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Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Thursday October 20, 2005
The Guardian

The Israeli military has blocked Palestinians from driving on the main artery through the West Bank in a first step towards what Israeli human rights groups say is total "road apartheid" being enforced throughout the occupied territory.
The army sealed off access to Route 60 after the fatal shooting of three settlers near Bethlehem on Sunday. No private Palestinian cars are permitted on the road although public transport is still allowed.

The Israeli newspaper Maariv yesterday said the government quietly gave the military the go-ahead earlier this week for a plan to culminate in barring all Palestinians from roads used by Israelis in the West Bank. "The purpose is to reach, in a gradual manner, within a year or two, total separation between the two populations. The first and immediate stage of separation applies to the roads in the territories: roads for Israelis only and roads for Palestinians only," the newspaper said.

The Palestinian leadership and others claim the separation plan, and the road network to make it possible, are elements of a wider strategy to carve out new Israeli borders inside the West Bank alongside the 420-mile security barrier under construction and expansion of settlements.

The plan for the occupied territory reserves the main roads for Jewish settlers and other Israelis while Palestinians will be confined to secondary routes, many little better than dirt tracks or roads which have yet to be built. Palestinian vehicles, including heavy lorries, travelling from Bethlehem to Ramallah, for instance, will be forced to take a lengthy route on a narrow road through the hills while Israelis driving between settlements near to each of the towns will travel on a highway.

The Israeli government is building a number of new roads for Palestinians in areas where there are none, and plans 18 tunnels under or around roads or areas from which Palestinians will be barred. Israel is seeking foreign funding but the EU has said it is not prepared to pay for roads used in a parallel system.
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Israeli human rights group BTselem said Palestinians are barred from or have restricted access to 450 miles of West Bank roads, a system with "clear similarities" to South Africa's former apartheid regime. Sarit Michaeli, of BTselem, said: "Israel is cynically manipulating the security fears of ordinary Israelis."
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10/18/05
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
The Guardian
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Foreign leaders, including Tony Blair, praised Mr Sharon for his "courage" in pulling out of Gaza last month, Israel was accelerating construction of the West Bank barrier, expropriating more land in the West Bank than it was surrendering in Gaza, and building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements.

"It's a trade off: the Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders," said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organisation Settlement Watch. "They don't know how long they've got. That's why they're building like maniacs."

At the core of the strategy is the 420-mile West Bank barrier which many Israeli politicians regard as marking out a future border. Its route carves out large areas for expansion of the main Jewish settlements of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, and expropriates swaths of Palestinian land by separating it from its owners.

In parallel, new building on Jewish settlements during the first quarter of this year rose by 83% on the same period in 2004. About 4,000 homes are under construction in Israel's West Bank colonies, with thousands more homes approved in the Ariel and Maale Adumim blocks that penetrate deep into the occupied territories. The total number of settlers has risen again this year with an estimated 14,000 moving to the West Bank, compared with 8,500 forced to leave Gaza.

Israel is also continuing to expand the amount of territory it intends to retain. In July alone, it seized more land in the West Bank than it surrendered in Gaza: it withdrew from about 19 square miles of territory while sealing off 23 sq miles of the West Bank around Maale Adumim.

Israel's strategy is to "strengthen the control over areas which will constitute an inseparable part of the state of Israel", the prime minister said after the Gaza pullout.

Last month, he told a meeting of his Likud party allies that it was important to expand the settlements without drawing the world's attention. "There's no need to talk. We need to build, and we're building without talking," he said. A few days later, one of the prime minister's senior advisors, Eyal Arad, publicly advocated "a strategy of unilaterally determining the permanent borders of the state of Israel".

The greatest impact of recent Israeli actions has been in and around Jerusalem, as Israel stepped up construction of the wall along the most controversial part of its route.

"What we are seeing is an acceleration of construction of the barrier," said David Shearer, head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem.

"Because of the barrier, Jerusalem is being sealed off from the rest of the West Bank. Movement in Jerusalem will be with a magnetic card and a sophisticated system of gates. The access the Palestinians have enjoyed to their places of worship, to some of the best schools, to hospitals is now going to be severely restricted."
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Chris McGreal
Thursday October 20, 2005
The Guardian

The strange and uneasy embrace between the Jewish state and America's evangelical right is being tightened. At the beginning of next year Israel's oldest English-language paper, the Jerusalem Post, is to launch a Christian edition. The Post, a widely respected paper until it fell into former owner Conrad Black's clutches, is seeking to bolster its North American circulation by building on the blossoming relationship between the Israeli right and Christian fundamentalists.

The relationship is not an easy one. Bush-backing evangelists are among Ariel Sharon's best friends in a hostile world. The politics mesh easily but underpinning them is a belief among the fundamentalists that the revival of the Israeli state is a precursor to the Second Coming.

And with that goes a desire to get Jews to recognise the First Coming and save themselves from eternal damnation. Israel passed laws against that kind of evangelising decades ago, but these days the Jerusalem Post, like the government, is less concerned with the hereafter than the here and now.
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A couple of years ago, the vice president of the World Jewish Congress, Isi Leible, pondered the meaning of the newfound relationship between Israel and the American religious right in an article for the Jerusalem Post. He said many Israelis would have been appalled at ties with people regarded as "anti-Semites obsessed with a fanatical urge to convert us".

Politics has overcome - as has the Post's dire financial situation. But Leible concluded it is better that some things remain undiscussed. "Their [the evangelists'] support for Israel is based upon the belief that the Jews must be sovereign in their land as a precursor to the Second Coming. These and other theological issues should never be explored".