Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

I was reporting in the Middle East recently and while I was there I spent a day driving around the West Bank with a couple of people who know it very well.

An Israeli peace activist named Jajuda Shaoul, and the American journalist Nathan Thraw.

For Ramala to Bethlehem, with no traffic for an Israeli Jew can be 35 minutes no traffic.

No traffic, of course, yeah, nothing.

Okay, for a Palestinian, you can't go through Jerusalem.

So you're taking this what's called Wadi NAR,

which is a terrible set of by, thin bypass roads

with hairpin turns, and you would go

all the way around like this to get to Bethlehem.

Two hours.

And it'll be two hours.

Whereas the Israelis just going to go straight through.

We weren't making small talk about the traffic.

In the West Bank, which road you're allowed to use,

where you're allowed to go, and what identification card you have.

These are just some of the aspects of the Israeli occupation,

the architecture of the occupation.

With the airstrikes from Hezbollah this week and the assassination of a Hamas leader in Iran, the war in Gaza,

threatens still to become an even wider regional conflict.

We're going to talk about one of the most intractable sources of this conflict, Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

The occupation began after the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza.

...