The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

She identifies a number of factors for this:
� “Israel today controls more than 80% of the water resources in
the West Bank, and allows Palestinian citizens to use no more than
(50) cubic meters per capita a year. At the same time, the illegal
Israeli settlers use more than 2400 cubic meters of water per year
per capita.
� The Israeli GDP per capita averages around $26,000 per year, while
the GDP per capita in Palestine is no more than $1000 per year.
Yet, due to the imposed market and tax union, Palestinians are
forced to pay the same prices for goods as Israelis. Palestinians
are also forced to buy water and electricity from Israel – at double
the price that Israeli citizens pay: Palestinians have to pay NIS 5
per water unit while Israelis pay NIS 2.4. Palestinians pay NIS 13
per unit of electricity, while Israelis pay NIS 6.3.
� The system of road segregation that has been initiated by Israel,
where most of the main roads in the West Bank are exclusively for
Israeli settlers or the Israeli army, separates Palestinian villages
and cities from each other, and restricts their access to different
places and resources.
� The building of the Apartheid Wall in the occupied territories. It is
a huge wall that will extend for about 850 km when finished. It is
three times as long and twice as high as Berlin Wall used to be.
And even when it is not a concrete wall, it is a fence system between
60 and 104 meters wide, depriving Palestinians of vast
areas of land. This wall destroys the Palestinian social fabric; it deprives
pupils and students of the possibility of reaching their schools
or universities and deprives hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
from reaching medical care or health systems. In East Jerusalem,
the wall separates the Palestinians on the right side of the wall
from those on the left side. Jerusalem itself is not accessible to
Palestinians living in the rest of the West Bank Areas.
� Colonial settlement activities: The Israelis started building these
settlements in the West Bank in the mid-1970s.”
(Report, p. 204-205).
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