Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Just when there seemed to be a consensus inside Israel concerning a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, we seem to be in danger of losing it altogether. The growing number of settlement-related facts on the ground, the harder it is to make a clean territorial cut, evacuate hundreds of thousands of settlers and demarcate a border of ethnic and national separation.

Drawing borders is a prerequisite for implementing a two-state solution. The two alternatives, a single binational state and continuation of occupation, do not require any form of territorial separation.

There are two options for the demarcation of borders. Either there is an automatic withdrawal to the armistice line separating Israel from the West Bank since the Rhodes agreements of 1949, or this so-called “green line” serves as a point of origin from which necessary changes are made, reflecting the situation on the ground today and the changes that have taken place since the June 1967 war.

Any such changes have to be part of a bilateral process of negotiation and boundary demarcation. They cannot be one-sided or imposed by Israel on the Palestinians, as was the case with the separation barrier. The latter has deviated from the green line in one direction only – inside the West Bank – effectively annexing territory to Israel in an attempt to retain Israeli settlement blocs under Israeli control and sovereignty.

The green line has never been a very effective boundary, even in the pre-1967 era. It came into being as a result of pressure of time and the realities of the ceasefire following the 1948-1949 war. Since 1967, it has remained a de jure administrative boundary between Israel and the West Bank, but it has been transgressed in many de facto ways, not least the blurring of the line in the center of Israel, the building of roads crossing the line and the construction of Israeli settlements inside the West Bank but in close proximity to the line itself. It is the latter that, Israel claims, should be annexed under a future peace agreement. A simple stroke of the cartographer’s pen would effectively reduce the number of settlers and settlements that have to be evacuated under a peace agreement.

In principle, such annexations have been rejected by the Palestinians. But this long-standing position has begun to change in recent years, with the acceptance by some that the difficulties Israel would encounter in evacuating the entire settler population are of a magnitude that may deter it from implementing a territorial withdrawal. As an alternative it would be acceptable to implement territorial exchange, through which Israeli territorial demands inside the West Bank would be compensated for by an equal amount of territory transferred from Israel to a Palestinian state.

The basis for such a territorial exchange would be 1:1 – a dunam for a dunam – so that the Palestinian state would end up with the same amount of territory as that encompassed within the present boundaries of the West Bank and Gaza. Territorial exchange would only take place along the green line, ensuring territorial contiguity for both sides, without enclaves or extra-territorial anomalies such as territorial corridors.

There are areas in close proximity to the green line inside Israel that could effectively be swapped. In particular the southern section of the green line, running from the Lakhish region and along the southern Hebron foothills, is an area of relatively little Jewish settlement on both sides of the green line. Territorial exchange there would result in minimal dislocation for the region’s residents, while at the same time enabling contiguous lands to be attached to the Palestinian state.

In the central and northern sections of the green line an exchange is more difficult to implement because of the greater population densities in close proximity to the existing boundary. But herein lies a much greater problem. It is precisely in the northern sections of the region where the towns and villages located near the green line are populated by Arab citizens of Israel. The idea that territorial exchange could take place in this area, to include such places as Umm al-Fahm and Baqa al-Gharbiyeh, has been proposed by right-wing groups in Israel who, while opposing in principle all notions of territorial withdrawal, have supported territorial exchange only if it led to the “silent” transfer of as many Arab citizens of Israel as possible to the future Palestinian state. This, they argue, would not require any dislocation since people would remain in their homes.

But it would result in an enforced change of citizenship for a population that has repeatedly expressed its intention to remain inside Israel, and has rejected proposals aimed at transferring it to a Palestinian state. The proponents of such an argument point to the many incidents of boundary redrawing that took place in Europe following World War I, where populations underwent citizenship transfer against their will while remaining in situ in their villages and homes.

Beyond the immorality of such a scenario, this would send the wrong message to the Arab citizens of Israel. After all, it is continually argued that they will be able to undergo greater integration into Israeli society and will no longer be perceived as constituting a fifth column inside Israel proper only if and when the Israel-Palestine conflict is finally resolved.

Leaving the populated areas aside, there is ample land available in other parts of the region for territorial exchanges of up to 8 percent on either side of the line. The resulting border would be no more tortuous and meandering than the original green line and would take into account existing realities on the ground today.

True, this would effectively legitimize some of the Israeli settlements retroactively. But if it were to enable the implementation of an agreement with greater ease, and if both sides were to feel that their territorial claims had not been unilaterally usurped by the other, then there is nothing sacred about the green line that renders it the only default boundary for a future Palestinian state.

