USAID funding Israel's apartheid road construction

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 17 May 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11267.shtml


USAID is financing roads in the occupied West Bank that will further restrict
Palestinians from being able to move around the territory. (Keren
Manor/ActiveStills)

The construction of sections of a controversial segregated road network in the
West Bank planned by Israel for Palestinians -- leaving the main roads for
exclusive use by settlers -- is being financed by a US government aid agency, a
map prepared by Palestinian researchers has revealed.

USAID, which funds development projects in Palestinian areas, is reported to
have helped to build 114 kilometers of Israeli-proposed roads, despite a pledge
from Washington six years ago that it would not assist in implementing what has
been widely described as Israel's "apartheid road" plan.

To date the agency has paid for the construction of nearly a quarter of the
segregated road network put forward by Israel in 2004, said the Applied Research
Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ).

The roads are designed to provide alternative routes to connect Palestinian
communities, often by upgrading circuitous dirt tracks or by building tunnels
under existing routes.

Meanwhile, according to human rights groups, Israel has reserved an increasing
number of main roads in the West Bank for Israelis so that Jewish settlers can
drive more easily and quickly into Israel, making their illegal communities more
attractive places to live.

The US agency's involvement in building a segregated West Bank road
infrastructure would run counter to Washington's oft-stated goal, including as
it launched "proximity talks" last week, to establish a viable Palestinian state
with territorial contiguity.

"The displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank's main roads improves the
appeal of the settlements by better integrating them into Israel," said Suheil
Khalilieh, the head of settlement monitoring at ARIJ. "Conversely, creating an
inferior, alternative network of local roads makes travel between the main
regions of the West Bank difficult and time-consuming for Palestinians."

Israel proposed the creation of two separate road systems in 2004, after many of
the West Bank's main roads had been sealed off to Palestinians following the
outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada.

Ariel Sharon, then prime minister, argued that segregated infrastructure would
create "contiguity of transportation" for Palestinians and help to alleviate
economic hardship resulting from hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that
restrict Palestinian movement.

The international community was asked to finance 500 kilometers of roads for the
Palestinians, later termed "fabric of life" roads, including upgrading
agricultural tracks and constructing many underpasses and bridges, at a cost of
$200 million.

The Palestinian Authority, however, objected, saying the plan would further
entrench the illegal settlements in the West Bank and justify confiscating yet
more Palestinian land for the new roads.

That position was backed by international donors, including the US, which
declared it would not finance any road projects against the PA's will.

Despite the US promise, however, a map of the West Bank recently published by
ARIJ shows that 23 percent of the "alternative" road network Israel proposed has
been built with USAID money.

Many of these roads are located in so-called Areas B and C, more than 80 percent
of the West Bank that was assigned to Israeli security control by the Oslo
accords. Israel oversees all road projects in these areas.

Khalilieh said the PA was being effectively bullied into conceding the road
infrastructure wanted by Israel.

"What happens is that USAID presents a package deal of donations for
infrastructure projects in the West Bank and the Palestinians are faced with a
choice of take it or leave it. That way the PA is cornered into accepting roads
it does not want."

He said some roads were also being approved because of a lack of oversight by
the PA. An inter-ministerial committee to vet proposed roads to ensure they did
not contribute to the Israeli plan had been inactive since 2006, he said,
following the split between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian elections.

After PA officials were presented with ARIJ's map, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian
prime minister, issued a statement last weekend denying that the PA had
contributed to the Israeli-proposed road network.

However, in a sign that such reassurances were unlikely to dampen concerns, he
reconvened the inter-ministerial committee to conduct field visits to check on
road projects that had been carried out or were in progress.

Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian government spokesman and a former planning
minister, said the PA was taking the issue "very seriously" and was doing
everything possible to resist the emergence of an "apartheid system" in the West
Bank.

He added that, if roads were being built that served the settlers' interests,
"that is not supposed to happen."

According to USAID's figures, it has financed 235 kilometers of roads in the
West Bank in the past decade, and is preparing to add another 120 kilometers by
the end of this year.

Critics add that in some cases the upgrading by USAID of minor roads, even those
not included in the Israeli plan, has worked to the same end of keeping
Palestinians off the West Bank's main highways.

USAID officials were unavailable for comment.

Among roads for Palestinians funded by USAID are several projects south of
Bethlehem that appear to be providing an "alternative" to Road 60, a busy
highway that has traditionally linked Jerusalem with the Palestinian cities of
Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank.

Israel has increasingly restricted Palestinian access to Road 60 because it also
serves as a fast direct route for Jewish settlers in the Gush Etzion bloc
driving to and from Jerusalem.

As a result, residents of several nearby Palestinian villages, including Batir,
Wadi Fukin, al-Walaja and Husan, have been forced off Road 60 and on to
USAID-funded side roads and underpasses to connect them to Bethlehem and other
neighboring communities.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said
170 kilometers of roads in the West Bank were either off-limits to Palestinians
or highly restricted, creating what the organization has called "forbidden
roads."

B'Tselem noted that, after the 2004 scheme for complete separation was rejected
by donors, Israel adapted the plan, using bridges, tunnels and interchanges to
create partial separation, with Israelis "traveling on the fast upper levels,
and Palestinians on the lower levels." It concluded: "The plan allows
Palestinian vehicles to travel on only 20 percent of the [West Bank] roads on
which Israeli vehicles travel."

Michaeli added that the growing dependence of Palestinian traffic on underpasses
meant that Israel was in a position to control or even sever connections between
Palestinian areas with only one military jeep.

Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, the director of Badil, a Bethlehem-based organization
that has lobbied against road segregation in the southern West Bank, said there
was considerable domestic and international pressure on the PA to agree to roads
dictated by Israel, if only because they often eased the existing restrictions
on Palestinian movement.

"Sadly, the PA is helping to build its own Bantustans," she said. "Palestinian
towns and villages connected by back roads and tunnels while the settlers
control the main highways is what the US appears to mean when it talks about a
viable Palestinian state."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest
books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's
Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu
Dhabi.