How settlements in the West Bank are creating a new reality, brick by brick

Continuing our series of exclusive reports, we look at how Israel's growing infrastructure in the region threatens not just the form but the very possibility of a future Palestinian state

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009

"......Instead, the Palestinians are confined to their fragmented urban areas, often behind checkpoints and where talk of a future contiguous, viable Palestinian state seems ever more remote. The effect of this political geography is so striking that even George Bush, who was perhaps the US president most supportive of Israel, was moved early last year to say of a future Palestine: "Swiss cheese isn't going to work when it comes to the outline of a state."

Others are more direct. In their study Lords of the Land, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, an Israeli academic and a journalist, write: "The Jewish settlement, at God's command and at the government's will, has thus caused continuing and extensive damage to the basic human rights of the Palestinians who live in the territories, among them the rights to personal liberty, freedom of movement, and property; it has also thwarted any possibility for the realisation of the collective rights of those who lived in the territory before the intrusion of the Israeli forces, such as the right to national self-determination, including statehood.""