By all appearances, it's possible to drive from the
village of Burkin to Jenin on the main road. It's
a five-minute trip. But at the end of the road is
an earth barrier that no car can get by. So you
have to take the roundabout route, between the
olive groves... Almost always a tank or some
other armored vehicle of the
Israel Defense Forces emerges
from between the trees. In some
cases, the soldiers tell the
driver to turn around go back
the way he came. Sometimes they
let him continue. It's
perfectly arbitrary. Sometimes
the soldiers slash the four tires to render the car immobile, or they may
impound the car keys for a few hours. There are
cases in which the soldiers open fire in the
direction of the passengers to frighten them,
and, in rare instances, they kill them...
This state of affairs has absolutely nothing to
do with the security of Israelis. The fact is
that traffic carries on somehow. You can get
from Burkin to Jenin, and you can even
transport terrorists and bombs, but to do it
you have to use back roads that are more like
trails. The purpose here is different. It's to
make the lives of the local residents as
miserable as possible...This is the sole reason for much of the army
activity in the territories, though it's
carried out under the lying guise of
maintaining security.
People who
thought that the cessation of the terrorist
attacks brought about an easing of this
situation are wrong; far from easing the
situation, in the past few days, the IDF has
been working to raise the height of the
barriers in the villages around Tul Karm and
Qalqilyah.
Few Israelis are aware of this reality...
"How old are you?" a soldier at a checkpoint
rudely asks a young Palestinian driver in the
2002 documentary "Ford Transit" (2002), a film
by Hany Abu-Assad that last week received the
Spirit of Freedom award at the Jerusalem Film
Festival. "A hundred," the Palestinian jokes,
and gets a fist in his face from the soldier.
Palestinians.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=322416&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y