Mitchell's challenge By Sandy Tolan

1. What does the unending march of Israeli construction actually mean for a "viable, contiguous" Palestine?
The only way anyone can viscerally understand the thousand cuts inflicted on the two-state solution is by driving through the West Bank. I've crisscrossed this landscape a hundred times since 1994, and never has the hardware of settlements and Israeli military control been so dense. Since the beginning of the Oslo "peace process" in 1993, the West Bank Jewish settler population has jumped from 109,000 to 275,000 - and this doesn't include the Jewish "suburbs" in East Jerusalem, which bring the total settler population to nearly half a million. Some 230 settlements and strategically placed "outposts" are now strung along hilltops across the West Bank, towering above whitewashed Palestinian villages.

2. How can a viable Palestinian state exist when a city of 20,000 Israelis sits in the middle of it?
In 1978, Ariel, the city of Jewish settlers, was founded, over US and international objections, in the heart of the West Bank district of Salfit. Fully one-third of it juts onto Palestinian land. Israel's "security barrier" (known as the "apartheid wall" to Palestinians), which ostensibly follows Israel's border with the West Bank, in fact doesn't; at Ariel it veers east 17 kilometers to enfold the full settlement in its embrace. For this reason, Ariel's leaders say confidently that their settlement, essentially a bedroom community for Tel Aviv with its own university and industrial park, is "here to stay".