Blair admits he is shocked by discrimination on the West Bank

Donald Macintyre in Hebron, The Independent, 13.10.07. Mr Blair is on the road, grappling with the mind-numbing complexities of how the physical security infrastructure of the occupation has squeezed the Palestinian economy. It is a theme reinforced for him in Hebron, the Palestinian city whose core was once the thriving commercial hub of the southern West Bank. Its mayor, Khaled Osaily, briefs him extensively about how much of its old city is boarded up, stripped of Palestinian life because of the presence of some 800 Jewish settlers, and their military protectors. e was shocked by what he was told about conditions in Hebron and diplomats say he was genuinely taken aback by his trip to the West Bank sector of the Jordan Valley – where Palestinians are allowed to dig wells only a third as deep as Israelis – at the exploitation of resources by the rich Jewish agricultural settlements at the expense of closed in Palestinian farmers. And he has been privately dismissive – rather more so perhaps than he was as Prime Minister – of the argument by some Israelis that security comes first, with economics and a political deal well behind it. "All three have to happen together" he has told diplomats – which is what he sees Annapolis as being about. Blair accepts in private that settlement expansion will soon make a Palestinian state unrealisable, increasing the urgency of a solution. But he is said to believe that Mr Olmert sees a two-state solution as necessary in Israel's interests and accepts time is short. He thinks the similarities with Northern Ireland are as great as the differences but since it irritates Israelis for him to say so, he doesn't.