The Forbidden Roads
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights information organization, has a map showing a network of roads connecting illegal settlements thorughout the occupied West Bank as part of an apartheid system meant to annex land. If you’re Palestinian, they swear there will be a tunnel for you.
PDF of the map is here.
Eoin Murray writes about traveling around these roads, some still under construction, with Palestinians in his January 20, 2007 post, “The hate that dare not speak its name.”
“But who’s afraid of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters, it’s the after-war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It’s all going to happen.”