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Israel and Palestinian Territories

If the Welsh people were treated in the way that I described, they might do that—I do not know. The only incorrect thing about my analogy is the size, because England is much larger than Israel. Wales is, in fact, exactly the same size as Israel, so if we wanted an analogy that was to scale, we would have imagine that most of the original population of Wales had been squashed into an area the size of the west bank and Gaza. It so happens that there is a county in Wales that is the same size as the west bank, Powys, and a city the same size as Gaza—Swansea. We could easily imagine all the original inhabitants of Wales being pushed into Powys and Swansea or crammed on to the Gower peninsula and into the mountains of Powys. We would then have to imagine the dominant power—let us leave aside who that might be—building 133 settlements in Powys, with another 100 unofficial outposts and a row of houses on the top of every hill or mountain in the Brecon Beacons. We would have to imagine that most of the roads had been taken over for the exclusive use of settler communities, with the Welsh confined to the mountain roads and the dirt tracks. We would have to imagine the settlements cutting so far into the Usk and Wye valleys that it would be impossible for Welsh people even to get from Brecon into Radnor or from Radnor into Montgomeryshire. What started as a single country would therefore end up divided into three almost completely separate blocks, and that is exactly what has happened in the west bank. It is almost impossible for Palestinians to travel between the separate parts of the west bank.