The inter­na­tion­al news cov­er­age of the Israeli-Pales­tine con­flicts often dwells on the dis­putes among diplo­mats or dra­mat­ic actions in the street. What’s miss­ing, how­ev­er, are the real­i­ties res­i­dents face as they go about their dai­ly lives. Even as the Unit­ed States-prompt­ed nego­ti­a­tions between the country’s lead­ers grow uncer­tain in the face of an April 29 dead­line, those in the region — includ­ing human rights work­ers, elect­ed offi­cials, intel­lec­tu­als and gov­ern­ment work­ers — don’t antic­i­pate that the per­son­al con­se­quences of occu­pa­tion will dimin­ish any­time soon. In the sec­ond part of a two-part series, here are the voic­es of var­ied groups of Pales­tini­ans and Israelis with whom I spoke last fall, as they share their expe­ri­ences of occu­pa­tion and how they think it will end.

Many progressive Israelis are skeptical about the progress of the negotiations—and they agree with Palestinian leadership that the barrier to peace resides predominantly on the Israeli side.

The human rights workers

Robert (not his real name) is a Euro­pean who moved to Ramal­lah, Pales­tine six years ago to work with Mil­i­tary Court Watch, a legal aid group that advo­cates for Pales­tini­ans sub­ject to the dual court sys­tem Israel has imposed in the West Bank.

Where­as Israelis — whether they live in Jerusalem or in the West Bank — are usu­al­ly tried by civ­il courts, Pales­tini­ans accused of a crime will most often face the Israeli mil­i­tary courts that have juris­dic­tion in the two-thirds of the West Bank under Israeli control.

Robert’s work pri­mar­i­ly focus­es on youth — includ­ing the 500 to 700 young peo­ple, some as young as 12, who are pros­e­cut­ed by the mil­i­tary courts each year. More than 99 per­cent of those cas­es end in con­vic­tion. He finds the work com­pelling, he says, because ​“for me, the court sys­tem pro­vides the clear­est case for end­ing occupation.”

​“When a fight breaks out between chil­dren in Israeli set­tle­ments and Arab vil­lages,” Robert says, ​“a sum­mons is issued by the police, and the Israeli child is told to report with his par­ents to the civ­il author­i­ty [the police sta­tion]. He is read his rights, has a lawyer and pro­ceeds to court.”

But that isn’t the case, he explains, for Pales­tin­ian chil­dren. After such an alter­ca­tion, he says, ​“There is a raid on the [Pales­tin­i­nan] fam­i­ly home in the mid­dle of the night, dur­ing which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) take the child away to a mil­i­tary encamp­ment and inter­ro­gate him, with­out his par­ents or a lawyer.”

Robert says that with this sys­tem in place, it is no sur­prise that 800,000 Pales­tin­ian men, women and chil­dren have been pros­e­cut­ed in Israeli mil­i­tary courts since 1967. A large per­cent­age of male Pales­tini­ans, he con­tin­ues, will have spent some of their lives in jail, usu­al­ly as a result of rel­a­tive­ly minor crimes.

End­ing occu­pa­tion, Robert feels, is the key to com­bat­ing this dis­tort­ed court sys­tem. He doubts, how­ev­er, that the cur­rent talks will yield a solution.

​“Every­one put faith in the Oslo Accords [final­ized in 1993], believ­ing that there would be an inde­pen­dent Pales­tin­ian state in three years,” he points out. Instead, he says, ​“The Accords have been used by the Israelis to jus­ti­fy and expand occu­pa­tion for the past 20 years.”

Robert and oth­er rights activists believe that any agree­ment made by Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu would only be one that pro­longed occu­pa­tion, there­by con­tin­u­ing to enable expand­ed set­tle­ments or the dual court system.

When I asked what the solu­tion to occu­pa­tion would be, he says, ​“We’ll just have to wait for a new generation.”

Sam, the Pales­tin­ian-Amer­i­can immigrant

Sam is an Amer­i­can: the son of a Pales­tin­ian who immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States in the 1950s and a Lebanese-Amer­i­can moth­er. In 1993, he mar­ried a Pales­tin­ian woman and moved to the West Bank, deter­mined to help build the econ­o­my of the nation that he believed would soon emerge from the Oslo Accords.

