Three persons say: “I love children.” One is a father. One is a Paedophile who uses children forcarnal satisfaction. One is a cannibal who eats them. They use the same words, but they meanquite different things.
The settlers love this country. They say so every day. They settle everywhere. But their loveis like that of the cannibal, who likes the children fried.
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 Dora al-Kareh. Before me there stretched a beauty spot I did not knowbefore, hidden from the Jerusalem-Nablus highway.
A charming, flat valley between two ridges of steep hills is divided into small plots on whichvegetables grow organically. The water of local springs flows in small canals which, thelocals say, date back to Roman times. The water is divided between seven hamulahs (extendedfamilies) according to an unchanging quota 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 ofasphalt can’t bother anybody. That’s what people think when they hear about yet anotherby-pass road.
The reality is quite different. Let’s take, for example, this particular road. It is designedto connect two settlements – Beth-El and Ofrah. Length: 5.9 km. Breadth: 220 (two hundred andtwenty!) m. The road itself will be 60 meters wide, with a security margin of 80 meters on eachside. 370 dunams will be expropriated outright, another 950 dunams will be rendered useless.
But the hidden is more important than the transparent. The road will separate three villagesfrom 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 Beth-El and Ofrah and promised publicly that theywill stay there forever. That was rather odd, because the recurring theme in his propagandawas “separation” (“We shall be here and they will be there…”), meaning that only big”settlement blocs” will be annexed to Israel, while the settlers in isolated spots will beevacuated or become residents of Palestine.
Beth-El and Ofrah are both isolated in the middle of the Palestinian population, far from thegreen line. But the leaders of the fanatical settlers live there, and Barak wants to cultivatethem. How? Simple: These isolated settlements will be turned into a new “settlement bloc”, tobe annexed to Israel.
The “by-pass road” serves this purpose. From a transportation point of view it is quitesuperfluous: These two settlements are already connected by existing roads. The new roadwill save the settlers five minutes driving time. Even if a new road has to be built, it can bemuch 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 followsautomatically that all the land between the road and the settlements will be annexed too. Theroad 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 different only because of the beauty ofthe landscape. While Barak chatters endlessly about “framework” and “permanent status”agreements and while negotiators meet all the time, Barak conducts a resolute campaign toenlarge the “settlement blocs”. The roads serve this purpose.
In this campaign of “creating facts on the ground”, not only are new injustices added to oldones, but also irreparable damage is being done to the landscape of this country. It’s a newcrime: the murder of the land, perhaps to be called “terracide”.