Apartheid roads

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

As the Hamas offensive began, I had just started reading Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, one of the most vivid accounts ever written of what it’s like for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Here he is writing about the post-Oslo era, as Israel prepared to carve up the Palestinian territories into smaller and smaller islands, divided by checkpoints, fences, walls, settlements and highways.

The prospect of a PLO-led police force operating in West Bank cities was a radical departure for Israel. To accommodate it, Dany Tirza planned a new transportation network to separate Jewish settlers from Palestinians, creating the bypass roads and highways that would allow Jews to travel around rather than through the Palestinian cities and checkpoints, and setting up what the army called “sterile roads” that Palestinians were not allowed to use at all.

In parallel, he designed a system of underpasses and circuitous routes for Palestinian villagers who were barred from accessing the settler highways cutting through their lands. These were given the benevolent-sounding name of “fabric of life” roads. In private, Israeli officials called them something more honest. Speaking to the US ambassador in Tel Aviv, who summarized the conversation in a diplomatic cable, Israel’s deputy defense minister referred to them as “apartheid roads.”

+ They knew the kind of occupation they were creating from the beginning and precisely what it was modeled on.