He set­tled in his fam­i­ly’s cen­tu­ry-old home in Al-Bireh, had three chil­dren, built a $100 mil­lion telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions firm, and earned an MBA from a joint Tel Aviv/​Northwestern Uni­ver­si­ty pro­gram. The one thing he didn’t have was the res­i­den­cy per­mit that would allow him to live in the West Bank permanently.

His Amer­i­can pass­port allowed him to trav­el freely in Israel and the West Bank, to see friends and con­duct busi­ness. Every three months, he would leave the West Bank to have the visa he need­ed renewed.

All went well until 2006, when he was issued a visa that read ​“Last per­mit” in Eng­lish, Hebrew and Ara­bic. Sam learned that had three choic­es: leave for good, live in Israel ille­gal­ly (risk­ing depor­ta­tion and a per­ma­nent ban), or fight for the per­ma­nent res­i­dence sta­tus he had first applied for in 1993. He chose the lat­ter course.

After months of work and with help from Israeli friends, he pre­vailed. How­ev­er, Sam explains, ​“When I went to the IDF to claim my res­i­den­cy card, I brought my Amer­i­can pass­port as required. When the IDF returned my pass­port, it had a new stamp: NOT VALID IN ISRAEL.”

​“Overnight,” Sam con­tin­ues, ​“I lost the rights that all oth­er Amer­i­cans enjoy in Israel. I could no longer dri­ve my Israeli-reg­is­tered car in the coun­try, nor on any of the spe­cial Israeli roads in the West Bank.”

In fact, Sam could also no longer enter Israel with­out a per­mit. And like most Pales­tini­ans, he could only get a short-term per­mit — in his case, one that last­ed only a day. With the added trav­el times and uncer­tain­ty about even attain­ing a per­mit¬ in the first place, this made con­duct­ing busi­ness meet­ings a major feat.

Even­tu­al­ly, he learned from friends that it was pos­si­ble to get a three-month per­mit. ​“But says Sam, ​“When I applied … I was told my res­i­den­cy card and pass­port were not suf­fi­cient ID. Instead I need­ed a dif­fer­ent, ​‘mag­net­ic ID.’”

Sam obtained the mag­net­ic ID — essen­tial­ly a mag­ne­tized ver­sion of his res­i­den­cy card — and applied again. ​“Unbe­liev­ably, the same offi­cers reject­ed my appli­ca­tion again,” he says. ​“They told me I also need­ed a ​‘businessman’s ID’: not my busi­ness card, but a spe­cial ID that only they issued.”

This too, he obtained; armed with his res­i­den­cy ID, his mag­net­ic ID and his businessman’s ID, he applied for a three-month per­mit yet again. As far as I know, he is still waiting.

In the mean­time, to go to his home in Amer­i­ca or to a speak­ing engage­ment in Europe, Sam can­not dri­ve the 45 min­utes to the Tel Aviv air­port. Rather, he says, like all Pales­tini­ans who are not Israeli cit­i­zens, he must trav­el to Amman, Jor­dan — adding a day to his trip each way.

Occupation’s influ­ence doesn’t just emerge through the walls erect­ed through­out the West Bank or the armed forces of the IDF; it’s also reflect­ed in the scores of banal rules and reg­u­la­tions that con­trol, con­strict and dis­tort the lives of the peo­ple and the econ­o­my of Pales­tine each day.

The Pales­tin­ian girlfriends

The East Jerusalem restau­rant in which I meet a group of most­ly Israeli-Pales­tin­ian women is packed — but only with Israeli-Arabs. East Jerusalem is pre­dom­i­nant­ly Mus­lim and Chris­t­ian; Jews, I am told, don’t come to the restau­rant, despite it being only a 10-minute walk from my West Jerusalem hotel.

