Israeli soldiers hand search a Palestinian man at the Hawara checkpoint south of the West Bank city of Nablus. (AFP) I still vividly remember the day that Jewish settlers no longer needed to use the same road us Palestinians were using to get to downtown Jerusalem. The day that the alternate settler road opened was the day that the nightmarish checkpoint began to take its toll on our lives. With the settlers using the same road, Israeli soldiers made sure that traffic passed as quickly as possible, with very few cars pulled over. I was able to get my kids to their Beit Hanina school in 10 minutes. After the settlers were gone, it would take me an hour and sometimes two or three hours to make the 3-kilometer journey. I recall this because I have always felt that Palestinians’ lives are totally connected to Israel, yet we don’t have the power to change those who rule our lives. The opposite is true for the Jewish settlers, whose wellbeing is taken very seriously by the army because they elect the governments whose defense minister is literally the dictator of life in the occupied West Bank. Israel and the Trump administration might not like the word “occupation” but, when an army controls people’s lives without them having the right to change those who rule them, it is a military occupation, for which the Fourth Geneva Convention was specifically drawn. On Tuesday, Israeli citizens, including 600,000 people living in areas Israeli troops occupied in 1967, will vote in a general election that will determine who will be prime minister and, more importantly for us, the next army ruler — the Israeli defense minister. I have been a staunch supporter of the two-state solution, which calls for an independent state in areas occupied in 1967 (possibly with some border adjustments) alongside Israel. My adult children and many of their generation have been nagging at me to abandon my ideas and to join them in a call for a single state, in which Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. If that was the case today, more than 4 million Palestinians would be voting in the general elections. Hopes raised by the Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin handshake at the White House in 1993 have long since disappeared and the future of an independent state has gone with it Daoud Kuttab The reality is that neither my ideas nor those of the younger generation have any chance of being heard in the coming months or years, so long as Israelis are able to get away with their army running a discriminatory legal system. A Jewish settler in Hebron has the ability to travel on relatively checkpoint-free roads, get subsidized water and housing costs and free health insurance, and can, most importantly, vote for those who make the rules for their lives. This is different from their Palestinian neighbors, who live under harsh military occupation, are faced with travel restrictions, suffer huge economic inferiority and, again most importantly, do not have the ability to vote for those who rule their lives. Some might argue that Palestinians have their own government and elections, but that is one of the biggest farces. True, there is a person with the title of president, but he also needs the permission of the Israeli occupiers if he wants to travel. The Palestinian government has no sovereignty over the areas it controls, as Israeli soldiers may have left but they often return without notice. Elections for president and parliament (the last of which was over a decade ago) mean little if the Palestinian borders are controlled by Israel, while customs fees collected on behalf of Palestinians are controlled, and often reduced, according to the whims of the Israeli military, which is again directed by the Israeli defense minister, who is appointed by the very same prime minister that only Israelis can vote for. Palestinians will watch the upcoming elections with anger and frustration. Hopes raised by the Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin handshake at the White House in 1993 have long since disappeared and the future of an independent state has gone with it. Israelis will most likely elect a leader who is tough in their controlling policies against the 4 million Palestinians. None of the main parties has any road map for peace and the American peace plan will not be produced by an honest broker, but rather by a clearly biased team that insults Palestinians and their leaders daily with their words and actions. Some Israelis and their American friends feel that it is high time Palestinians surrendered and declared that they have lost. This will not happen. If Palestinians can’t vote in the coming Israeli elections, they will one day have that right within either a separate sovereign Palestinian state or within a single state with equal rights for all its citizens. • Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Twitter: @DaoudKuttab Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view