Walls and checkpoints: the nightmare
comes true
By Uri Avnery
June 14— 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-meter 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 the country we knew and loved
beyond recognition.
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 60.000 inhabitants.
Most of them are officially still Jerusalem residents, carrying the
blue identity cards of inhabitants of Israel. This allows them to come
to Jerusalem, a drive of 10 minutes, work there, tend to their businesses,
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) construction of the 8-meter
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. Because the wall (or in some places
a barrier, consisting of a fence, trenches and roads) will completely
surround a-Ram from all sides. 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 kilometers,
instead of the ten minutes or so it took before the occupation.
A few kilometers to the west of a-Ram lies a group of villages centered
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 kilometers
instead of a drive of a few minutes.
A-Ram will be especially hard hit. Because of its location, it has developed
in the last few years into a kind of transshipment 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 60,000 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 kilometer 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.
Source: Counterpunch
