Israel tried desperately, during the time I was reporting, to
circumvent the PLO by installing a quisling government apparatus throughout the West Bank, the "Village Leagues." It also began funding Hamas in the vain belief that a religious group would miraculously not work against colonial subjugation as did the PLO. Both ventures crashed, of course - the latter with the results we observe today in the extreme polarization of Palestinian political life.
On all my stays in the West Bank I personally witnessed the casual, daily humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints; the casual landscape and social scenery of apartheid (the most obvious and continual manifestations were the checkpoints with differing treatment of Palestinians on the one hand; Israeli Jews and internationals on the other, and the different color of license plates - blue for Palestinians, yellow for Israelis).
I interviewed villagers whose homes had been blown up and/or bulldozed by Israeli soldiers. I heard accounts by men and women jailed, abused, and tortured in Israel's prisons (on the subject of torture London's TIMES issued a well-documented report in the early 80s: the practice is an established fact acknowledged by Israel's B'tselem and foreign human rights organizations.
circumvent the PLO by installing a quisling government apparatus throughout the West Bank, the "Village Leagues." It also began funding Hamas in the vain belief that a religious group would miraculously not work against colonial subjugation as did the PLO. Both ventures crashed, of course - the latter with the results we observe today in the extreme polarization of Palestinian political life.
On all my stays in the West Bank I personally witnessed the casual, daily humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints; the casual landscape and social scenery of apartheid (the most obvious and continual manifestations were the checkpoints with differing treatment of Palestinians on the one hand; Israeli Jews and internationals on the other, and the different color of license plates - blue for Palestinians, yellow for Israelis).
I interviewed villagers whose homes had been blown up and/or bulldozed by Israeli soldiers. I heard accounts by men and women jailed, abused, and tortured in Israel's prisons (on the subject of torture London's TIMES issued a well-documented report in the early 80s: the practice is an established fact acknowledged by Israel's B'tselem and foreign human rights organizations.