With the Unit­ed States-insti­gat­ed Israeli-Pales­tin­ian talks begin­ning to col­lapse, pun­dits left and right are rec­om­mend­ing that rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all three nations with­draw from the efforts before the sit­u­a­tion wors­ens further.

'Occupation is not a concept. It is a reality that circumscribes and limits the action and the lives of every Palestinian each and every day.'

I have to disagree.

The dra­ma of board­room nego­ti­a­tions may have dom­i­nat­ed front-page real estate. But Israel’s con­tin­ued occu­pa­tion of the West Bank has con­se­quences regard­less of lead­ers’ next moves — to the lives and liveli­hood of Pales­tini­ans, to Israel’s abil­i­ty to be ​“of the Mid­dle East” and a ​“Jew­ish, demo­c­ra­t­ic state,” and to Amer­i­ca. And these costs won’t just emerge in future con­flicts; they also affect our cur­rent polit­i­cal processes.

What fol­lows is Part 1 of a two-part series chron­i­cling the places and peo­ple I encoun­tered while in the Mid­dle East this past Octo­ber, a time when the talks were in full swing. While I was there, I saw first­hand how occu­pa­tion impacts the lives of Pales­tini­ans who live on both sides of the Green Line, and why arriv­ing at a peace­ful agree­ment between the two is both so dif­fi­cult and so necessary.

When I arrived in Israel, I was delight­ed by the 70-degree weath­er; ini­tial­ly, only the pres­ence of machine-gun armed sol­diers out­side the air­port remind­ed me of the dark­er real­i­ties behind this sun-kissed coun­try. Rather than tak­ing a cab, I decid­ed I would trav­el into Jerusalem via ​“sherut,” a shut­tle bus that will take any­one from the air­port to any door in Jerusalem.

Well, almost any door. Accord­ing to friends and some NGOs in the region, if you are a res­i­dent of one of Jerusalem’s Pales­tin­ian areas, dri­vers will take you only to the edge of your neigh­bor­hood — remind­ing me of what it used to be like in my home­town of Chica­go before it became ille­gal for cab dri­vers to refuse to take peo­ple to pre­dom­i­nant­ly African-Amer­i­can neighborhoods.

The heart of the city

The heart of Jerusalem is the Old City, the 225-acre walled area in East Jerusalem that has exist­ed for mil­len­nia and has been at the cen­ter of strife for near­ly that long. The Old City itself is unof­fi­cial­ly divid­ed into quad­rants among Jews, Chris­tians, Mus­lims, and Arme­ni­ans. Out­side its bor­ders, the rest of East Jerusalem is pri­mar­i­ly occu­pied by the major­i­ty of the city’s Pales­tini­ans, both Mus­lim and Chris­t­ian, whose fam­i­lies have lived there for hun­dreds of years. Mean­while, the major­i­ty of the city’s Jews live in West Jerusalem; though they immi­grat­ed to Israel in small groups over many cen­turies, most arrived in droves as first the rise of anti-Semi­tism and then the hor­rors of the Holo­caust drove them from Europe.

Pri­or to the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the city was undi­vid­ed. When par­ti­tion began in 1948, Jor­dan con­trolled the entire Old City, East Jerusalem and the West Bank; Israel con­trolled all of the city to the west. After Israel won the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, how­ev­er, the Israelis annexed East Jerusalem, includ­ing the Old City and an addi­tion­al 70 square kilo­me­ters of land where 28 Pales­tin­ian vil­lages were located.

Imme­di­ate­ly after its takeover, Israel con­duct­ed a cen­sus. All non-Jews present in Jerusalem at the time were grant­ed ​“per­ma­nent res­i­dent sta­tus.” Those who were not in the city at the time for any rea­son were for­ev­er pro­hib­it­ed from return­ing as res­i­dents. Deeds, sur­veys and prop­er­ty maps were dis­re­gard­ed and destroyed; the prop­er­ty of the absent non-Jew­ish inhab­i­tants was con­fis­cat­ed, no mat­ter how many hun­dreds of years they may have lived there or owned their homes. Non-Jew­ish res­i­dents were offered full Israeli cit­i­zen­ship if they had some knowl­edge of Hebrew and would swear loy­al­ty to the State. Few took the offer.