David Newman is a professor of political geography at Ben-Gurion University and editor of The International Journal of Geopolitics. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons.org, an online newsletter.

Beersheba, Israel - Nearly 40 years after it was removed from official maps, atlases and school books, the Green Line has made a significant comeback. Israel’s education minister, Yuli Tamir, has ordered the Green Line border, which separates Israel from the West Bank, to be reintroduced in all texts and maps used in the Israeli school system. From now on, Israeli children will know exactly where the Green Line is and what it signifies — a political border that, at some point, will almost certainly become the line separating neighboring Israeli and Palestinian sovereign territories.

It was shortly after the Six-Day War of 1967 that the Green Line was removed from atlases produced by the Israeli government. The border, hastily drawn at the Rhodes armistice talks after Israel’s war of Independence in 1948, had always been regarded as nothing more than an artificial line of separation eventually to be reworked. For most Israeli leaders in 1967, the occupation of the West Bank was a sign that the future territorial order would be vastly different from the one they had lived with for the previous 19 years.

According to Abba Eban — Israeli ambassador to the United States and the United Nations in the 1950s and foreign minister at the time of the Six-Day War — his attempts to negotiate with the Arab states to transform the border into a permanent recognized international boundary had been rejected in the early 1950s by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had argued that the more elastic and less permanent the boundary, the easier it would be to change in the future — as indeed seemed to be the case in the aftermath of the 1967 war.

The Green Line’s removal from maps was meant to signify that it existed no longer, but in reality it never disappeared. It remained the administrative boundary separating Israel from the occupied territories, with one law for the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, and quite another one for the stateless Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Even Israeli settlers who moved to the occupied territories and continued to enjoy Israeli citizenship were ultimately subject to the military authorities — just to show the world that Israel had not formally annexed these territories or, as the Israeli government preferred to put it, had extended civilian law to these areas over which they did not enjoy sovereign rights.

But in the past decade, for most Israelis, the Green Line has once again become the line separating the relatively safe roads of Israel from the danger of the West Bank. Few Israelis, other than the settlers, venture beyond it, even when doing so would make their route shorter. It is along the Green Line that the unilateral West Bank separation barrier has been constructed in large sections.

Where the barrier has deviated from the Green Line, in practice annexing some parts of the West Bank to Israel, the International Court of Justice has ruled it illegal. Many Palestinians are caught in a state of territorial limbo: they live east of the Green Line inside the West Bank, but west of the separation barrier, in effect spatial hostages to this exercise in redrawing the border.

At last year’s Herzliya Conference, an annual gathering arranged by the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and attended by the prime minister and leading political figures, a group of Israeli geographers, planners and cartographers proposed that the Green Line serve as the foundation for any future territorial agreement, based on the principles of the road map and a two-state solution to this never-ending conflict. They identified certain areas along the line where, given the variations that have occurred during almost 40 years of occupation, territorial exchanges could be made between the two sides — as opposed to returning to a line that even 60 years ago was not ideal and that today is out of touch with the region’s demographic realities.

The international legal status of the Green Line is not clear. On the one hand, it is no more than an armistice line — it is not a recognized boundary, unlike the borders separating Israel from both Egypt and Jordan, which were drawn up and ratified as part of peace agreements. Yet the Oslo accords make mention of the West Bank as constituting the future Palestinian state. This region has a clearly defined boundary — the Green Line — and many international jurists argue that this is sufficient to recognize it as the formal line of political separation. The jurists’ time in court is yet to come, but the groundwork has already been prepared by international boundary experts on both sides.

If some Israelis were unclear about the long-term significance of the Green Line, the education minister’s decision to return the border to the geography and history textbooks will have left no one in doubt.

There may never be peace in this troubled region. But if there is to be a return to the negotiation table, the issue of boundary demarcation will be of paramount importance in determining the territorial configuration of the respective sovereignty to be practiced by each of the two states. On the ground, there are many reasons for drawing a completely new line, but it will always be easier for the politicians to return to what was once — however briefly — there. The Green Line is the default boundary, and it has finally been recognized anew by the Israeli government.

David Newman, a professor of political geography at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, is a co-editor of the journal Geopolitics.

Increased security will not bring Israeli people the safety they crave

I always know there has been a terrorist incident in southern Israel when the helicopters start arriving at the regional hospital opposite my place of work. This time I didn't need to wait for the helicopters: Tuesday's suicide bombs exploded near enough for me and my colleagues at Ben Gurion university to be shaken by the blast. It was closer to home in another sense: we were all aware that it could have been any one of us on those buses, popping out of our office to go shopping. And given that it was the last day of the holidays before the country's schoolchildren returned to their desks, we were all worried that maybe, just maybe, one of them was on those buses.

