"We are not going to leave this place. We will stay here forever in the middle of Samaria. There is no power in the world that can force us out."
—Israeli settler on the West Bank
Ten years ago this week, the Six-Day War erupted. In its most extraordinary military triumph, the Israeli army reunited the divided Holy City of Jerusalem, decisively defeated the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and occupied huge swatches of Arab land—the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
For all the Arabs in the occupied territories—but perhaps particularly for the 650,000 Palestinians on the West Bank—the decade since the '67 war has been a time of frustration, humiliation and resentment. Israeli troops still maintain law-and-order—often with brusque insensitivity—in their 2,270-sq.-mi. homeland of rolling hills and desert.
In many ways the occupation is as benevolent as an occupation can be. West Bank Arabs hold free municipal elections, their newspapers—although censored—are probably allowed more latitude than those in any Arab state, and their standard of living surpasses that of their cousins in Egypt, Syria or Lebanon. Yet even West Bankers who remember that they were also second-class citizens under Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967 remain bitterly opposed to their Israeli overlords. Says the Arab mayor of Nablus, Bassam Shaka'a: "If I could communicate with the world, I would shout 'We want our freedom! We want to feel like human beings! We want to live like other people!' "
Spit of Land. The West Bank Arabs fear that a decade of occupation could turn into permanent possession and continued encroachment by Jewish settlers. Since 1967, 45 communities (nine of them Jerusalem suburbs built on Arab land) have been created on the West Bank—in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1949, which states that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." To West Bankers, the settlements are not only permanent, but they are also designed to surround and isolate the major Arab centers of population. Example: in the Latrun finger, a spit of land that juts out between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Arab villages of Beit Nuba, Emmous and Yalu, with all their 1,800 houses, were bulldozed to the ground. East of the present Jerusalem-Nablus road, meanwhile, the Israelis are linking their major settlements overlooking the Jordan Valley with a new two-lane highway called the Allon Road (named for Israel's present Foreign Minister). The road clearly defines the West Bank areas that Israel intends to keep.