Today, the near­ly 400,000 ​“per­ma­nent res­i­dents” of Jerusalem — most of them descen­dants of the orig­i­nal non-Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion—can­not vote in nation­al elec­tions and have no pass­ports. They are severe­ly restrict­ed in their move­ments and even in their access to some gov­ern­ment ser­vices that Jew­ish res­i­dents take for granted.

Ground zero

Look­ing east from the bal­cony of my hotel room in West Jerusalem, I saw a vast swath of large­ly unde­vel­oped land to the east and won­dered what it could be. A few days lat­er, on a trip to East Jerusalem with long-time attor­ney and activist Dan­ny Sei­d­man, I found out. It is ​“E1”, the area much-dis­cussed in 2013 as the lat­est Israeli set­tle­ment bat­tle­ground. While read­ing reports about E1, I had imag­ined a small region amid the jam-packed neigh­bor­hoods of East Jerusalem. In fact, E1 spans five square miles — and it is home to 20 Bedouin com­mu­ni­ties that have been there for decades.

If the land is con­fis­cat­ed by the Israeli gov­ern­ment, E1 will cre­ate an East-West cor­ri­dor through the West Bank that would sev­er the con­nec­tions between East Jerusalem’s near­ly 400,000 Pales­tin­ian res­i­dents and the more than 2 mil­lion Pales­tin­ian res­i­dents of the vil­lages and cities of the West Bank.

Though it is an impor­tant and explo­sive flash point, E1 is sim­ply the lat­est focal point of skir­mish in the bat­tle for Jerusalem and its cen­ter: the Old City of East Jerusalem.

A walk through the Old City’s Mus­lim Quar­ter brought home the full impact of the con­flict. Accom­pa­nied by new friends — a Pales­tin­ian woman and a Euro­pean human rights work­er — I ascend­ed dim­ly lit stairs to the rooftop of an ancient build­ing just across from the Tem­ple Mount. Until recent­ly, a house sat on the roof, built by the fam­i­ly that have owned and occu­pied the build­ing for more than 500 years. Var­i­ous fam­i­ly mem­bers live on the first, sec­ond and third floors of the build­ing. The rooftop house, con­struct­ed of rough stones, was built to accom­mo­date a daugh­ter, her hus­band and chil­dren. How­ev­er, last sum­mer the Israeli Defense Force demand­ed that the own­ers destroy the house because it had been built ​“with­out a per­mit.” With­out the funds to fight the order, the fam­i­ly tore down the house. There have been more than 800 such demo­li­tions in East Jerusalem alone.

One might think that the gov­ern­ment is jus­ti­fied for demand­ing demo­li­tion of a struc­ture with­out a per­mit, but the sit­u­a­tion is more com­plex. For a Pales­tin­ian, get­ting a build­ing per­mit is near­ly impos­si­ble: Approval, which is rare, can take five to 10 years. And though about 40 per­cent of Jerusalem’s pop­u­la­tion is Pales­tin­ian, only 8 per­cent of the city’s hous­es have been des­ig­nat­ed for Pales­tin­ian hous­ing. Mean­while, almost all of Jew­ish Israelis’ per­mit appli­ca­tions have been approved for the thou­sands of hous­es they’ve con­struct­ed in this his­toric Mus­lim area over the last decade.

My guides say that the build­ing per­mit issue is part of a plan to ​“Judaize” East Jerusalem in order to thwart the cre­ation of a viable Pales­tin­ian state.

