In this sense (although the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice would, despite Oslo and subsequent agreements, reaffirm Israel's status as occupying power with all the responsibilities for the occupied population that are specified in the key documents of international humanitarian law), the Oslo agreements were designed in part to relieve Israel of many of the burdens of occupation-- as well as the need to police a restive population on a daily basis.

The Palestinian leadership failed disastrously by not coming up with an alternative to the U.S.-Israeli position at Camp David and subsequent negotiations through the end of the Clinton presidency. It also failed by not explaining what was wrong with the terms being negotiated at Camp David, and how the whole process, from Oslo on, represented the subordination of international law to Israeli demands.

. . . published the Road Map to Peace. The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out, "is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resource, and institutions.

What draws me to Palestine, then, is neither nationalism not patriotism, but my sense of justice, my refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, my unwillingness to just go on living my life -- and enjoying the privileges of a tenured university professor – while trying to block out and ignore what Wordsworth once called the still, sad music of humanity.

Israel maintains its pressure on the Palestinian population not simply for its own security, then, but because such pressure has for four decades enabled it to maintain control over the territories- and, quite simply, because it encourages Palestinians to leave.

But the main thing I learned from the war was that war is unjust, no matter who is pulling the trigger, and that, as my parents taught me, we owe it to each other as human beings to speak out against injustice.

Apart from the question of fatigue, this soldier is convinced that the only function of his checkpoint is "to put pressure on the Palestinian population. Officers explicitly told me that the checkpoint has no security value and was meant to harass the population." Another soldier agrees. "The idea is to make life hard for the Palestinian citizenry. There is no operational objective.