It is an inter­est­ing group. Three are Chris­t­ian Israeli cit­i­zens; one is a Ger­man immi­grant mar­ried to a Pales­tin­ian man with Israeli cit­i­zen­ship. All are well edu­cat­ed, have spent time abroad and have more inde­pen­dence than most Pales­tini­ans. Sarah, whose real name I am not using, is a renowned intel­lec­tu­al who found­ed and leads a wom­en’s coun­sel­ing and pol­i­cy cen­ter; she is also a leader in joint Israeli-Pales­tin­ian wom­en’s efforts for peace and the end of occu­pa­tion. Sylvia, whose real name I am also not using, and Anna both work for inter­na­tion­al human rights organizations.

Despite their rel­a­tive free­dom, they tell me, all of them expe­ri­ence the small hard­ships as well as the out­right hor­rors of occu­pa­tion every day. Sarah’s fam­i­ly has lost its home twice to the Israeli gov­ern­ment — one con­fis­cat­ed in 1948, the sec­ond in 1967. The fam­i­ly of anoth­er woman, Nadine, owned a famous butch­er shop in Jerusalem. They, too, lost their home. How­ev­er, as her father was the only sup­pli­er of pork in the city, she says, they were even­tu­al­ly able to regain it.

Sto­ries like these, the women say, are far from uncom­mon. ​“Life for us,” Sarah says, ​“is an end­less round of deal­ing with the Kafkaesque sys­tem of rules and bar­ri­ers that the Israelis have created.”

​“If you want to build onto your home, you must spend months deal­ing with the bureau­cra­cy,” she con­tin­ues, ​“and usu­al­ly you are turned down.”

Nadine, mean­while, talks about the road restric­tions that pro­hib­it Pales­tini­ans from using the main roads of the West Bank, which can turn 10-minute trips between vil­lages into hour-long treks.

All agree that even trav­el­ing out of the coun­try is a night­mare. Even the women with pass­ports, they say, fre­quent­ly endure deten­tions and search­es at air­ports, which can cause humil­i­a­tion as well as missed planes and appointments.

And they scoff at the idea that these stric­tures are for secu­ri­ty. ​“These rules don’t make any­one safer,” Sarah argues. ​“The restric­tions and reg­u­la­tions have only one pur­pose: to wear peo­ple down and to encour­age us to leave the coun­try.” For these women, as with Sam the human rights work­er, it is the very banal­i­ty of the sys­tem that makes it so pernicious.

Yet the sit­u­a­tions the women describe, as fre­quent­ly as they may occur for Pales­tini­ans, are rarely cov­ered in glob­al media. ​“The inter­na­tion­al press is good at writ­ing about the big­ger prob­lems,” Sarah says, ​“But lit­tle is writ­ten about the indig­ni­ties every Pales­tin­ian — Israeli cit­i­zen or not — faces.”

Nadine agrees, ​“While the media cov­ers the incar­cer­a­tion of chil­dren for throw­ing stones, the gassing of peace­ful demon­stra­tors, and land seizures in vil­lages — occu­pa­tion affects us all.”

Asked about the nego­ti­a­tions, they, like Sam, are cyn­i­cal. ​“The only Pales­tin­ian state that Netanyahu has in mind,” says Nadine, ​“is a Swiss cheese-look­ing state of ​‘con­nect­ed’ vil­lages and cities, sur­round­ed by set­tle­ments and total­ly with­in the con­fines of Israel with no exter­nal borders.”

Only strong out­side pres­sure would make an accept­able pro­pos­al emerge, they sus­pect — but they doubt the Unit­ed States has the will or the pow­er to make that happen.

The Pales­tin­ian officials

One night, a group of Pales­tin­ian lead­ers makes the time to share their per­spec­tive on the talks with our del­e­ga­tion. More than one says the last decade of diplo­ma­cy has been the worst one, in which the Pales­tin­ian cab­i­net main­tained every com­mit­ment while the Israelis broke each of theirs.

One talks about the expand­ing set­tle­ments in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where, he says, Israeli flags fly ​“as a state­ment and a dare.” Anoth­er speaks of the trav­es­ty of Israel’s claim that it has helped build Palestine’s econ­o­my. How, he asks, can any­one believe that, when Israel has defied the Oslo Peace Accords by keep­ing Area C, which con­tains much of the West Bank’s water, agri­cul­tur­al and min­er­al resources, ful­ly under Israeli control.

