Enclaves in the West Bank: The nightmare comes true

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The nightmare comes true
URI AVNERY
Gush Shalom, 12 June 2004

EXTRACT

...

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.

...

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 thousand
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 Biddu (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 Biddu 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 Biddu 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 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, Qalqilya, 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% (about 10% of historical
Palestine).