antisemitismus.net / klick-nach-rechts.de / nahost-politik.de / zionismus.info

haGalil onLine - http://www.hagalil.com
     

  

Spenden Sie mit PayPal - schnell, kostenlos und sicher!

hagalil.com

Search haGalil

Veranstaltungskalender

Newsletter abonnieren
e-Postkarten
Bücher / Morascha
Musik

Koscher leben...
Tourismus

Aktiv gegen Nazi-Propaganda!
Jüdische Weisheit
 

Online Translation, Now!
Get this article translated online 
from english to hebrew, french, spanish, german...

M'ARIW
Translation of an article to be published
in Ma'ariv on May 14, 2000

haAhawah - hi tazil otkha:
LOVE OF THE CANNIBALS?

by Uri Avnery

Three persons say: "I love children." One is a father. One is a Paedophile who uses children for carnal satisfaction. One is a cannibal who eats them. They use the same words, but they mean quite different things.

The settlers love this country. They say so every day. They settle everywhere. But their love is like that of the cannibal, who likes the children fried.

This thought came to my mind a couple of days ago, when I was standing on a hill north of Ramallah, near the village of Dora al-Kareh. Before me there stretched a beauty spot I did not know before, hidden from the Jerusalem-Nablus highway.

A charming, flat valley between two ridges of steep hills is divided into small plots on which vegetables grow organically. The water of local springs flows in small canals which, the locals say, date back to Roman times. The water is divided between seven hamulahs (extended families) according to an unchanging quota worked out 400 years ago. On the Ramallah market, these well-known vegetables fetch prices considerably higher than others.

All this beauty is now threatened with extinction. All in the name of love for the country.

The slogan is "by-pass road", two innocuous words that hide a cruel reality.

On the face of it, what's wrong with a road? It helps the flow of traffic. A narrow strip of asphalt can't bother anybody. That's what people think when they hear about yet another by-pass road.

The reality is quite different. Let's take, for example, this particular road. It is designed to connect two settlements - Beth-El and Ofrah. Length: 5.9 km. Breadth: 220 (two hundred and twenty!) m. The road itself will be 60 meters wide, with a security margin of 80 meters on each side. 370 dunams will be expropriated outright, another 950 dunams will be rendered useless.

But the hidden is more important than the transparent. The road will separate three villages from a great part of their lands. In practice, these will be added to the settlements.

Some explanations may be in order:

Before the elections, Ehud Barak visited Beth-El and Ofrah and promised publicly that they will stay there forever. That was rather odd, because the recurring theme in his propaganda was "separation" ("We shall be here and they will be there…"), meaning that only big "settlement blocs" will be annexed to Israel, while the settlers in isolated spots will be evacuated or become residents of Palestine.

Beth-El and Ofrah are both isolated in the middle of the Palestinian population, far from the green line. But the leaders of the fanatical settlers live there, and Barak wants to cultivate them. How? Simple: These isolated settlements will be turned into a new "settlement bloc", to be annexed to Israel.

The "by-pass road" serves this purpose. From a transportation point of view it is quite superfluous: These two settlements are already connected by existing roads. The new road will save the settlers five minutes driving time. Even if a new road has to be built, it can be much shorter. The planned road is unnecessarily long and winding.

So what's the real purpose? Well, the road is, of course, to be annexed to Israel. It follows automatically that all the land between the road and the settlements will be annexed too. The road is a knife cutting off a big slice of territory from the future State of Palestine.

The same happens now all over the West Bank. This case is different only because of the beauty of the landscape. While Barak chatters endlessly about "framework" and "permanent status" agreements and while negotiators meet all the time, Barak conducts a resolute campaign to enlarge the "settlement blocs". The roads serve this purpose.

In this campaign of "creating facts on the ground", not only are new injustices added to old ones, but also irreparable damage is being done to the landscape of this country. It's a new crime: the murder of the land, perhaps to be called "terracide".

Get this article in Hebrew

Gush Shalom

 

Werben in haGalil?
Ihre Anzeige hier!

Advertize in haGalil?
Your Ad here!

 

haGalil.com ist kostenlos! Trotzdem: haGalil kostet Geld!

Die bei haGalil onLine und den angeschlossenen Domains veröffentlichten Texte spiegeln Meinungen und Kenntnisstand der jeweiligen Autoren.
Sie geben nicht unbedingt die Meinung der Herausgeber bzw. der Gesamtredaktion wieder.
haGalil onLine

[Impressum]
Kontakt: hagalil@hagalil.com
haGalil - Postfach 900504 - D-81505 München

1995-2006 © haGalil onLine® bzw. den angeg. Rechteinhabern
Munich - Tel Aviv - All Rights Reserved