New roads keep West Bank tied firmly to Israel

Bypasses are a key weapon in the drive to increase settlers, writes Patrick Cockburn

Efrat - "Now they have finished the tunnels it will be a 10-minute drive from here to Jerusalem," says Eva Harow, an Israeli settler in the hilltop town of Efrat, on the West Bank, as she points to the glistening black highway which, when it opens later this month, will allow settlers to travel without entering a Palestinian area.

It is roads like this which are changing the political geography of the West Bank, binding it irrevocably to Israel. Palestinian cities, such as Hebron and Nablus, far from becoming the centres of a Palestinian state, are increasingly isolated by the new road system which Israel has been building at a furious pace since 1992.

Khalil Toufakji, a Palestinian cartographer, has no doubt what the so- called bypass roads mean. "They will turn the West Bank into a mosaic," he says. "Ramallah, Hebron and Qalqilya are being surrounded. Do you think the Israelis are spending $350m (pounds 230m) on the roads just to hand them back to the Palestinians?"

It was a Labour government which built most the new roads, after signing the Oslo agreement in 1992. It said they would protect the existing settlements and give the Israeli army overall military control. The Palestinians always felt suspicious about the large size of the new highways, which seemed designed to perpetuate Israel's control of the West Bank.

Mr Toufakji displays a map dating from 1982 showing a new road system planned by the Israeli army, but never constructed. At the time it was called military order number 60. He says: "All they did for publicity purposes was to introduce the word bypass."

Benjamin Netanyahu, the new right-wing Prime Minister, says the bypass system is the only item of Labour policy of which he wholly approves. With melancholy precision, Mr Toufakji draws coloured lines on a map of the West Bank. They show new highways in vivid orange, those still planned in pale green, and two new roads announced this month by Ariel Sharon, the infrastructure minister, in dark pink.

Palestinians are deeply worried by leaked reports of government plans to boost the 140,000 settlers already living in settlements like Efrat by 50,000.

On 2 August the cabinet ended the partial freeze on the expansion of settlements. But in many ways the bypass roads pose a more dangerous threat to Palestinians than do a few more settlements. New roads make it more attractive for settlers to move to the West Bank. Mrs Harow, 35, a mother of seven who came to Efrat eight years ago from Los Angeles, says: "When I see a Palestinian policeman I see a terrorist in uniform." A temporary bypass opened six months ago already allows her and other settlers in Efrat to avoid such sights by skirting the autonomous Palestinian enclave of Bethlehem.

As soon as he can find the time in his calendar, Mr Netanyahu is expected to open a more direct road to Jerusalem - going through a tunnel under the Palestinian village of Beit Jalla. Local property prices in Efrat are responding. They rose by 10 per cent when Mr Netanyahu was elected on 29 May. One house in the settlement was sold two months ago for pounds 330,000, and a small plot of building land costs pounds 66,000.

Throughout the West Bank, bulldozers and mechanical grabs are slicing open hillsides and cutting through ancient stone terraces. East of the Palestinian town of Ramallah, an almost complete highway dwarfs the road linking Palestinian towns and villages. A Jewish settlement such as Elon More, with a population of a few hundred, which overlooks Nablus, where there are 120,000 people, will soon be connected to a better road system than its larger Palestinian neighbour.

Construction work on the roads has been carried out with almost frantic speed since last September, when Israel and the PLO signed the second stage of the Oslo agreement.

Palestinian negotiators, focussing on increasing the size of their autonomous enclaves, appear to have underestimated the degree to which the bypass system would reinforce Israeli control of the West Bank.

Mrs Harow says Efrat has a population of 5,500. But she adds, ominously, that "its town plan is for an eventual population of 25,000".