- The walled enclaves will lead, of course, to bloodshed
on an unbelievable scale. No people on earth will submit to such a life.
For thousands and thousands of young Palestinians, a martyr's death will
be preferable
-
- I thought it was terrible. I was wrong. It is far, far
worse! These words sum up my feelings at that moment.
-
- I was standing on a hill overlooking the infamous Kalandia
checkpoint. Below me was a narrow road, packed with Palestinians in the
blazing sun, 30 degrees centigrade in the shade (but there was no shade)
trudging towards the checkpoint. Very soon this road will be transformed.
It will be widened to three lanes and be reserved for Israelis: on both
sides of it, 8-metre high walls will spring up. It will allow the settlers
of the Jordan valley to reach Tel-Aviv in about an hour. The Palestinians
living on either side will be cut off from each other.
-
- This is a small part of the new reality that is rapidly
being created on the West Bank and that is changing beyond recognition
the country we knew and loved.
-
- I was standing near the edge of a-Ram. Once this was
a small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, on the road north to Ramallah.
Since successive Israeli governments have prevented the Palestinians in
East Jerusalem from building new homes, the severe overcrowding has forced
a mass exodus to a-Ram, which has grown into a town of sixty-thousand inhabitants.
Most of them are officially still Jerusalem residents, carrying the blue
identity cards of the inhabitants of Israel. This allows them to come to
Jerusalem, a 10-minute drive, work there, tend to their businesses and
go to the hospitals and the universities there.
-
- This is about to stop. Along the age-old road from Jerusalem
to Ramallah (leading on to Nablus, Damascus and beyond) the construction
of the 8-metre wall is due to start any minute now, not across the road,
but along the middle of the road - the full length of it. The inhabitants
of a-Ram, east of the wall, will not only be completely cut off from Jerusalem,
but also from all the townships and villages to their west - their relatives,
the schools which thousands of their children attend, their cemetery and
their places of work. A small part of a-Ram remains outside the wall and
will be cut off from the main part of the town in which they live.
-
- But this is only part of the story. The wall (or in some
places a barrier, consisting of a fence, trenches and roads) will completely
surround a-Ram. The sole exit from this walled-in area will be a narrow
bridge connecting it with the adjacent area to its east, consisting of
several Palestinian villages, which will be surrounded by another barrier.
This enclave will have a narrow exit to the Ramallah enclave. Through this
it will be possible for a person from a-Ram to reach Ramallah, God willing,
by a roundabout route of some 30 kilometres, instead of the 10-minute drive
or so it took before the occupation.
-
- A few kilometres to the west of a-Ram lies a group of
villages centred around Bidou (where five Palestinians have been killed
so far in protests against the wall). This area is rapidly becoming another
enclave, completely surrounded by a separate barrier. The only way out
will be a tunnel to be built under road No. 443 - the settlers' road of
which the section I mentioned before will become part. All existing roads
to Bidou have long since been cut off by trenches or piles of dirt, one
can enter only at one spot controlled by a checkpoint. This will cease
to exist.
-
- If a villager from Bidou has some business in a-Ram,
he will have to go through the tunnel to Ramallah, turn to the enclave
east of a-Ram and enter a-Ram by the narrow bridge, a semicircle of about
40 kilometres instead of a few minutes drive.
-
- A-Ram will be especially hard hit. Because of its location,
it has developed in the last few years into a kind of trans-shipment point
for goods travelling from Israel to the West Bank and vice versa. Israelis
and Palestinians do business there. All this will end with the wall. The
means of livelihood for many of its sixty thousand inhabitants will disappear.
-
- This is only one example of what is happening now all
over the West Bank, turning it into a crazy quilt of walled-in enclaves,
'connected' by bridges, tunnels or special roads, which can be cut off
at any moment at the whim of the Israeli government or of a local army
officer - and, all around them, roads-for-Israelis-only, expanding settlements
and military installations. Every Palestinian town - Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm,
Kalkilia, Bethlehem, Hebron and others - will become the 'capital' of a
tiny enclave, cut off from all the others, from their 'hinterland' and
villages, except by tortuous roundabout routes. Fifty-five percent of the
West Bank will be Israeli, the Palestinian enclaves will amount to 45 percent
(about 10 percent of historical Palestine).
-
- This is no longer just a nightmarish future prospect
- it is happening now, visible to the naked eye, while Sharon babbles about
a 'disengagement' to happen sometime in the future in one small part of
the occupied territories.
-
- Practically no Israeli has any idea about all this. It
may be happening one kilometre from his home (in Jerusalem, for example),
but it might as well be on the far side of the moon. The media are not
interested, nor is the world.
-
- This is the peace Sharon has been dreaming about. This
is the 'Palestinian State' George Bush promised. This is a cornerstone
of the new democratic Middle East.
-
- It will lead, of course, to bloodshed on an unbelievable
scale. No people on earth will submit to such a life. For thousands and
thousands of young Palestinians, a martyr's death will be preferable.
-
- And sometime in the future this awful structure will
be torn down, like the Berlin wall, which, evil as it was, was much less
inhuman. As always, after much suffering, the human spirit will prevail.
-
- Uri Avnery is a leading Israeli writer and peace activist
and a former member of Knesset
-
- 19.06.2004
- Bellaciao Collective
- http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=1455
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