Who Pays for the Road
Israeli bulldozers tore down about 50 Palestinian shops in the West Bank town of Al-Eizariya overnight, clearing land ahead of a settlement-linked road project in the occupied West Bank. The demolitions hit a town southeast of Jerusalem, where car washes, scrap metal shops and vegetable stands were flattened after owners had received notices to evacuate shops built without permits less than a week earlier. Attorneys appealed, up to Israel’s Supreme Court, but the demolitions went ahead anyway.
The people at the bottom of this arrangement were left with the wreckage. Mohammad Abu Ghalieh, a 48-year-old shop owner, said, “Forty-eight years of night and day to build something for his children and himself, and in one day and one night, everything was gone.” Daoud al-Jahalin, the head of nearby village council, said more than 200 families would lose their incomes. Those losses land on Palestinian families while the project advances for the benefit of a road system designed from above.
What the Authorities Say
Israeli authorities said the buildings were built illegally and owners had been warned for “several years” that enforcement was forthcoming. COGAT, the Israeli military body overseeing civil affairs in the West Bank, said the structures obstructed construction of the planned road to connect Palestinian towns. Israel says the demolitions are needed to make way for a road serving Palestinian communities.
That official line sits beside a different account from Palestinian officials, rights groups and the internationally backed Palestinian Authority. They say the road is part of a broader plan to keep Palestinian vehicles off a new highway being built to serve nearby Israeli settlements. They say Israel’s planned tunnel-and-bypass road will reroute Palestinian traffic off a major Israeli highway linking nearby West Bank settlements to Jerusalem, in effect cutting off drivers from large swaths of the territory.
Hagit Ofran, director of the antisettlement group Peace Now, said, “The shops that were demolished are where Israel is planning to build a new road that will divert all Palestinian traffic to that road so that they can close down the whole area of E1 for Palestinians.”
E1 and the Machinery of Separation
The project is part of a strategic section of the West Bank known as E1, which Israel is developing with the intention of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The E1 project is especially contentious because it runs from the outskirts of Jerusalem deep into the occupied West Bank, isolating the cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem and hindering north-south movement for the Palestinians.
Rights groups and the internationally backed Palestinian Authority say the demolitions are connected to Israel’s plans to overhaul transportation and create separate road systems for Israeli and Palestinian ID holders. Israel is planning to build some 3,500 apartments next to the existing settlement of Maale Adumim. Both Israeli leaders and critics of settlements say the E1 plan would complicate efforts to establish a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank.
Some of the demolished shops partially blocked sidewalks and roads leading into the town. Palestinians say proper construction permits are nearly impossible to obtain from Israeli authorities, even as Israeli settlements rapidly expand. That leaves ordinary people trapped in a system where permits are scarce, enforcement is swift, and the bulldozers arrive when the paperwork runs out.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territory to be illegal and an obstacle to peace. Metz reported from Ramallah, West Bank. Shlomo Mor contributed from Al-Eizariya.