As Kerry talks peace, Israeli settlers dispossess Palestinians

Traveling through the West Bank, we observed the extent to which the map of "Eretz Israel" — the Greater Israel of biblical Judea and Samaria that religious settlers claim as a divine right — has been imposed on Palestinian land.

Throughout this landlocked territory, Palestinians are now corralled into small enclaves by walls and watchtowers, military checkpoints, a road system that bisects their land but is off-limits to them, closed military zones and omnipresent fortress-like settlements that glower over the rural landscape.

Road signage points the way to settlements, where construction was up 70 percent in the first six months of 2013 according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlement activity in the area. The signage omits references to Palestinian villages that remain an obstacle to the full realization of the "Eretz Israel" vision.

Settlements have all but erased the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank and stake out Israel's claim to the water-rich Jordan Valley, where Palestinian freedom of movement is severely restricted. The wall that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to build along the border with Jordan will set in stone the message delivered to our delegation on Nov. 6 by David Wilder, a spokesman for settlers in the city of Hebron: "There will never be a Palestinian state."

Most Israelis we met on this trip were either isolated from or indifferent to the forced displacement of Palestinians that is being deployed with an unyielding sense of impunity. Exceptions are those Israeli activists who take part in weekly nonviolent demonstrations against land confiscation in scores of West Bank villages. 

Two days before we met Iyad Burnat, a Palestinian activist who was featured in his brother's Oscar-nominated film, "5 Broken Cameras," he had been shot with rubber-coated steel bullets by Israeli soldiers. Burnat recounted the violent repression of demonstrations in Bil'in — a small village east of the Green Line near the West Bank wall — during the nine-year struggle to save it from Israel's separation wall, the barrier that cuts deeply into the West Bank and, at 270 miles long, is now 60 percent complete. His story brought to mind a similar state repression closer to home.

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers cracked down heavily on demonstrators marching for voting rights across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. The violence unleashed against the Selma marchers on the day that became known as Bloody Sunday was televised across the nation, shocking the conscience of the American people. It proved a tuning point in the civil rights movement.

But such a turning point is nowhere on the horizon for Israelis, who have been insulated from and remain largely indifferent to the intensity of repression in the West Bank. The brutal suppression of nonviolent protests in Bil'in has caused no shock to the conscience, despite occurring nearly every week for nine years.

Nor has the escalating number of house demolitions. While our delegation was in East Jerusalem — home to 300,000 Palestinians — demolition orders were placed on 200 apartment buildings in the neighborhood of Ras Khamis, each containing 40 to 70 apartments. Their destruction, typically carried out after only a 10-minute warning, will force some 15,000 Palestinians to leave Jerusalem.

Three hundred and fifty settlers are now embedded in the heart of the once thriving Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan on the slopes of East Jerusalem's Old City. There, some 90 homes have been issued demolition orders to prepare the ground for an enlarged City of David theme park.

Jawad Siyam, a Silwan resident with a demolition order on his home, has been arrested 41 times in the last four years for complaining about the settlers. Siyam quoted Israeli attorney Danny Seidemann as saying, "There is no law. There are only settlers." Seidemann's organization Terrestrial Jerusalem tracks developments in the city that undermine efforts to achieve peace.

The dispossession agenda also plays out in rural areas, where settlers vandalize Palestinian homes and olive groves and attack farmers in their fields, often as Israeli soldiers stand by. More than 7,500 olive trees have been destroyed by settlers so far this year, depriving many Palestinian families of their only source of income and eventually forcing them to leave their land.

Thousands of Palestinian farmers have also lost their livelihoods to the $3 billion separation wall. Many have been denied visitor permits to pass through locked gates to access their fields and sources of water that lie beyond the wall. Some have permits, but the locked gates are never opened.

The daunting web of restrictions they face has forced many West Bank Palestinians to leave their homes in a below-the-radar form of gradual ethnic cleansing that has been called the invisible transfer.

The American people must realize that we are responsible for allowing our government to underwrite Israel's territorial ambitions, at an unprecedented financial and terrible human cost. We must tell our elected representatives that we do not want them to serve the interests of an expansionist Israel and insist that Kerry frame negotiations in terms of international law under which the settlements are illegal, not just "illegitimate," as he has termed them.

The Obama administration should follow the example of President George H.W. Bush, who in September 1991 made a $10 billion loan-guarantee package to Israel contingent on a settlement freeze. By publicly proclaiming peace as a U.S. foreign policy objective, the directive all but silenced pro-Israel supporters in Congress.

The U.S. should once again use its considerable leverage to demand a halt to settlement construction. But this time, there should be no relenting on the settlement issue, as there was in 1992 with a change of government in Israel.

If there is to be any hope of a just solution that most Israelis and Palestinians can live with, the U.S. government must stop using its Security Council veto power to shield Israel from international censure, embrace relevant international laws and follow through with its commitments.