As we looked out from the rooftop to the sur­round­ing streets, the suc­cess of the Israeli strat­e­gy was obvi­ous. In every direc­tion we saw scores of build­ings with Israeli flags fly­ing above their roofs. These are the new­ly per­mit­ted ​“set­tle­ments”: Sin­gle build­ings, or even rooms, that Israelis have ​“cap­tured” through sale or by just mov­ing in when an occu­pant is not home and build­ing onto the struc­ture. After the ​“set­tle­ment” is cre­at­ed, an IDF pres­ence fol­lows to ​“pro­tect” the set­tlers, there­by cre­at­ing anoth­er mil­i­tary out­post in a his­tor­i­cal­ly Arab community.

Not a Pales­tin­ian in sight

You can tell it is Tel Aviv, because there is far less diver­si­ty here than in Jerusalem.

Tel Aviv, an hour’s dri­ve from Jerusalem, is a Mediter­ranean sea­side town. Its seashore is lined with high-end hotels, its boule­vards with trees. The city’s econ­o­my is fueled by con­struc­tion of gov­ern­ment build­ings and Israel’s grow­ing high-tech indus­try.

Tel Aviv is actu­al­ly Tel Aviv-Jaf­fa. In 1950, Tel Aviv uni­lat­er­al­ly annexed Jaf­fa after near­ly 65,000 Arabs fled the city dur­ing the armed con­flict of 1948. The 4,000 Pales­tini­ans who stayed were ​“relo­cat­ed” to Jaffa’s Aja­mi and Jabali­ah neigh­bor­hoods. Israel then con­fis­cat­ed all the ​“aban­doned” prop­er­ties and made them ​“prop­er­ties of the state.” Those in Aja­mi were grant­ed ​“cit­i­zen­ship” but lived under mil­i­tary rule until 1966.

Today, Tel Aviv is a city of more than 400,000, with a pop­u­la­tion that is 92 per­cent Jew­ish-Israeli. Vir­tu­al­ly all Pales­tin­ian res­i­dents live in Jaf­fa, thanks to the pro­hib­i­tive­ly high prices else­where in the city. Until a decade ago, friends tell me, hun­dreds of thou­sands of West Bank res­i­dents went to the beach in Tel Aviv, went to school there and worked there. Now, it is a city where they are nev­er seen. In fact, it is pos­si­ble to live in Tel Aviv and nev­er inter­act with a Pales­tin­ian, except while doing mil­i­tary service.

No ​ ‘ lit­tle hous­es on the prairie’

On my first trip to Israel in 2000, the West Bank looked and felt quite dif­fer­ent. Then there were about 200,000 Jew­ish-Israeli ​“set­tlers”; today there are more than 300,000.

The set­tlers’ red-roofed hous­es and con­crete tow­ers now dom­i­nate the land­scape from Jerusalem to Ramal­lah, extend­ing North to Nablus, east to Jeri­cho, south to Hebron and West to Tulkarem.

These are not ​“lit­tle hous­es on the prairie.” Rather, they are instal­la­tions built to house any­where from 500 to more than 30,000 peo­ple, built in fla­grant vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al and some­times even Israeli law.

What­ev­er their ori­gin, as the set­tle­ments grow, so does the impact of occu­pa­tion. For exam­ple, though all avail­able water is drawn from the aquifer below the West Bank itself, it is con­trolled sole­ly by Israel. Israelis receive 80 per­cent of the water from the West Bank, while neigh­bor­ing Pales­tin­ian vil­lages receive only 20 per­cent, depriv­ing the lat­ter of a resource essen­tial for both dai­ly activ­i­ties and for nur­tur­ing the olive groves that have been the lifeblood of their com­mu­ni­ties for centuries.

And while vil­lage chil­dren are arrest­ed en masse (and some­times killed) for throw­ing stones, the UN reports that set­tlers rarely face any con­se­quences for actions like burn­ing their Pales­tin­ian neigh­bors’ olive trees.

Thus, the Pales­tini­ans I met see set­tle­ments as part of a strat­e­gy to divide their peo­ple, forc­ing them into areas that can­not sup­port them or their fam­i­lies. When I met with pro­gres­sive Jew­ish-Israeli lead­ers lat­er in the week, many agreed that the set­tle­ments could be seen as move­ment by the gov­ern­ment to slow­ly encir­cle Pales­tin­ian hold­ings with Israeli land.

