Published: 12 July 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ONE AFTERNOON in the spring of 2015, a senior State Department official named Frank Lowenstein paged through a government briefing book and noticed a map that he had never seen before. Lowenstein was the Obama Administration’s special envoy on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, a position that exposed him to hundreds of maps of the West Bank. (One adorned his State Department office.)
Typically, those maps made Jewish settlements and outposts look tiny compared to the areas where the Palestinians lived. The new map in the briefing book was different. It showed large swathes of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the settlements and the outposts.
At that moment, Lowenstein told me, he saw “the forest for the trees”—not only were Palestinian population centres cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained.
Lowenstein’s team did the maths. When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts, and the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated, they covered almost 60 per cent of the West Bank.
Lowenstein showed the small map to Secretary of State John Kerry and said, “Look what’s really going on here.” Kerry brought the map to his next meeting with President Obama.
FULL STORY The maps of Israeli settlements that shocked Barack Obama (New Yorker)
AND SEE
State funds being used to build up illegal outposts, auditor charges (Times of Israel)
Settlement council, ministries and KKL-JNF are bankrolling construction in wildcat communities, even after Civil Administration issues stop-work orders, according to comptroller
Image: A State Department map shows Palestinian population centres in the West Bank (New Yorker)