By-Pass Roads Destroy Hopes for Future Palestinian Autonomy

by Maureen Meehan

Musbah al-Atrash and his large family were awakened at midnight last December by the grinding sound of bulldozers which they soon realized, to their horror, were plowing a strip through their grape vines. Stunned, Atrash rushed out to the vineyard only to find his and his neighbors' land surrounded by more than a thousand Israeli soldiers.

"I could not believe my eyes, there they were ripping up our vines, thick with grapes nearly ready for harvest, just plowing them under. I was outraged, I'm still outraged," recalls Atrash. He added that he and his neighbors had never received any notice from the Israeli government that their land had been slated for confiscation.

Atrash and his six brothers lost all the land,some four acres,that had been in their Halhoul-based family for generations. Another 277 families in the Halhoul-Hebron area alone will lose up to $10 million annually as a result of destruction of 2,000 acres of the area's grape-rich land.

The confiscation of large tracts of Palestinian land to be used to build by-pass roads for Jewish settlers is wreaking havoc on the Palestinian agricultural sector, isolating towns and villages from each another, and virtually guaranteeing the permanent presence of settlers, and the Israeli army,in the West Bank.

Following the September 1995 signing of the Oslo II agreement, the $330 million bypass road construction plan got underway. The building of the roads throughout the West Bank will require the confiscation of thousands of acres of Palestinian land. Twenty new roads covering an expanse of over 300 miles are slated for construction.

With its jagged slice through the West Bank, the by-pass road network will link Jewish settlements to one another and to the modern highway transportation system in Israel proper.

Hundreds of Palestinian homes will have been demolished to make way for the new roads. Near Bethlehem, where environmental damage caused by construction is staggering, two new bridges and a tunnel are being built through some of the area's most fertile agricultural land.

Area planning maps illustrate that many roads are being built in places near, and in some cases parallel to, existing roads. Maps also show how the roads will detour around Palestinian towns and cities whose residents will not have access to the roads. It is still not clear whether Palestinians will be permitted to drive on them.

"The 'Jewish-only' road plan is about the closest thing to apartheid you can get, as is the calculated isolation of our towns into bantustan-style areas," said Mohammed Said Majiyeh, leader of the Halhoul-Hebron Land Defense Committee.

Majiyeh is convinced that the purpose of the by-pass road plan, in addition to making life easier for the area's 120,000 Jewish settlers, is to fragment Palestinian population centers, thus enabling Israel to maintain control over the West Bank.

"Palestinian autonomy is an illusion under such circumstances. There can be no economic, cultural or community development without territorial contiguity between cities, towns and villages," said Majiyeh, a writer who returned to the West Bank in 1994 after a 24-year Israeli deportation order.

"To get from one town to the next, people will have to pass by settlements and through Israeli checkpoints. And there is no telling when the Israeli government may decide to impose a closure," he added.

During the recent Palestinian election campaign, the Palestinian Peoples Party distributed maps of the West Bank that show "how the Oslo agreement has chopped up what was supposed to be Palestine." (See December 1995 Washington Report, p. 17.)

"People were shocked to learn how little land was actually to be returned to Palestinians. After all, negotiations between the PLO and Israel were held in secret," said Majiyeh. "Now as people see the reality of our situation, the legitimacy of the process and the promise of self-government is all but lost."

Once final-status talks are complete, Palestinian control in the West bank may not exceed 30 percent. At the moment, less than 3 percent of the West Bank, the centers of six cities, is under Palestinian control.

The rest of the West Bank (70 percent), under Israeli army control, will provide a safe haven for Jewish settlements to expand. In fact, Israel recently approved the building of 6,000 new units to house Jewish immigrants.

The boom is likely to continue as the settler movement, which once complained of feeling threatened by the possibility of Palestinian autonomy, now finds itself in a protected position.

Recently Israeli Labor government minister Yossi Beilin implied during a dialogue with the National Religious Party (NRP) that Israel likely will reach a permanent arrangement in which Jewish settlements eventually would be annexed to Israel.

While Beilin's comments were viewed as an attempt to win over the staunchly pro-settlement NRP in the build-up to Israeli elections, it does not suggest that Labor Party policy has ever been anything but sympathetic toward the settlements. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made it clear that negotiations with the Palestinians and redeployment from the West Bank would not go forward unless by-pass road construction was allowed to proceed unhindered.

According to land-use planning consultant Jan de Jong, the most crucial geopolitical consequence of this encirclement is what he calls the "sandwiching dynamic" in which Palestinians not only have no territorial contiguity but lose control over vital water resources.

"The current lack of access to its natural ground and surface waters probably constitutes the single most important obstacle to the rehabilitation and expansion of Palestinian agricultural land-use potential," writes de Jong in a Jerusalem-based monthly publication, News From Within.

Pointing out that the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza is expected to double from about 2.4 million to 5 million in the next 15 years, de Jong says that "expansion of agricultural land is more a necessity than a luxury if economic disaster is to be averted."

World Bank reports show that agriculture contributes at least 25 percent to the Palestinian gross domestic product and 25 percent to employment. At least half of the Palestinian population benefits from agricultural returns.

In addition to ongoing land confiscation and resulting agricultural losses, the Palestinian economy is stifled by Israeli control of all international bordersmaking direct Palestinian access to markets abroad impossible. Prolonged closures of the West Bank and Gaza also add to the economic decline.

The Jerusalem-based Land and Water Establishment for Studies and Legal Services (LAWE) has taken many land confiscation cases to court despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority has agreed to Israel's road-building on the basis that construction was directly linked to redeployment.

LAWE attorney Shawki Issa said that while he was appealing a land seizure case in the Israeli courts, he was asked by the judge why he was bothering since the confiscations for road-building had been agreed to by the Palestinian Authority.

Certain it could not be true, Issa sent a fax immediately to Yasser Arafat asking him to clear up the judge's remarks. Issa said Arafat responded within a week and the text of Arafat's handwritten fax read as follows: "According to the agreement they [Israelis] must coordinate land confiscation for bypass roads with us. They have not done that."

"This means the Palestinian Authority is giving Israel the right to take land from Palestinians...it is legitimizing Israeli land theft," said Issa, who added that the Palestinian Authority has systematically discouraged protests against the land confiscations.

Israel argues that the by-pass roads are temporary and could be removed once a final agreement is reached over the fate of the settlements. Palestinian attorneys point out that house demolitions and the paving over of thousands of acres of agricultural land are not temporary measures.

"Calling land confiscation for road-building a 'temporary seizure' allows the Israeli government to circumvent the normal, more complicated legal requirements relating to confiscation," explained Issa. Referring to the Israeli seizure orders as a "legal trick," Issa explained that once a seizure order is issued, land owners have only 48 hours to appeal, far less time than for a normal confiscation order.

Issa cites international law which stipulates that it is illegal to make permanent changes to or to move civilians to an occupied area. "These roads are not intended to fill the needs of the local population,in fact, Palestinians may never be allowed to drive on them even though they're being built on their land," said Issa.

Musbah al Atrash said he was brushed off when he sought the intervention of one of the Palestinian ministers. "When we called to tell him the bulldozers were destroying our vineyards, he told us he was on his way to the airport and 'couldn't be bothered with such things,'" Atrash said bitterly.

Atrash's neighbor, Abdula Sa'ada, lost his two-acre vineyard to make way for the building of a road to serve the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba. "Taking away our land is like taking the souls out of our bodies," said Sa'ada. "Why can't leaders on both side see how dangerous this is for the future? How can the Israelis call this a peace agreement when it's obviously a recipe for continual conflict?"