gled a flat rate — the quicker he got me to Tel Aviv, the bet­ter for him.

As it turned out, he took sev­eral smaller roads through the West Bank in order to avoid traf­fic con­ges­tion and get to Route 443 as soon as pos­si­ble. But I was ner­vous. A few min­utes after we left Jerusalem, we were in a part of the West Bank that I did not recognize.

All of the signs were in Ara­bic. All of the peo­ple walk­ing on the side­walks were Arabs. All of the cars had green license-plates. More­over, I was able to see first-hand the eco­nomic dis­par­ity between Israelis and Pales­tini­ans from the van­tage point of a taxi’s win­dow. This part of the West Bank was much poorer than Israel proper — the build­ings were in dis­re­pair, and there were more trash and lit­ter in the streets. This neigh­bor­hood resem­bled the poor, blue-collar, Israeli city of Lod — which is also known for the vio­lent con­fronta­tions that some­times occur between Arabs and Jews there.

And then, a few min­utes later, I saw a road sign that said Ramal­lah, the unof­fi­cial cap­i­tal of the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity and a past cen­ter of ter­ror­ist activ­ity, was only a few kilo­me­ters away in a given direc­tion. But before I became too stressed, the taxi dri­ver turned away from Ramal­lah and headed towards Route 443. I breathed a sigh of relief. I do not want to sound para­noid, but, after all, this is the Mid­dle East. Just to be safe, I had told the taxi dri­ver dur­ing our small-talk that I was an Amer­i­can tourist. I would not want an Arab taxi-driver tak­ing me through the West Bank to know that I was an Israeli cit­i­zen as well. It may be racist, but that is life in this part of the world.

—

The third time I was in the West Bank was ear­lier in the morn­ing a few days ago. I went with a friend who was tak­ing his daugh­ter to a park in Ma’ale Adu­mim, a suburb-settlement just over the Green Line between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. When West­ern­ers think of the word “set­tle­ment,” they likely imag­ine a few pitched tents on a hill­top. Some­times this is true (and the Israeli gov­ern­ment calls them ille­gal or unau­tho­rized “out­posts”), but not in the case of Ma’ale Adu­mim. As of 2007, the set­tle­ment had 33,000 res­i­dents — more than my home­town of Belleville, Illi­nois — and there are insti­tu­tions like a shop­ping mall and library. It just seemed to be another ordi­nary, quiet suburb.

On the way back to Jerusalem, I real­ized that Ma’ale Adu­mim — and the three settlement-cities that are even larger — killed the tra­di­tional, two-state solu­tion. Most main­stream com­men­ta­tors and ana­lysts have always posited that such a peace needs three agreements:

• Pales­tini­ans stop all vio­lence and rec­og­nize Israel as a Jew­ish state
• Jerusalem is divided
• Israel with­draws from all ter­ri­tory beyond the Green Line (which was orig­i­nally the cease-fire line between Israel and Jor­dan in 1948)

From what I have seen, the third stip­u­la­tion is now impos­si­ble. The peo­ple of Ma’ale Adu­mim are not going any­where. Get­ting them to leave would be like the mayor of Boston ask­ing an entire neigh­bor­hood to pack and get out. It’s not going to hap­pen. The so-called “facts on the ground” are indeed the facts on the ground.

It is a com­mon view that the peo­ple who live in set­tle­ments are all reli­gious Zion­ists because most of the major, bib­li­cal events occurred in the West Bank (also known as Judea and Samaria), but that is not entirely accu­rate. The ones who live on “out­posts” deep in the West Bank are usu­ally reli­gious, but those near the Green Line in places like Ma’ale Adu­mim are a mix of reli­gious peo­ple and those who want cheaper rent. Israel has one of the high­est lev­els of income-disparity in the world.

The lower prices are under­stand­able since the mar­ket is tak­ing higher risk into account. Of course, there is a slightly-higher risk of ter­ror­ist attacks, but the greater vari­able is likely that the prop­erty itself is unsta­ble. No one really knows what will occur in these areas in the com­ing years or decades. It is pos­si­ble — but not likely — that the gov­ern­ment will one day order the evac­u­a­tion of places like Ma’ale Adu­mim just like it car­ried out in the Gaza Strip. And if that occurs, peo­ple own­ing homes here would lose nearly every­thing they have. (Many for­mer Gaza res­i­dents, for exam­ple, are angry at the gov­ern­ment because they are unem­ployed and have yet to receive their promised compensation.)

Still, nearly all of the set­tle­ments and out­posts are offi­cially reli­gious or have local codes like the sign pic­tured above that is posted at the entrance to Ma’ale Adumim.

The true divi­sion in the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is over the sta­tus of the West Bank. But now the issue is not Israel proper vs. the West Bank. It is between the Israeli West Bank vs. the Pales­tin­ian one. As I stated, the major set­tle­ments near the Green Line are de facto per­ma­nent. The issue is which parts of the West Bank will go to Israel and which part will go the Pales­tini­ans in any future two-state solution.

In any pro­posal, Israel will want to keep the parts of the West Bank with major set­tle­ments — most of which are behind the con­tro­ver­sial separation-barrier. In return, most main­stream ana­lysts agree that Israel will have to offer a part of Israel proper that will equal that taken by the set­tle­ments. Crit­ics argue that Israel will offer to trade low-quality land, but this misses one point: As my pic­tures reveal, the parts of the West Bank in places like Ma’ale Adu­mim are not arable any­way — the set­tle­ment is located in the foothills of the Judean Desert, and the land on the bor­der is arid and rocky. The land’s only pos­si­ble uses are grow­ing olive trees and per­haps light graz­ing by animals.

The Pales­tini­ans, for the most part, still insist that they receive all of the West Bank. Cyn­ics argue that the Pales­tini­ans know that this will never occur, giv­ing them an excuse to keep attack­ing Israel. How­ever, the reluc­tance is under­stand­able — the Pales­tini­ans believe that they deserve all the land beyond the Green Line for his­tor­i­cal and reli­gious reasons.

Over­all, it is likely that the sta­tus quo will remain the sta­tus quo as far as any­one can pre­dict. The West Bank will con­tinue to be an inter­est­ing — and divi­sive — place.