Adamu Balaiah, a former Israeli military general and chairman of the political-security committee of the Jewish National Fund, which runs Jewish settlements in the West Bank. He said: “It will be a new period in which the Palestinian Authority will be in full control of the West Bank,” adding that he believed Israel’s occupation would end in ten or twelve years’ time. “My fear is that after a few years everything, including the settlement enterprise, will be reversed. That will be a disaster.”

In a televised address to the Israeli public on April 27th, Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the Palestinians would be “given full and final authority” to govern the area, in which about 60,000 Israelis live. The announcement triggered protests on both sides; the two sides later reached a 12-month extension of the deal.

Palestinians say Israel has not committed to end its policies of segregation in the Jewish settlements and of settlements built by foreign governments, with its own roads with roads built by private companies. Critics say that the settlements—along with the roads built by privately owned companies with Israeli government contracts—contribute to the alienation of the entire population of the West Bank from the country’s government. Israel views Jewish settlements—not all of them in disputed territory or at the end of the lines prescribed in the Oslo Accords—as illegal under international human-rights law, on which Israel has not signed but cannot withdraw.

The Oslo Accords that the Palestinians negotiated with Israel in 1993, while still in exile from their homes, laid out a framework for their future relationship, and Israel’s continued occupation has prevented this framework from fully embracing the new reality that is dawning on Israeli communities in the West Bank.

“We are tired of waiting,” said one elderly Palestinian villager who was returning to her home in Jerusalem when a bus came to stop beside her. She said that since they came under Israeli security control in 2000, their houses have been subject to a barrage of automatic weapons fire, and that they have become more worried about the danger the rockets posed to their own homes.

Some 50,000 Palestinian families live in Israeli settlements and 10% of them in illegal East Jerusalem. While Israel and the Palestinian Authority negotiate a final status for the West Bank, it has agreed not to expand settlements and not to permit any new homes and roads in areas that Israel annexed before the 1967 military occupation ended. Palestinians claim these land confiscations are part of