The barrier will make it far more difficult for Palestinians, including both terrorists and day laborers, to enter Israel and the Etzion settlements. De facto, it will declare the annexation of the Etzion area. It will force Palestinians who live east of the barrier route, outside the Etzion area, to pass through Israeli gates to get to fields on the west -- if on any given day the gates are open. Some 20,000 Palestinians who live in villages within the Etzion area will find themselves inside an enclave, barred from entering Israel proper and only able to reach schools, jobs, or hospitals in Bethlehem, the nearest Palestinian city, through one Israeli-controlled gate. By building the barrier around the Etzion Bloc, rather than putting the fence on the Israel-West Bank border, the government has declared that the settlers' daily safety overrides any possibility of normal life for the area's Palestinians.In his feature story, "And the Land Was Troubled for Forty Years," Gorenberg goes back to the origin of the occupation, 1967's Six Day War, and details the intense and candid debate among officials and policymakers over its wisdom and morality. "[V]irtually from the day after the war," he writes, "there were warnings of the danger of staying put. I have dug through the documents of that time. We are living in a tragedy foretold.""This astonishing landscape that we always saw and thought of as the 'Land of Israel' -- the vineyards and the olive orchards -- will be replaced by the fence," says Dror Etkes, head of Peace Now's Settlement Watch, who brought me here. Etkes' voice is a mix of melancholy and sarcasm. He is mourning for the countryside, and he is mocking those who have settled the West Bank so that the entire biblical Land of Israel stays under Jewish rule even as they dress the land in asphalt and concertina. And I think he is weary from the work of trying to make Israelis notice the occupation -- unless I am only hearing my own weariness in his voice. The occupation has become a malaise, a chronic, degenerative disease. It is not news, but it is destroying us.
The occupation was colonial, and would produce rebellion. Exploitation of Palestinian labor was racist. Settlement would be illegal. Palestinian autonomy would resemble a Bantustan, a creation of grand apartheid. Israel would become an international pariah. These were not the arguments of distant campus radicals enamored of their megaphones; they were the all-too-accurate premonitions of Israeli patriots.Gorenberg's piece, available online as a free preview to non-subscribers, appears in the Prospect's special June print issue, which focuses on the Mid-East. Elsewhere in the magazine, Flynt Leverett lays out options for withdrawing from Iraq to an incoming Democratic president in 2009; Robert Dreyfuss details how it actually happened that the neocon architects of the Iraq war willfully made the decision to get into bed with Iran-backed Shia fundamentalists in Iraq; and three former negotiators in the Israel-Palestine conflict lay out a common plan that could provide the basis for an Israeli-Palestinian final settlement. Meanwhile, among the non-Mid-East-related content in the June issue, Drew Westen applies his arguments about political language and emotion to the Democrats' fraught relationship with gun issues; Ezra looks at two new assessments of Nazi Germany, one a survey of World War II alternative histories; and Mark Schmitt offers an explanation for what "big government conservatism" really is all about.
That, and much more, can be found in the new issue. But you can only read it if you subscribe, for just 20 bucks a year.
--The Editors