Accord­ing to many of these offi­cials, all obsta­cles to a two-state solu­tion lie on the Israeli side. They con­sid­er the issues Netanyahu rais­es, such as his demand that Pales­tini­ans rec­og­nize Israel as a ​“Jew­ish state” or the refusal to grant Pales­tin­ian refugees a ​“right of return,” to be delay­ing tac­tics in order to allow for more set­tle­ments. This, they fear, will pre­vent the cre­ation of a con­tigu­ous Pales­tin­ian state.

How­ev­er, they also think Netanyahu isn’t think­ing in the long term. He’s blind, they say, to the grow­ing Euro­pean and Amer­i­can frus­tra­tion with Israel and to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of anoth­er Arab Spring chang­ing the polit­i­cal face of the Mid­dle East, there­by cat­alyz­ing the demand for democ­ra­cy everywhere.

The pro­gres­sive Israelis

As a long­time pro­gres­sive leader and for­mer Meretz MP, Nao­mi Chaz­an is a fix­ture of the pro­gres­sive move­ment and a con­stant advo­cate for women, peace and democ­ra­cy. As such, she and her work have been a fre­quent right-wing tar­get, but she remains unbowed.

Com­ment­ing on the cur­rent round of Israeli-Pales­tin­ian talks, Chaz­an har­bors lit­tle hope.

​“On the one hand,” says Chaz­an, ​“there is no ques­tion that a ​‘final sta­tus agree­ment’… could be achieved.” This, she says, would act in con­trast to what she calls an ​“agree­ment to agree” by both sides, which pre­sum­ably would achieve lit­tle real progress.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, though, Chaz­an says that she thinks the cyn­i­cism she and oth­ers express is a good thing. ​“The eupho­ria and hope sur­round­ing Oslo and oth­er rounds of talks turned to bit­ter­ness and anger when the nego­ti­a­tions yield­ed no results,” she says. Today’s pub­lic skep­ti­cism, she says, is actu­al­ly a ​“sign of progress.”

That night, I spend the evening with a young leader of the peace move­ment in Israel. She enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly talks about pro­gres­sive Israelis’ hope — thanks in large part to U.S.-based advo­ca­cy groups like J Street—that Jews in the Unit­ed States might help work for a two-state solution.

How­ev­er, beyond that opti­mism, she says, there is a sense of grow­ing unease and dis­con­tent among Israelis as a whole. She cau­tions, ​“Whether that unease leads to the growth of the Left, towards peace and jus­tice, or to the growth of the Right … will depend on the abil­i­ty of the exist­ing par­ties — or a new par­ty — to excite, empow­er and pro­vide [my] peers with a viable, believ­able path to a bet­ter future as a nation of, rather than sim­ply in, the Mid­dle East.”

A few days lat­er, our del­e­ga­tion meets with a broad range of pro­gres­sive politi­cians, pun­dits, for­mer secu­ri­ty advi­sors and uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors. And in spite of their var­ied back­grounds, I am struck by the homo­gene­ity of their arguments.

Many are skep­ti­cal about the progress of the nego­ti­a­tions — and they agree with Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship that the bar­ri­er to peace resides pre­dom­i­nant­ly on the Israeli side. They rue the government’s use of secu­ri­ty as a pre­text for set­tle­ment expan­sion as it takes moun­tain­tops in the West Bank as Israel’s own for ​“strong­holds” and expands the line of the ​“secu­ri­ty fence” into Pales­tin­ian lands beyond 1967 bor­ders, encir­cling Pales­tin­ian hold­ings with Israeli land.

Some say that even as pub­lic polls show that the Israel peo­ple would sup­port a peace agree­ment, the Israeli gov­ern­ment has moved right, empow­er­ing the set­tler move­ment and increas­ing its require­ments for Palestinians.

