Israel may have won the battle of settling into the West Bank, but it has lost the war of making peace with the Palestinians.

"... After I left Sabri’s house, I drove back to Ramallah, riding through tunnels burrowed under the highways that connect Jewish settlements to the rest of Israel. There’s no escaping the new geography of this land, I thought.

And then another thought struck, perhaps one even bleaker. Israel may have won the battle of settling into the West Bank, but it has lost the war of making peace with its closest neighbors, the Palestinians. And they are Israel’s only hope of gaining acceptance in the Middle East."  RAJA SHEHADEH May 3, 2012

Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer and writer living in Ramallah, is the author of “A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle,” “2037: Le Grand Bouleversement” and “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,” which won the Orwell Prize in 2008.

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/israels-progress-with-settlements-in-the-west-bank-is-really-its-loss/

Sabri Garaib in the village of Beit Ijza, West Bank, in December 2009.Al Haq

 The House That Sabri Built

by Raja Shehadeh

BEIT IJZA, West Bank — One of the first statements under oath that I took for Al Haq, a human rights organization I helped establish, was from Sabri Garaib, a farmer from Beit Ijza, a Palestinian village ten miles northwest of Jerusalem. I remember sitting on the porch of his house overlooking the garden and the low, undulating hills planted with wheat and barley that spread out on all sides. All 112 acres, I was told, were in danger of being expropriated by the new Jewish settlement of Givon Hahadasha.

It was 1982. In the many years since then Sabri repeatedly fought the settlers in order to hold on to his land. He would go to the Military Objection Committee to counter claims challenging his ownership. He would appeal to the Israeli high court, using every recourse available. He would go to jail for fighting off settlers who tried to stop him from farming or for removing fences they’d put up. But the settlement kept growing all around his house, claiming his land one acre at a time.

Sabri died on April 18. He was 73. It had been several years since I’d gone to his house, and when I visited recently to pay my condolences to his family I was appalled by what I saw. The house was hemmed in on three sides, with only a few yards of space left for a garden between the house and a gigantic steel fence. To get to the front door, I had to pass through a metal gate that is operated from the army camp nearby and walk down a narrow walkway lined with more steel fencing.... READ MORE