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Source: Suggested Projects with the Participation of the Jewish Agency Settlement Department (1988) (emphasis added) terial coordination. 12 Precise spending on settlements, however, remains a dif‹cult subject to research. The 1978 WZO master plan for West Bank settlement construction understood the costs to be very major, predicting a cost of Israeli Lira (IL) 32 billion over ‹ve years, with an additional IL 22 billion to “thicken” existing settlements. Later independent assessments of actual spending have con‹rmed that the investment has been vast.

For all these reasons, it is in the West Bank that Palestinian nationalists most anxiously seek to preserve the territorial integrity necessary to sustain a coherent Palestinian social and political structure. And it is Jewish settlements in the West Bank that therefore comprise the most crucial and stubborn danger to viable Palestinian statehood, as they continue to grow, to absorb more land, and to break apart and erode what remains of Palestinian society and national life. The East Jerusalem settlers will not be withdrawn, and the Gaza Strip settlers almost certainly will be.

But as the Jewish settlement grid has greatly expanded, cutting across Palestin- THE IMMOVABLE OBJECT 27 Map 5. ) ian roads without access junctions and between villages so that travel between them is impossible, the Palestinian road grid has become increasingly dysfunctional. The grid has also taken control of West Bank water. Water is in short supply throughout the region and is, for Israel, a major security concern. Israeli water stations in the West Bank are surrounded by barricades of barbed wire and are under military control; no outside observer knows precisely how much they take, and the data is kept secret as a matter of state security.