What the future could be

Rawabi is a new city being con­struct­ed in the West Bank by and for Palestinians.

Find­ing an Israeli-Pales­tin­ian dri­ver will­ing to do so, I crossed from Israel by check­point into the West Bank. Halfway between Ramal­lah and Nablus we left the dry desert floor and climbed into the hills, cov­ered by sur­pris­ing­ly lush green pines and olive trees. About five miles lat­er I saw a sight that moved me: a Pales­tin­ian flag atop a mountain.

As we drew clos­er I saw two mod­ern mid-rise build­ings. This was Phase I of Rawabi, the first entire­ly new city to be built in the West Bank — and one built almost exclu­sive­ly with Pales­tin­ian labor and Pales­tin­ian and Qatari money.

The two build­ings I saw will soon house 1,000 fam­i­lies on either side of an expan­sive plaza anchored by a retail and com­mer­cial cen­ter under con­struc­tion. Walk­ing on the site, I peered down the hill­side, see­ing the out­lines of a 20,000 – seat amphithe­ater that is being carved into the side of the moun­tain on which the city sits. To my left three schools were under con­struc­tion; to my right I saw the cor­ner­stones of both a mosque and a church.

Planned for an even­tu­al pop­u­la­tion of 40,000, the first homes in Rawabi have been sold. This year, devel­op­ers tell me, the first 3,000 peo­ple will move in. It is a bold endeav­or with great impact already. Rawabi cor­po­ra­tion is the larges t pri­vate employ­er in the West Bank. All con­struc­tion work and prepa­ra­tion is done on site. Pales­tini­ans quar­ry and cut the stone, and mix the cement. All engi­neer­ing, archi­tec­tur­al staff and builders are Pales­tini­ans, and when Euro­pean exper­tise is need­ed, the con­sul­tants are paired with Pales­tini­ans to ensure knowl­edge trans­fer. The devel­op­ers esti­mate that 8,000 peo­ple will be employed in the con­struc­tion of Rawabi; one-third of its engi­neers are women.

The devel­op­ment, how­ev­er, is not free from the bur­den of occu­pa­tion. There have been con­tin­u­ous bat­tles over access for deliv­er­ies on the Israeli-con­trolled road, and know­ing that Israel could cut off the sup­plies of steel or oth­er need­ed goods at any time, most build­ing mate­ri­als must be cre­at­ed or kept onsite.

The cur­rent bat­tles are about water and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. The Israeli gov­ern­ment has yet to allow Rawabi access to the water it con­trols. Sim­i­lar­ly, while Rawabi’s future as a com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial hub will depend on whether they have 4G Inter­net ser­vice, Israel has not allowed any part of the West Bank to have it.

For Bashar Mas­ri, the entre­pre­neur behind the project, Rawabi is about cre­at­ing a sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ty in the desert and about nation-build­ing — about thriv­ing in the midst of oppres­sion, about demon­strat­ing capac­i­ty and cre­at­ing eco­nom­ic opportunity.

Vet­er­ans of stone-throw­ing and prison them­selves, Rawabi’s devel­op­ers assert that they are cre­at­ing a new path, one that chal­lenges the occu­pa­tion at every step.

Lat­er that day, a Pales­tin­ian friend explained to me, ​“Occu­pa­tion is not a con­cept. It is a real­i­ty that cir­cum­scribes and lim­its the action and the lives of every Pales­tin­ian each and every day. Forms of resis­tance may vary, but every act — whether it be a stone thrown out of bore­dom or des­per­a­tion or a build­ing … built despite the Kafkaesque bar­ri­ers put in its way — is real, per­va­sive and indica­tive of a peo­ple which plans and hopes are not to die as mar­tyrs but to live, pros­per and build a nation in the process.”

This is occu­pa­tion — and Rawabi is one more com­pelling rea­son to end it.