The settlers love this country. They say so
every day. They settle everywhere. But their love is like that
of a cannibal.
This thought came to my mind a couple of
days ago, when I was standing on a hill north of Ramallah, near the
village of Dura al-Kareh. Before me there stretched a beauty spot I
did not know before, hidden from the Jerusalem-Nablus
highway.
A charming, flat valley between two ridges of
steep hills is divided into small plots on which vegetables grow
organically. The water of local springs flows in small canals which,
the locals say, date back to Roman times. The water is divided
between seven hamulahs (extended families) according to unchanging quotas
worked out 400 years ago. On the Ramallah market, these well-known
vegetables fetch prices considerably higher than
others.
All this beauty is now threatened with
extinction. All in the name of love for the country. The
slogan is "by-pass road," two innocuous words that hide a cruel
reality.
On the face of it, what's wrong with a
road? It helps the flow of traffic. A narrow strip of asphalt
can't bother anybody. That's what people think when they hear about
yet another by-pass road.
The reality is quite
different. Let's take, for example, this particular road. It
is designed to connect two settlements—Beit-El and Ofrah. Length:
5.9 km. Breadth: 220 (two hundred and twenty!) meters. The
road itself will be 60 meters wide, with a security margin of 80 meters on
each side. 370 dunams will be expropriated outright, another 950
dunams will be rendered useless.
But the hidden is more
important than the visible. The road will separate three villages
from a great part of their lands. In practice, these will be added
to the settlements.
Some explanations may be in
order:
Before the elections, Ehud Barak visited Beit-El
and Ofrah and promised publicly that they will stay there forever.
That was rather odd, because the recurring theme in his propaganda was
"separation" ("We shall be here and they will be there"), meaning that
only big "settlement blocs" would be annexed to Israel, while the settlers
in isolated spots would be evacuated or become residents of
Palestine.
Beit-El and Ofrah are both isolated in the
middle of the Palestinian population, far from the green line. But
the leaders of the settler movement live there, and Barak wants to mollify
them. How? Simple: These isolated settlements will be
turned into a new "settlement bloc," to be annexed to
Israel.
The "by-pass road" serves this purpose.
From a transportation point of view it is superfluous; these two
settlements are already connected by existing roads. The new road
will not save the settlers more than five minutes driving time; moreover
even if a new road has to be built, it can be much shorter. The
planned road is unnecessarily long and winding.
So
what's the real purpose? Well, the road is, of course, to be annexed
to Israel. It follows automatically that all the land between the
road and the settlements will be annexed too. The road is a knife
cutting off a big slice of territory from the future State of
Palestine.
The same happens now all over the West
Bank. This case is special only because of the beauty of the
landscape. While Barak chatters endlessly about "framework" and
"permanent status" and while negotiators continue to meet, behind the
scenes a resolute campaign is conducted to enlarge the "settlement blocs."
The roads serve this purpose.
In this campaign of
creating "facts of the ground," not only are new injustices added to old
ones, but also irreparable damage is being done to the landscape of this
country. It's a new crime: the murder of the land. Let's call
it "terracide."
_________________________
First published in
Ma’ariv, May 6, 2000. English translation first published in The Other
Israel, POB 2542, Holon 58125, Israel. Reprinted by permission
of The Other Israel.
