Everyday Israel proves that it never withdrew from the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that it has no troops or settlers there.
Everyday Israel proves that the most important thing for it is to keep the life of every Palestinian in its control.
What you see is not what Palestinians get. What is declared to the media and what is said in documents is not what really happens on the ground.
Israel gained a great amount of praise from the international community and lots of money from the United States of America for the implementation of the unilateral disengagement plan from the Gaza Strip.
The 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are controlled now by few soldiers on Erez, Karni, Kerem Shalom crossing points and International observers on Rafah crossing with Egypt who implement an agreement set as Israel was preparing to leave the Gaza Strip in 2005. By doing so, Israel does not anymore need to spend millions of dollars for a military presence in the Strip or loose Israeli soldiers in fights with the Palestinian resistance groups.
In addition, to the praise and the savings, Israel won an American recognition for the current route of the annexation which will confiscate almost 50 percent of the West Bank, in addition, Israel won a U.S. recognition of is plan to annex a number of huge settlements to Israel which will contribute to the shrink of the West Bank.
In addition to the above mentioned achievements, Israel also achieved U.S. support in eliminating the Right of Return for the Palestinian refugees.
All the above, contributed to canceling the option of two states as a solution to the conflict.
There can be no way for a viable Palestinian state to be established on scattered pieces of land, with minimal contiguity confined inside Israel.
The Unilateral Disengagement from the Gaza Strip is a pilot project, after which the experiment will be implemented on the West Bank.
The West Bank will become a bigger Gaza Strip. Israel will have full control over entry and exit of everything, including humans and goods and money.
The new Israeli party, who won the latest parliamentary elections Kadima, is planning to evacuate tens of thousands of settlers from the West Bank and move them into Israel. This is the image in the media now. In fact, very few people examined actual meaning of moving the settlers into Israel.
Israel will receive more praise and applause for this step.
Some 20,000 settlers live in Ariel where as more than 30,000 settlers live in Maale Adumim in the Jordan Valley, and 20,000 settlers live in Gush Etzion south of Bethlehem. Annexing these three settlements into Israel will "technically" move 70,000 settlers into Israel however in fact; more Palestinian land will be confiscated in Israel.
Each of the above mentioned settlements has several satellite settlements around it, with a population that varies between few hundreds to few thousands of settlers.
Overall, there are currently almost 400,000 settlers in the West Bank including 250,000 in Jerusalem alone.
The 250 thousand settlers in Jerusalem are not included in Israel’s definition of settlements.
Israel managed to double the number of settlers and almost triple the areas occupied by settlement during the peace process, and the implementation of Oslo accords.
Statistics done by the applied research Institute about settlements indicate that 85 percent of the settlement activity in the West Bank since 1967 took place between 1996 – 2001.
Following his meeting with the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on April 14 2004, U.S. president George Bush publicly endorsed Israeli annexation of West Bank settlements, writing in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Sharon: "in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
In other words, the major settlement blocs mentioned earlier will be annexed into Israel under any final statement with the Palestinians.
As time passes, the Palestinian land shrinks, and Palestinians increase. To achieve stability, Palestinians need to either gain more land or leave. Therefore, if Palestinian come to understand that they can not take their land back, at some point leaving will be the only option for many.
