1986 Report: Demographic, Economic, Legal, Social and Political Developments in the West Bank; Conflicts and Contradictions

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and now director of the nonofficial West Bank Data Base Project, presents the latest data (covering the 1984-85 period) on the situation in that territory, but he does not confine himself to statistics. His survey of political developments leads him into editorial comment and conclusions on the policies of Israel's major parties and leaders, on tension and violence between Arab and Israeli in the West Bank, and on the prospects for negotiated peace. Roughly the same conclusions appear in expanded form, with the author's reflections on the past and future, in Conflicts and Contradictions. A product of the traditional mainstream of Zionism but now a maverick, Benvenisti takes no comfort in the record of his own generation, the sons and daughters of the founders of Israel, and is coldly realistic-and therefore pessimistic-on the subject of Palestinian-Israeli relations, for which Labor, Likud and the Palestinian leadership all are assigned a large measure of responsibility.