While most feel Netanyahu and the right wing want nego­ti­a­tions to fail, they also stress that Israelis are fools if they think the sta­tus quo will hold. Israel, they say, is already a bi-nation­al state, with one group’s lives con­strained by lack of cit­i­zen­ship or access to resources. They argue, just like the Pales­tin­ian-Israeli women of a few nights pri­or, that if there is for­ward move­ment, it will be due to out­side pres­sure. Israel, they say, is unable to save itself.

The settler

We trav­el to Ariel, a mas­sive set­tle­ment of 18,000 on the West Bank pre­dom­i­nant­ly pop­u­lat­ed by Russ­ian immi­grants lured there by gen­er­ous Israeli gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies and grants. Here we meet with Dani Dayan, an Argen­tin­ian immi­grant who has become a vocal advo­cate for the set­tler move­ment in the inter­na­tion­al press.

To our gen­er­al­ly pro-two-state del­e­ga­tion, he deliv­ers a 90-minute solil­o­quy about why a two-state solu­tion is not war­rant­ed and why Israel deserves to con­trol all land from the Jor­dan to the Mediterranean.

Dayan’s recount­ing of his­to­ry is cer­tain­ly unique. Accord­ing to him, only Jews have any his­toric claims to the land. In his view, a two-state solu­tion is nei­ther pos­si­ble nor desir­able. When asked if he there­fore favors a uni­fied state, he says, ​“of course not.” His rea­son­ing is that Jews won the 1967 war moral­ly — against the total­ly unjus­ti­fied quest of the Pales­tini­ans, the Jor­da­ni­ans and the Egyp­tians to ​“anni­hi­late Israel”— and thus the ter­ri­to­ry is theirs.

Final reflections

As I sit on the tar­mac in Tel Aviv in Novem­ber of 2013 wait­ing to go home, the plane delayed so that Sec­re­tary Kerry’s plane could take off, I reflect on the places, events and peo­ple I’ve encoun­tered through­out the week.

Ker­ry has been blunt in recent weeks about his impa­tience with the stag­nant peace talks (he trav­eled to the Mid­dle East twice in March to try to break the impasse, with­out suc­cess). But even in the fall, the Sec­re­tary of State end­ed his trip vent­ing frus­tra­tion about Israeli behav­ior, upset that in the mid­dle of nego­ti­a­tions, the Israelis announced their inten­tion to expand the set­tle­ments in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Mean­while, I end my trip think­ing about the path­way to peace in the region.

Actu­al­ly, ​“peace” is a rather strange word to use. For Israelis, peace has pret­ty much been at hand for quite some time. Despite high prices and hous­ing short­ages, life for most Israelis is good. The aver­age income is $32,000, and the con­struc­tion cranes ris­ing along the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem speak vol­umes about a robust and expand­ing econ­o­my. Israeli cit­i­zens have a nation­al health­care sys­tem and gen­er­ous fund­ing for high­er edu­ca­tion (in exchange for extend­ed mil­i­tary ser­vice).

Mean­while, in the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, the major­i­ty of land and resources are con­trolled by Israel. It is here that youth aged 15 – 29 make up 30 per­cent of the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion and face unem­ploy­ment as high as 36 percent.

Due to these dis­parate real­i­ties, many Israelis under­stand­ably feel no urgency to the sit­u­a­tion, though an increas­ing num­ber of pro­gres­sives are advo­cat­ing for a shift in the sta­tus quo. Yet it is clear that end­ing occu­pa­tion is essen­tial for build­ing a nation for Pales­tini­ans, for fos­ter­ing Israeli democ­ra­cy, and for pre­vent­ing an esca­la­tion of hos­til­i­ty in the region. Astute observers on both sides agree that the sit­u­a­tion is a time bomb — and dan­ger­ous for Israelis, who, as Ger­shom Goren­berg, a jour­nal­ist for The Amer­i­can Prospect, put it to our del­e­ga­tion, ​“sit sip­ping lattes on the edge of a volcano.”

This is part II of a two-part series. Read part I, ​“Two Decades After Oslo, A Look at Life in Israel and Pales­tine,” here.