21 - 27 December 2000
Issue No.513
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 December 2000 Issue No.513 |
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The war of the roads
By Graham UsherRoad Number 4 certainly feels like an integral part of Israel. It branches north-east out of Tel Aviv before sweeping past drab industrial zones into the blue-tinged mountains that climb up from Israel's coastal plain. But the mountains are not in Israel. They are in the occupied West Bank.
The road's four lanes have been laid over the last seven years to service the 20 or so "Western Samaria" Jewish settlements Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak wants to annex to Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians. They reach to and beyond the mammoth settlement of Ariel, 20 kilometres into the West Bank and home to around 15,000 Israelis, many of them newly arrived Russian emigrants, many of whom are not Jewish.
You can travel Road Number 4 not knowing that you are traversing and transgressing the lands of scores of Arab villages, inhabited by some 50,000 Palestinians, with deeds stretching back to Ottoman times. For them, Road Number 4 services nothing except their ongoing dispossession: "It is a finger stuck down the throat of our future state," says one.
During seven years of negotiations, Israeli and Palestinian politicians and academics have argued the rights, demographics and viability of such annexations. Now the talking is over and words have turned into a war for the roads fought by Palestinian guerrillas on the one side and armed Jewish settlers on the other. "They try to intimidate us and we try to intimidate them," comments one Palestinian fighter. "The difference is we don't have an army."
We meet the army outside Hares, a village with 4,000 Palestinians. Since the Intifada of Al-Aqsa started on 28 September, Hares has been under siege, marked by huge rock boulders strewn across its only access road. Around 800 olive trees belonging to villagers have been razed, sometimes by soldiers for "security" reasons, sometimes by settlers from the nearby Revava settlement "out of spite," says Netti Golan, an Israeli peace activist stationed in Hares to monitor the settlers' actions. "They think if the army can bomb Gaza in revenge, why can't we uproot a few trees?" she explains.
We want to get to the village of Kfar Ad-Dik, 10 kilometres south of Hares, a 20-minute drive. But an army checkpoint blocks our way. "I don't need a warrant to close a road," says the officer in charge. He does. But we decide to skip the hassle and take the scenic, "Palestinian" route.
It is a jagged landscape of rock, olive tree and gorge. It is also an invisible and live front. Marda cowers like a bird in the fist of Ariel, much of which was built on the village's land. Last week, a Palestinian boy was run over by a settler car, one of seven similar accidents in the last two months. This week the army flattened the village's perma-culture centre in reprisal for a shooting attack.
Salfit is the largest Palestinian village in the area and one of a dozen or so under full Palestinian control. Here fighters belonging to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement escort us, small sub-machine guns strapped to their arms. "We're human bait," says one cheerfully. He is only half-joking. Three weeks ago, an army helicopter gunship strafed the main Fatah office in the village. The "Tanzim" escaped unharmed. But an old man in the house next door had his leg sliced in half from shrapnel.
We descend out of the village, then climb a steep ridge to Kfar Ad-Dik, the drive made doubly arduous by rock barricades youths from the village have scattered across the road. The day before settlers had breached the village and shot one of the young people. Today nobody is taking any chances, least of all with journalists. We say we have a meeting with the mayor.
"He's in the hospital, awaiting surgery," says Taysir Tara, the mayor, of the young man. But the boy's injuries are the least of his problems. "The settlers chopped down 250 of our olive trees last night. Last week the water was cut off. All the roads have been blocked off since God knows when. And today we have no electricity. It's Ramadan. There are 3,500 people in this village. What are we supposed to do?"
"Wait for rain," says one man.
"There is no rain," answers the mayor.
He denies all knowledge of a shooting attack two nights ago on Pedu'el settlement, which sits 500 metres west of Kfar Ad-Dik. Others are less categorical. "Look, if the settlers come to our village looking to kill someone, as they did last night, of course we will use guns," says one Fatah leader in the village. "Believe me, we are at a dangerous point, the cusp of a volcano, in this land."
Less than 50 metres from his home, we reach one of the volcano's many lips. This is where the bypass road to Pedu'el cuts the land of Kfar Ad-Dik in half like a thin black blade. It also explains why the road was closed to us. On the cliff on the opposite side of the village are a dozen or so national religious settlers, dancing around three Border Police officers, with M16 rifles slung menacingly over their shoulders. On our side there are 40 or so Palestinians, simmering with rage, and commanded by four soldiers with machine guns.
"We closed the road because you threw stones," explains one soldier disingenuously, in Arabic. "Stop throwing stones and we'll open the road. But go home."
"Tell the settlers to go home," says a Palestinian in Hebrew.
Eventually a deal is struck. The settlers descend the cliff guarded by the police and Palestinian men shoo away children who are itching to throw stones at the settlers. "They had to move them," says the Fatah man. "They know there would have been an explosion otherwise."
We drive out of Kfar Ad-Dik on the bypass road, now miraculously reopened. On either side are stumps of uprooted olive trees, their newly dispersed earth red against the brown of the old. The army policy is to sweep a 50 metre rim beside any bypass road where shooting occurs. "If they sweep 50 metres either side of every bypass road, there won't be any trees left in the West Bank," says Issa, who is getting a lift with us back to Hares.
As we approach the village, a stone slams into the side of our car. "They're afraid," says Netti.
"The Palestinians?"
"No, the settlers. They feel they are the victims. And in a way they are. But not of the Palestinians. They are the victims of the Israeli governments who put them here."
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