Regional

While there is considerable disagreement over who is to blame for the Palestinians’ living conditions in the West Bank (and, before August 2005, in Gaza), no one seriously disputes that these conditions are miserable. The daily lives of nearly 3.5 million Arabs are filled with unique difficulties. Some of the statistics are shocking. A 2002 USAID study revealed that more than 30 percent of Arab children living in Gaza and the West Bank were chronically malnourished. Other studies, conducted around the same time, found that more than 50 percent of the Arabs in the Palestinian territories were unemployed and forced to live on less than two dollars a day. More than a quarter of the Arab households did not have access to any piped water.

But for many Palestinians, what is harder to bear than the extreme poverty is the feeling that they are prisoners in their own land. Palestinians throughout the West Bank are subject to curfews, military searches, home demolitions, imprisonment, injury, and death. Between September 2000 and October 2008, more than 4,700 Palestinians—including nearly a thousand children—were killed by Israeli security forces.⁴

Palestinian school girls wait at an Israeli checkpoint - West Bank, 2002
© 2002 Getty Images, Inc.

These statistics show only the most dramatic effects of the Israeli occupation. But life for the Palestinians is also affected in a number of subtler ways, one of the most disruptive being the time it takes to get from place to place. Whether they are visiting family or friends, going to school or work, or being rushed to the hospital, Palestinians are frequently required to go through a series of checkpoints that have been set up by the Israelis to stop terrorists from entering Israel and Israeli settlements. The checkpoints can turn what would otherwise be a five-minute trip to a friend’s into a 45-minute journey or a 45-minute commute to work into a three-hour ordeal involving taxis, buses, and a lot of walking. (Things are simpler for the settlers, who are allowed to travel on Israeli-only roads that bypass most of the checkpoints.) Going through the checkpoints can itself be a long and humiliating experience. Palestinians have to pass through metal detectors or submit to manual searches and sometimes suffer verbal and physical abuse from the Israeli soldiers on duty.

The reasons for this abuse and for the existence of the checkpoints in the first place are not hard to understand. Between September 2000 and October 2008, more than three hundred Israeli security forces and more than seven hundred civilians (including dozens of children) were killed by Palestinian attackers, the majority of the civilians in suicide bombings.⁵ Even Israelis who have not been affected directly by the bombings suffer from them. Tragic stories—including that of a 20-year-old woman who was buried on the day she was supposed to be married—appear to have convinced many Israelis that they are in constant danger. Routine activities like taking a bus to work, sitting in a coffee shop, or dancing in a club are now filled with fear.

Unless a compromise can be reached, this awful cycle of violence appears destined to continue.

Israel’s future as both a Jewish and a democratic state is under threat. Not because (or not only because) there are groups who have vowed to destroy it, but because in the absence of a new Palestinian state, the relative size of the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel and the territories it controls will shift in the Arabs’ favor. Before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, there were roughly 3.5 million Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank and an additional 1 million living in Israel. All told, there were more than 4.5 million Arabs—not far behind the 5.4 million Jews in those same areas. And a much higher Arab birthrate meant that, within a generation, there would have been more Arabs than Jews.

An Israeli soldier removes the national flag from an army base bombed by Palestinian militants - Gaza, 2004
© 2004 Getty Images, Inc.

Ending the Israeli occupation of Gaza in August 2005 reduced the number of Arabs inside Israel and the occupied territories by more than a million—and bought the Israeli government some time. But further withdrawals from the West Bank will be necessary at some point if Israel is to avoid making a tough choice.

If the number of Arabs in Israel and the West Bank ever exceeded the number of Jews, then the Arabs might find it advantageous to drop their demand for their own state and, instead, push for universal voting rights within a unified Jewish-Arab state. If Israel were to agree to a unified state, this is the tough choice it would have to make: preserve its Jewish identity or remain a democratic nation. It could preserve its Jewish identity by refusing to grant Arabs in the occupied territories a vote (currently, only those Arabs living in Israel itself have the right to vote in Israeli elections) or, even more drastically, forcing large groups of them to relocate to other countries. Or it could preserve its democracy by allowing non-Israeli Arabs to vote—a decision that would effectively end the Jewish control of the Israeli government.