By SIMON COLLINS
From the shell of his bombed-out home in the West Bank town of Bayt Jala, Issa Mahmud Shananir can see the upmarket Jerusalem suburb of Gilo from which Israeli troops fire across the gully.
The scale is intimate. If Shananir shouted loudly enough, the Israelis on the facing bank could probably hear him.
The whole of the West Bank is only 170km from north to south, about as far as from Warkworth to Te Kauwhata, and about as wide as this part of New Zealand.
About 1.6 million Palestinians live in this area, in densely packed hillside towns such as Bayt Jala and Hebron, earning average net wages of $36 a day making shoes, glassware and the like in small workshops on the ground floors of their white concrete houses.
Most of the time, the guns are silent. Boys kick footballs in the hot streets, oblivious to the bullet holes in the walls behind them. This is a Muslim country, and the girls stay indoors.
On the stony hills, shepherds look after flocks of scrawny sheep. In the valleys, you can see men holding down wooden ploughs pulled by mules, a scene unchanged since Biblical times.
Yet if you look up to the horizon, almost everywhere in the West Bank you can now see high-rise Jewish "settlements." A "settlement" sounds like a village, but these "settlements" are cities of multi-storey apartment blocks, guarded from the surrounding Palestinians by barbed wire fences and the Israeli Army.
There are 230 of them spread strategically from top to bottom of the West Bank, housing 180,000 people.
Every day, most of the workers living in them commute to Jerusalem, Israel's high-tech modern capital right in the middle of the West Bank.
Only cars with Israeli number plates are allowed on to the gleaming motorway which carries them across the gullies in which the Palestinians live and through a multimillion-dollar tunnel into Jerusalem.
From the Palestinian villages, the motorway looks like another world. The Israelis who drive on it have a national average income of $43,000 a head, slightly higher than New Zealand's.
These days the smaller country roads, to which vehicles with Palestinian number plates are confined, are blocked at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers - mostly school-leavers aged 18 to 21 doing their national service.
Since Palestine's uprising, or intifada, began last September, the 200,000 Palestinians who also used to commute to work in Israel have been barred in case they turn out to be suicide bombers.
In Bayt Jala, a young boy died in the same shelling which destroyed Issa Mahmud Shananir's home. A large portrait of the boy hangs on the front wall of his house. Neighbours point out his father in the street: "the father of the martyr."
Unemployed, cooped up and overwhelmingly outgunned by the far richer Israelis, the people of the West Bank are growing desperate. Peace looks far away.
Feature: Middle East
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UN: Information on the Question of Palestine
Israel's Permanent Mission to the UN
Palestine's Permanent Observer Mission to the UN
Middle East Daily
Arabic News
Arabic Media Internet Network
Jerusalem Post
Israel Wire
US Department of State - Middle East Peace Process
Life on the Middle East frontline
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