By Dan Connell and Angela Matheson
JEBEL MUKABER, Occupied West Bank: A convoy of 15 Israeli vehicles recently drove into this small Palestinian village and stopped in front of the newly constructed house of Anwar Kalil. Within minutes, two bulldozers reduced Kalil's home to a pile of twisted steel and concrete rubble.
Kalil's crime was failing to have a building permit. The 25-year-old unemployed construction worker had applied for one but was turned down. Now he is living next door with his wife and four small children in his mother's one-room house.
The Israelis may be at the negotiating table with the Palestinians at the Middle East peace talks in Washington, but in the occupied territories it is business as usual.
Israeli authorities have demolished more than 150 Palestinian houses in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, shot dead seven Palestinians and injured 93 others, and slapped another three-month closure order on the Birzeit University since the peace talks began in Madrid in October, according to the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, a human rights monitoring organisation which compiles detailed records of each incident. More than 100 Palestinian houses have been sealed or demolished for alleged, but unproven, "security" violations.
The growing repression is apparently part of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's strategy of stonewalling the peace talks by removing any remaining Palestinian patience with the stalled negotiating process.
Thousands of new buildings designed for Israeli settlers are popping up throughout the Palestinian territories. Human rights workers argue that this is part of a complex Israeli strategy to transform the demography of the region so that the creation of a separate Palestinian state will become impossible. This process has accelerated as peace talks continue.
The result of this burst of Israeli settlement has been to further entrench a South Africa-style bantustan, crowded with impoverished Palestinians who have neither economic nor political prospects apart from serving the Israelis in menial, low-paid jobs.
Billions of dollars in US loan guarantees for new Israeli housing — whether or not the money is specifically targeted to the Palestinian territories — can only accelerate this process.
The colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza is now accelerating more rapidly than ever before. Since the end of the Gulf War, the Israelis have initiated four new settlements, elevated one existing settlement to the status of an Israeli city, taken control of 25,000 acres of Palestinian land and started building 17 new highways.
This brings the total number of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories seized since 1967 to almost 200. There are now almost a quarter of a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the Gaza strip and East Jerusalem. At the present rate of growth, the total could he next year.
Driving through the West Bank and Gaza on the network of newly constructed highways that link the Jewish settlements with each other and with Israel proper, a visitor is hardly aware of the Palestinian villages and towns, which are almost entirely hidden from view. One could easily get the impression that there are only a handful of Palestinians left here.
In fact, the design of the settlements, constructed in a complex grid, serves to divide Palestinian communities from the outside. This is turning them into tightly enclosed ghettos, clustered around the towns of Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron and Gaza City. Two entirely distinct societies increasingly overlap each other.
There are two different and vastly unequal economies, policies and judicial structures — one for the Israeli settlers and one for the Palestinians. Both are controlled by the Israelis.
Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza are governed under Israeli law, vote in Israeli elections, and receive all the benefits and services of Israeli citizens. Palestinians in the occupied territories are governed under an agglomeration of Turkish, British mandate and Jordanian laws, together with hundreds of draconian Israeli military decrees. These are applied by the Israeli military authorities as they see fit, with no appeal to Israeli courts.
Palestinians are not even classified as citizens in the land of their birth — instead they are "residents" whose right to live there can be revoked at will by the occupation authorities.
While Israeli officials claim to lack funds to build sufficient housing for the new immigrants who choose to live in Israel proper, they continue to pour massive subsidies into new housing in the occupied zones. Developers are still offering free land, prefabricated houses are sold at as low as one-sixth their cost, and mortgages are offered at no or low interest, while settlers are given a 7% reduction in income tax.
The Israeli government is colonising the West Bank and Gaza at great cost to its own economy. And although the US government is taking much of the credit for bringing the Israelis to the negotiating table, its continuing and unparalleled flow of aid to Israel makes a just and lasting peace settlement unlikely.
The Palestinian team in Washington has raised the issue of repression at the talks. But for now, Palestinians living under Israeli rule seem to have little choice but to bear the increasing brutality.