Family and colleagues immediately got in touch,as did the foreign correspondents wanting to know more about this place which has, until now, been well off the map of terrorism. Beersheba, the normally peaceful regional capital of the Negev in the south of the country, has finally made it into the international headlines.

Beersheba is almost equidistant between the Gaza Strip and the southern section of the West Bank, approximately 20 minutes' drive from each. In the past, when cheap Palestinian labour used to flood into Israel from the occupied territories, it was a place where the two groups of Palestinians met, exchanged information and disseminated their fight for independence from one territory to the other. But those days have long since ceased: today there is no more than a trickle of Palestinians allowed into Israel by the authorities.

Israeli rightwingers, who oppose Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan, have used Tuesday's attacks as another reason not to go ahead, arguing that to disengage from Gaza would be equivalent to rewarding the terrorists. The fact that the suicide bombers did not come from Gaza, but from the Hebron region in the West Bank, is irrelevant to them. Any act of terrorism is, they say, an indication that territorial withdrawal will not bring an end to violence. And when the incident takes place in a major town so close to the Gaza Strip, this argument is strengthened.

The lull in bombings over the past six months has been taken by most Israelis as proof that the security wall has served its professed purpose: keeping the bombers out of Israel. The proponents of the wall, which is still being built even though the international court of justice has ruled it illegal, point to the Beersheba bombings as further proof of its value. Why, they ask, did terrorism move southwards this week? Because, they answer, this is the only region where suicide bombers can still cross with relative ease from the West Bank into Israel.

If anything, Tuesday's bombings will serve to speed up Israeli plans for the wall. It was reported on Ynet, the Israeli internet news channel, that Sharon undertook a tour of the southern parts of the West Bank last week to push ahead with the construction of the wall in this region, now that it has been completed elsewhere. When construction does go ahead, it will more closely follow the course of the green line. The few Israeli settlements there are more isolated and would not necessitate a rerouting of the border, as elsewhere.

The idea that the wall - and only the wall - has brought about the lull in bombings is far too simplistic. There are a host of other reasons. International pressure on Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to take a firmer hold of fundamentalist groups is of great importance. So, too, has been the impact of Israel's hardline military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have destroyed much of the military and civilian infrastructure, so much so that the situation for Palestinians is worse than at any time since 1967.

Not that that makes much difference to some Israeli policymakers, who immediately after the bombings accused the Palestinian Authority of not doing enough to rein in the terrorists. The Israeli government is intent on discrediting Arafat, who is therefore linked to every outrage despite the fact that his declining authority has left him with little control over Hamas and Jihad elements.

According to the biblical narrative, Beersheba was the home of Abraham, the common father to both Judaism and Islam. His name is often used to promote it as a city of peace and dialogue between the two peoples. But this week it became a city of violence and blood. It reminded the residents of this outlying town that the conflict does not bypass anyone. Hopefully, when the immediate - and understandable - emotional reaction has passed, it will remind us that peace, if it ever comes, will be for the benefit of all - not just the residents of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

There is nothing that causes as much heated debate in Israel as the future of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. It is now clear to most Israelis that if there is ever going to be a final political agreement with the Palestinians, it will require that some, if not necessarily all, of the settlements be dislodged and evacuated. A permanent plan would have to create a Palestinian state that is compact and continuous - unlike the disconnected wedges and enclaves of Palestinian autonomy areas that were created by the Oslo accord and that have left the settlements in place. Although this reality is undeniable, the practicality of settlement removal has largely been avoided by all Israeli governments, including those of the left, even as that avoidance makes the eventual uprooting of the growing settler population more difficult.

There are today approximately 200,000 Jewish settlers living in a variety of West Bank and Gaza communities. They have arrived in those areas continually over the past 35 years, ever since Israel's occupation of the region after its victory in the 1967 war. For the first 10 years, settlement was limited to the eastern edges of the Jordan Valley by the Labor governments of Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin. They did not allow settlements in the densely populated Palestinian upland areas, assuming that this area would eventually become an autonomous Palestinian region linked to Jordan.

