Descending east from Jerusalem into the Rift Valley, the landscape turns decidedly hostile, and that's just the start of it.
The Number 1 freeway first arcs up from the Holy City's eastern flank towards the Mount of Olives before cutting underneath the world heritage site to emerge in what quickly becomes another country, a different land.
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Jerusalem's ancient hills delineate one of the world's sharper rain shadows.Â
Yet as discriminating as the rains are, they are egalitarian compared to the political economy – dictated by birth as Arab or Jew.
![Illustration by Matt Davidson](/web/20170224151725im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/g/1/k/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gufj41.png/1487627185942.jpg)
Ahead in the desert haze are the barely visible hills of Jordan. And running along the more fertile valley floor between is the border marked by the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.
This is the occupied West Bank, the putative Israeli-occupied Palestinian state as described by the 1967 war and contemplated in the 1993 Oslo Accord between the Israeli government and the PLO.
Some souls live up here. Dotted hither and thither as the highway snakes eastward are Jewish settlements, invariably holding commanding hill-top positions.
And lower down, perched awkwardly in the dry treeless gullies closer to the highway, there are Bedouins. Their ad hoc micro-settlements are untidy off-grid affairs. Illegal shanty towns of tin and tarps, marking out these itinerants as the most dispossessed of the 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
In one such community, just 20 minutes from First World Jerusalem, a mud-brick school clings to a hillside.
Its defiantly permanent adobe structures use solar panels for electricity, fake grass for play areas, and rely on donated equipment, most notably from Italy.
But even that international recognition has not protected the tiny school from capricious treatment. A community leader displays a children's swing now reduced to a useless frame after its moving parts were allegedly confiscated because the concrete footings had breached the rules.
It is an example of the countless small ways in which officialdom makes life difficult for non-Jewish persons in the hope that they simply give up.
Overlooking all this sits a gleaming white hamlet of Jewish settlers, replete with valuable water rights, extra security  and private service roads – just some of the 600,000 state-subsidised outliers intent on expanding the Jewish state into the West Bank permanently per force of occupation.
Doubtless, Israel is a modern marvel – an institutionally stable, technologically advanced and reputedly democratic nation created in the aftermath of World War II, and championed ever since as an island of justice, peace and the rule of law.
But terra nullius, this was not. And peaceful, it has never been.Â
This, rather, is conflict central. A place where rights are dependent on race and religion. Where uniformed Israelis young enough to use acne cream stroll absent-mindedly through shopping malls and bus stations, machine guns dangling from their shoulders.
Where Palestinian suicide bombings, murderous drive-throughs and random stabbings create a siege mentality, licensing the constant ratcheting up of the existential threat and thus the further militarisation of Israel itself.
Where traffic snarls last for hours at check-points policing internal borders.
Where even professional Palestinians, academics with PhDs, or top-level business people are required to queue up for monthly permits simply in order to move between cities or attend work.
And where West Bank homes and businesses built on land held in Palestinian families for generations are bulldozed when deemed illegal by the occupying power.
It is astounding that in the decades since enlightened governments celebrated the removal of that abomination against humanity, the Berlin Wall, Israel has been furiously building walls similar in appearance and function to the partitioning of Germany.
The comprehensiveness of Israel's suppression of the local population is staggering. Yet it occasions little serious study from governments like Australia's, which has succumbed to the self-serving binary that there are only two critiques of Israel: unqualified support or anti-semitism.
Ditto for the program of illegal Jewish settlements, which has as its unconscionable aim the erosion of the two-state solution from within – ensuring with every passing day that no contiguous Palestinian state remains to be handed back.
Now even that pretence is falling away. In a departure from decades of US policy, Donald Trump says he is not wedded to the two-state solution. And the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has also begun to disown the term.
Australia at least is holding the line, but the fact is even Palestinians on the ground increasingly concede that a two-state future is slipping away. Some have begun advocating a switch from a fruitless fight for self-determination to one of pure human rights.
Thus, without serious international pressure, a new possibility arises, a single state where the rights of one group are vastly superior to the rights of another, based exclusively on race and religion: the very definition of apartheid.
So it's not just Cold War-style partitioning to which much of the world has turned a blind eye, but now a new South Africa.
Mark Kenny is chief political correspondent. He travelled to Israel in 2014 courtesy of the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council and to the occupied territories in 2016 courtesy of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.
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