Virginia Tilley

‘When we have settled the land,’ Rafael Eitan, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, said in 1983, ‘all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.’ Over twenty years later, the Palestinians are struggling to consolidate a genuinely representative Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority and to...

“’Settlement’ suggests a few hill-top caravans defended by zealots, but what we have is a massive grid of towns penetrating deep into the West Bank and Gaza and now housing some 200,000 people . . . tens of thousands of homes and apartments are served by schools, shopping malls, theatres and arts centres, connected by major highways, elaborate water and electricity supplies, dykes, walls, perimeter fences and surveillance systems.”