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Twighlight zone / Behind the scenes
By Gideon Levy
What you see and what you don’t on the Maccabim-Reut highway to Jerusalem.
How many times have you driven along Route 443 and looked to your right and to your left? How many times have you decided to take this fast route from Maccabim-Reut to Jerusalem and thought about the tens of thousands of residents who have been imprisoned because of it? How many times have you noticed the 12 blocked roads that lead into it, how many times have you paid attention to the residents of the 22 surrounding villages who make their way on foot on the rocky hills? Have you ever stopped for a moment next to the sign that leads to the Ofer camp, a euphemism for a mass detention facility in which about 800,000 Palestinians are now imprisoned, most of them without trial?
There is no other apartheid road like this one - a four-lane highway, a one-nation road, for Israelis only, built on Palestinian land. A road Palestinians are not allowed to use, neither in a vehicle nor on foot. An occupation road, with a checkpoint at the entrance and a checkpoint at the exit. In contrast to all the other occupation roads, it is full of traffic every day, an inseparable part of Israel, in the heart of the consensus, as though nothing were amiss.
There are no Arabs, there are no terror attacks. The planners of the highway did everything possible to hide the Arabs from view, even the view of someone who is tired of averting his gaze and ignoring them. In addition to the total ban on Palestinian travel on the road - including walking alongside it - there is the strangest things of all. As you approach Jerusalem, concrete walls border the highway, and on them the embodiment of the Israeli dream is portrayed. Under painted arches one can glimpse expanses of green lawns and perpetually blue skies, painted by an artist on the gray concrete that hides the Arabs’ homes. In this way, one can travel not only safely, but in a fantasy. A roofless tunnel, an Arab-free world, in which a people without a land has arrived in a land without a people - just like the fairy tale they told us as children. We used to sing a song about the pleasures of hiking around the country without any particular destination - only instead of white stones marking the paths, as in the song, there are concrete blocks.
More:
haaretz.com/hasen/spages/530037.html
By Gideon Levy
What you see and what you don’t on the Maccabim-Reut highway to Jerusalem.
How many times have you driven along Route 443 and looked to your right and to your left? How many times have you decided to take this fast route from Maccabim-Reut to Jerusalem and thought about the tens of thousands of residents who have been imprisoned because of it? How many times have you noticed the 12 blocked roads that lead into it, how many times have you paid attention to the residents of the 22 surrounding villages who make their way on foot on the rocky hills? Have you ever stopped for a moment next to the sign that leads to the Ofer camp, a euphemism for a mass detention facility in which about 800,000 Palestinians are now imprisoned, most of them without trial?
There is no other apartheid road like this one - a four-lane highway, a one-nation road, for Israelis only, built on Palestinian land. A road Palestinians are not allowed to use, neither in a vehicle nor on foot. An occupation road, with a checkpoint at the entrance and a checkpoint at the exit. In contrast to all the other occupation roads, it is full of traffic every day, an inseparable part of Israel, in the heart of the consensus, as though nothing were amiss.
There are no Arabs, there are no terror attacks. The planners of the highway did everything possible to hide the Arabs from view, even the view of someone who is tired of averting his gaze and ignoring them. In addition to the total ban on Palestinian travel on the road - including walking alongside it - there is the strangest things of all. As you approach Jerusalem, concrete walls border the highway, and on them the embodiment of the Israeli dream is portrayed. Under painted arches one can glimpse expanses of green lawns and perpetually blue skies, painted by an artist on the gray concrete that hides the Arabs’ homes. In this way, one can travel not only safely, but in a fantasy. A roofless tunnel, an Arab-free world, in which a people without a land has arrived in a land without a people - just like the fairy tale they told us as children. We used to sing a song about the pleasures of hiking around the country without any particular destination - only instead of white stones marking the paths, as in the song, there are concrete blocks.
More:
haaretz.com/hasen/spages/530037.html
