This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control established and maintained by force of arms--in defiance of international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague--have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.

The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as the colonial world ("a world cut in two") famously described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, Fanon's 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful and relevant in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it made available when it was first published.

Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West Bank, for example: one for the territory's immigrant population of Jewish settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian) population.

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