For me it was a long day. An old friend of mine had invited me to a dinner party in Caesarea. The elite of the elite was there, financiers, doctors, senior bureaucrats, media people, artists. Wonderful food, excellent wines. I had no strength left to get into arguments. So I just sat aside, looked and wondered about what was happening at the time in Hares, some light-years away.
At midnight, on the long way home, I heard on the news that a settler woman had been slightly wounded by stones near Hares village.
May 14, 2000
Three people say: "I love children." One is a father. One is a pedophile who uses children for carnal satisfaction. One is a cannibal who eats them. They use the same words, but they mean quite different things.
The settlers love this country. They say so every day. They settle everywhere. But their love is 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 had not seen 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 that, the locals say, date back to Roman times. The water is divided between seven hamulahs (extended families) 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 "bypass 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 bypass road.
The reality is quite different. Let's take, for example, this particular road. It is designed to connect two settlements: Beth-El and Ofrah. Length: 5.9 kilometers. Width: 220 (two hundred and twenty!) meters. The road itself will be 60 meters wide, with a security margin of