65 manned roadblocks, 58 trenches, 95 concrete barriers,
464 mounds of earth
By Akiva Eldar
Haaretz, December 23, 2003
Measures aimed at "easing restriction on movement of persons and goods" are mentioned in the first stage of the road map, a stage that was originally slated to end by May 2003. But the road map is one thing, and the roadblock map is another.
On August 4, at the height of the hudna (cease-fire), Labor Party Secretary-General MK Ophir Pines-Paz asked Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz how many roadblocks and other obstacles are scattered throughout the West Bank, how many the Israel Defense Forces had removed since the start of the hudna and how many they intended to remove?
In a question to the minister, Pines-Paz noted that roadblocks make life very difficult for West Bank residents, and that despite Israel's promise to make thing easier for them as one of its gestures under the road map, it was not clear that there had been any significant change on the ground.
The answer arrived about four weeks later, from the office of Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim. "The roadblocks are changed from time to time in accordance with the situation assessment," Boim wrote, explaining that therefore, "there is no possibility of keeping track and informing [you] of how many roadblocks have been taken down since the hudna [began] and how many are slated to come down." The deputy minister added that "the opening up of roadblocks and other abatements are considered once a week in the situation assessment."
One does not need to be the military commander of the Judea and Samaria Region in order to know that there are dozens of roadblocks that have not been moved for three years or more. At some roadblocks, permanent buildings have been erected, which include fortified positions for the soldiers, fences and watchtowers. A letter sent to Pines-Paz by the B'Tselem organization, which he had asked to investigate Boim's claims, noted that in addition to the IDF roadblocks scattered throughout the West Bank, there are hundreds of other barriers to vehicular traffic in the form of mounds of earth, concrete blocks and trenches dug across roads. Most were placed there during the early days of the intifada.
Three days before Boim sent his letter to Pines, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which coordinates humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, published the data that the deputy defense minister was unable to find. The data were accompanied by a detailed map giving the location of every roadblock (65 manned, including nine along the Green Line), every mound of dirt (464, including seven along the Green Line), every trench (58, including two along the Green Line) and every concrete barrier (95).
Factories exit
Soldiers who are not responsible for one of the dozens of roadblocks stand guard, among other things, over the industrial zones scattered throughout the territories. The compromise reached recently with the European Union, which requires Israel to include the place of origin of every product on its label, outraged the settlers and their patrons. Based on the amount of noise they have made, one might have thought that the West Bank competes with Silicon Valley. But an operation mounted by the Gush Shalom ("Peace Bloc") organization raises the suspicion that at some of the industrial parks in the territories, only non production personnel - from CEOs to cleaning ladies - remain. The factories that operated there have left.
To update its boycott list, Gush Shalom's Boycott Committee sent letters at the end of November to the managers of 120 industrial plants whose products it is urging the Israeli public not to buy. The letter noted that many factories have apparently left the settlements and returned to Israel, and that the number of departures can be expected to grow in the wake of the agreement with the EU regarding the labeling of Israeli exports. Managers whose plants had returned to Israel were therefore requested to give Gush Shalom their new addresses so that they could be removed from the boycott list.
Gush Shalom's mailbox was too small to hold the flood of returned mail. The post office sent back no fewer than 52 letters stamped "moved" or "address unknown." Most came from the industrial parks in Mishor Adumim (18 letters), Barkan (11), Atarot (5) and Ariel (3). A few letters were also returned from industrial parks in Karnei Shomron, Ma'aleh Efraim and Kiryat Arba. Telephone calls to some companies were answered by security guards. Gush Shalom discovered that some businesses maintain two addresses. One enables them to obtain customs breaks in Europe, and the other allows them to obtain tax breaks in Israel.
"The fact that more than one-third of the factories in the territories have quietly packed their bags and returned to Israel gives us great satisfaction," says Gush Shalom's Uri Avnery. "Israeli governments - both Likud and Labor - invested enormous efforts in enticing factories to the settlements, and their efforts have failed." Avnery sees the failure of the occupation industry as proof that it is impossible to conduct serious economic activity in a region of violent conflict. The veteran peace warrior believes that this failure, like the closure of the European market to products from the settlements, will hasten the inevitable evacuation of the settlements.
MK Ran Cohen (Meretz), who served as industry and trade minister in Ehud Barak's government, recalls that upon entering the ministry, he discovered that 23.5 percent of the budget for developing industrial parks (some NIS 120 million a year) was allocated to the territories, at the expense of the Negev and the Galilee. Cohen says that he ordered this practice halted. He adds that even though many factories have closed or downsized, and both output and the number of workers have shrunk, the quantity of administrative staff in these industrial zones, who are paid by the state, has remained virtually unchanged.
The number of troops that the IDF is compelled to allocate to these half-empty parks has also not decreased. Cohen relates that for months, he has been asking the industry and trade ministry for updated figures, but in vain.
Outposts in caves
In their verdict on the five high-school graduates - Noam Bahat, Hagai Matar, Adam Maor, Shimri Zameret and Matan Kaminer - who were convicted last Tuesday of refusing to be drafted, the judges of the Jaffa Military Court wrote that they were convinced that the five truly believed that the actions taken by the army in the course of implementing government policy with regard to the administered territories [the court's term] and their residents were illegal and unacceptable, unjustly and inappropriately harmed the local population, and caused moral damage. The judges then declared that the value of freedom of conscience must be weighed against other values that are no less important, such as national security, and that "given the state's sensitive security situation, it cannot permit itself excesses of this nature."
Volunteers from the Ta'ayush organization could tell the court a thing or two about the harm to the local population and about those who are contributing to "the sensitive security situation" that turns refusal to serve into an excess. Amnon Sadovsky of Ta'ayush, who for months has been assisting the battle for survival waged by Palestinian farmers and shepherds in the Mount Hebron area, has documented a new development with his camera: Residents of the settlement outposts, wearing skullcaps and tzitzit (ritual fringes), are no longer content with evicting Palestinian farmers from their lands, uprooting their trees and driving them out of their homes. The residents of the illegal settlements in the Sussya area have also begun driving Palestinian shepherds out of the string of caves in which they live. They take over these shepherds' miserable "houses" and steal their sheep, the poor man's lamb.
"In our tour of the area on Saturday, December 6, we came to the place that the Palestinians call `Gawawis,'" relates Sadovsky. "The place is about two kilometers from the settlement of Abigail. Four families from the Abu-Iram clan used to live there, but they disappeared a few months ago, apparently due to repeated harassment by the settlers. Stone walls separate the carefully tended groves of fruit trees that the residents left behind when they fled. About a month and a half ago, a number of young people from the surrounding [settlements] settled there, headed by a youth known to us as Itamar. With him are his wife, their baby and a several other young people, including two whom our members identified as residents of Havat Maon." According to Sadovsky, "Itamar explained to us that he and his friends decided to take over the caves in order to `redeem the land and return to a traditional way of life.' He took the trouble to say that they are `men of peace' and that they never raised a hand [against anybody]. Later, we saw settlers who had taken over a site known as Hirbat Srura and were not allowing Palestinians to approach the site."
