Those settlements: Seeing as it is on the ground

We always read about the Israeli settlements in the West Bank - in reality not a rag-tag of homes or caravans - but Peace Now, an Israeli peace group, decided to go up in a plane and take photographs of how those settlements actually look like on the ground.

The New York Times reports:

"Local leaders often take visitors to Jewish settlements occupying the high ground of the northern West Bank to lookout points from where, on a clear day, they can see the glass towers of Tel Aviv, the shimmering waters of the Mediterranean and the contours of Israel’s heavily populated coastal plain.

The aim is to underline the strategic dangers that the leaders say would be inherent in any Israeli withdrawal from the area to make way for a Palestinian state.

In an effort to illustrate the other side of the argument, Peace Now, the leftist Israeli group that advocates a two-state solution and monitors settlement activity, took a planeload of Israeli members of Parliament, reporters and photographers on an aerial tour of the northern West Bank on Monday.

The group’s goal was to give a bird’s-eye view of the growth of the settlements and outposts across the hilltops, and to argue that if the settlements do not stop spreading, the land between the Jordan River and the sea will soon become indivisible for all practical purposes, and the two-state option will cease to exist.

“The point,” Peace Now’s secretary general, Yariv Oppenheimer, said over the plane’s public address system, “is to see how the reality has changed and how the binational state is getting closer.”

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