It was only after the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and, more important, the rise of Israel's first right-wing Likud governments, led by Menachem Begin from 1977 to 1983, that settlement policy was extended to include the whole of the West Bank region. Spurred on by the religious settler movement Gush Emunim, settlements began to sprout up throughout the mountainous interior as well as in close proximity to the "green line" boundary between Israel and the West Bank, with their inhabitants hoping to prevent any future Israeli withdrawal from those areas. Gush Emunim supporters believed that the land conquered in 1967 had been returned to its rightful owners as promised to their biblical ancestors by God. Hence, they were not interested in such practical problems as demography, security or the political rights of another people. And they set out to make it as difficult as possible for any government to relinquish the land in a future political agreement.

From 1984 onward, Israel was governed by several national coalition governments - perhaps more adequately described as governments of national paralysis - consisting of the left-wing Labor and right-wing Likud parties. In each instance, the coalition agreements included a clause freezing all further settlement activity. And yet from 1984 to 2002 the settler population increased from a mere 30,000 to approximately 200,000 (not including another 200,000 living in East Jerusalem, which Israelis do not consider part of the West Bank).

Even under Labor governments, settlement activity did not cease. Few new settlements were constructed, but all the existing settlements underwent consolidation and expansion as new neighborhoods were built, new settlers arrived, and a second generation of settler families grew up and made their homes in these places.

In fact, the so-called settlement freeze proved to be a lifesaver for the many small communities that had been established under the Likud governments. Preventing the construction of additional settlements allowed small ones to grow to sizes that made them viable as functioning communities.

The Likud governments, eager to keep the West Bank as part of Israel, actively promoted the growth of the settler population through large subsidies - cheap land, low- interest mortgages and lower income tax rates for individuals, as well as subsidies to local government councils. (Labor governments attempted to cut back on these subsidies but often met with political opposition from their coalition partners.)

Israelis moving to the West Bank side of the green line could exchange a small three- or four-room apartment in a crowded Israeli town for a bigger house in a low-density community, with government benefits not available to people living just a few miles away inside Israel proper.

It was basically a case of suburban colonization.

The settlements, like communities inside Israel, are governed by municipal and regional councils that provide public services and control land use planning and development. A recent study by B'tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, shows that while the built-up areas of the settlements take up only 1.7 percent of the land in the West Bank, the area encompassed within the municipal boundaries of the settlements takes up 6.8 percent of the land. Regional councils, which provide services to smaller, scattered communities through a regional authority, govern an additional 35.1 percent. Together, these settlement councils effectively control 41.9 percent of the area in the West Bank.

After decades of growth, these settlements have created a completely new landscape. They are no longer outposts on exposed hills, but are fully developed communities with schools, commercial centers, industrial zones and municipal services all created for the settler population - needless to say, the Palestinian neighbors who occupy the same geographical space do not share in these benefits.

The very solidity of these planned developments makes it almost impossible to remove all of the settler population. Instead, the debate, even among left-wing Israelis who oppose the settlements, is over how to redraw the future border between Israel and a Palestinian state in such a way as to retain as large a number of settlers and settlements on as little territory as possible. This would probably require transfer of an equal amount of territory from within Israel itself - some have suggested the expansion of the Gaza Strip region - as compensation for the settlement territory that would be formally annexed to Israel.

But even if such a territorial solution were to be acceptable to both sides, this still leaves around 35 percent to 40 percent of the settler population living in areas farther east, into the West Bank, who would have to be evacuated. Israelis left and right already fear a day when the government will have to send the army in to move these settlements if the settlers refuse to go. Even the best outcome would probably mean violent demonstrations of the type seen in the early 1980's when the Northern Sinai settlements were dismantled as part of the implementation of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement; a worst case would involve armed confrontation between soldiers and settlers. This is a major reason why even the Labor governments that negotiated and supported the Oslo accords did not stop settlement growth and instead allowed population expansion even at the cost of creating further resentment among the Palestinians.

Now, however, public support of the settlements is declining. Recent surveys show that a majority of Israelis believe that eventually there will be a Palestinian state and that the settlements will have to move (and this regardless of the recent vote by the Likud Party to oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state). Early in the development of the settlements, settlers argued that their towns contributed to Israel's security. That is not accepted by most Israelis now, and in fact the settlements are seen for what they are, namely a security burden. Public support is likely to decline further if they are also perceived as the main obstacle on the way to a final peace agreement.

Unlike other matters that will need to be negotiated with the Palestinians, the settlement problem, created and expanded by successive Israeli governments, will have to be resolved by Israel itself. For Israelis who have lived in the West Bank for more than 25 years, for those who were born there, there will be heartbreak, even if the government can give them housing elsewhere. That is one price they and Israeli society will have to pay for a stable peace.

David Newman is chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and editor of the International Journal of Geopolitics.