80 meters on each side. 370 dunams will be expropriated outright, another 950 dunams will be rendered useless.32
But the hidden is more important than the transparent. The road will separate three villages from 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 they will stay there forever. That was rather odd, because the recurring theme in his propaganda was "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 be evacuated or become residents of Palestine.
Beth-El and Ofrah are both isolated in the middle of the Palestinian population, far from the green line. But the leaders of the fanatical settlers live there, and Barak wants to cultivate them, blow? Simple: These isolated settlements will be turned into a new "settlement bloc," to be annexed to Israel.
The "bypass road" serves this purpose. From a transportation point of view it is quite superfluous: These two settlements are already connected by existing roads. The new road will save the settlers five minutes driving time. Even if a new road has to be built, it can be much 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 follows automatically that all the land between the road and the settlements will be annexed too. The road 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 of the landscape. While Barak chatters endlessly about "framework" and "permanent status" agreements, and while negotiators meet all the time, Barak conducts a resolute campaign to enlarge the "settlement blocs." The roads serve this purpose.
In this campaign of "creating facts on the ground," not only are new injustices added to old ones, but also irreparable damage is being done to the landscape of this country. It's a new crime: the murder of the land, perhaps to be called "terracide."
August 18, 2001
A middle-aged man approaches the army checkpoint. Three bored soldiers look at him. One, probably the one in charge, who was standing two or three meters away, comes up to him and slaps his face.