Part three • From the West Bank, a circuitous road to market
Trucker Rajaee Sultan Tamimi starts his hours-long trek from Hebron to Jerusalem's edge at 4:40 a.m. because of checkpoints. If he could drive straight to the city, it would take 45 minutes. Part 3 of three.
HEBRON, WEST BANK –
Rajaee Sultan Tamimi rises at 3 a.m. He leaves the house about 4 a.m. and arrives here by 4:30, two hours before sunrise.
He's an Al-Juneidi Dairy & Food Stuffs Company truck driver, father of eight, and on this recent weekday, he has a cargo of some 500 cases of yogurt and other dairy products to get to an Israeli army-run checkpoint at Beitunia, outside Ramallah.
After inspection, the goods will be switched to a truck with yellow license plates that signal permission to enter Israel. That truck will take the goods south, into Jerusalem, to shelves in stores all across the city's Arab sector.
Like a growing number of West Bank residents, Mr. Tamimi doesn't have Israeli permission to enter Jerusalem. For Palestinian businesses to get their produce into East Jerusalem - which has always been a natural market for them - it's becoming a longer, more complicated, and circuitous haul. They face Israel's security barrier - a concrete wall in some parts and fence in others - and more security checkpoints outside Jerusalem, says the Israeli human rights group Btselem.
"The number of staffed checkpoints is fairly constant, while the number of physical obstacles often changes, depending on the political and security situation," the group says on its website, adding that some 470 obstacles block roads.
"What we've mostly seen is more physical obstacles: The [Israeli] army putting up concrete blocks, dirt mounds, or trenches so that they channel all traffic to the main roads where you have the checkpoints, to make sure that people don't avoid them and to make sure Palestinians don't have access to roads that are only for settlers," says Jessica Montell, the executive director of Btselem.
If Mr. Tamimi could travel straight from Hebron to Jerusalem, his daily haul - instead of snaking around the West Bank through checkpoints and around settlements for four hours - would take about 45 minutes.
In fact, when he started driving in the early 1980s, that's exactly what he did, making deliveries as far north as Haifa and Galilee. "It's now at least double the time to do everything we used to do," says Tamimi. "What makes it bad is that they're saying it will get better, but it's worse."
Barrier to truckers and students alike
Since the start of the last intifada, which began in September 2000, there's been a drastic reduction in the number of permits given to West Bankers to enter Israel. Since the election of Hamas in January, the seal has become tighter, with the ban over the past year extended even to Palestinian students who want to study at - and have been accepted to - Israeli universities.
On Monday, Israel's Supreme Court called a sweeping ban against Palestinian students studying at Israeli universities unreasonable and ordered the military to set specific criteria for admitting at least some Palestinian students into Israel for purposes of study. The decision followed a challenge from Gisha, the Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement.
From a height of a few hundred students who studied in Israel in 1996, says Sari Bashi, the executive director of Gisha, the Center for the Legal Protection Freedom of Movement, there are currently 14 Palestinian students with permits to study in Israel.
"There's been an overall chilling affect, so Israeli universities have stopped admitting and Palestinian students have stopped applying," says Ms. Bashi, whose organization deals with freedom-of-movement issues for Palestinians in the territories.
The new walls around Jerusalem, she says, mean that many Palestinian students from the West Bank and the outlying areas are no longer able to get to Al-Quds University, which has campuses both inside Jerusalem and in nearby Abu Dis.
"The university is having to duplicate a lot of their services, and around 30 percent of students and faculty are having problems to get their classes. Jerusalem is a hub, so when you cut off that hub from people who live in the surroundings, you're denying people access to family members, commerce, and education."
Traversing new economic realities
Tamimi is on the road at 4:40 a.m., a time when the streets of Hebron are silent and somber. He winds down a back road to avoid a checkpoint at the entrance to the city.
Then he heads north, past Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements. Just as he reaches the southern entrance to Efrat, one of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he turns right on a road that will lead him east and north. "If we were able to go straight to Jerusalem," he says, turning, "we'd be there in 10 minutes." This way, the road is old and winding, and at this hour, darker.
Around 5:20, he's passing the settlement of Tekoa, on a hilltop surrounded by Palestinian villages. Tekoa's location is so remote that, according to current plans, it will be left outside the wall, or security barrier, which has yet to be built in this area. In Tamimi's opinion, there are not enough people there to warrant the resources it gets. The roads leading to it are well-lit, while this one is dark. "This road is for Arabs," he says. "See, no lights."
He reaches a checkpoint near Sawahare known by everyone as "the container," because there used to be a shipping container here that marked the place of the checkpoint. Sometimes, he says, it takes two hours to get through. But he's having a good morning, and soldiers wave him through.
"They never tell you what the holdup is, just that they need to check," he says. "Sometimes they will bring dogs to sniff inside the truck."
Heading along the curvy road, he slows down by a small neighborhood mosque, its slim minaret topped with neon green rings. He hops out of the truck and goes inside to quickly say his morning prayers.
Given that he's about to drive into the Valley of Fire, apparently named for its treacherous roads, stopping to pray seems especially sensible.
"When it's rainy, we don't take it," he says, downshifting and moving more slowly. Over mountains that are rough and dry, the light is starting to peek out, brightening the valley.
"At least I get a chance to get out of my house and see something," he says. These days, West Bankers rarely go into Jerusalem.
Getting Israelis and Palestinians to "separate" has been a stated goal of politicians since the Labor Party's Ehud Barak was prime minister in 1999.
He argued for less Palestinian contact with Israel, whether with the intention of enabling an independent state or simply decoupling the economic lives of the two people.
"Us here, them there," was one of his slogans. This, it was argued, would erase points of friction and opportunities for terrorism.
But the friction is still there, and Palestinians are feeling the economic pinch.
"There are [expiration] dates, and because yogurt is a sensitive material, if it is not sent back immediately the next day, all of this traveling back and forth affects the quality of the product," says Nidal Mohammed, marketing manager with Al-Juneidi.
"Al Juneidi's income in Jerusalem was about 15 percent of our overall income, and now that's almost a total loss for us. But our objective is to stay alive in the Palestinian areas and keep our presence on the shelves, so we keep delivering."
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WEST BANK ROAD:
Palestinian truck driver Rajaee Sultan Tamimi begins his day about 4:30 a.m. so that he can reach Beitunia checkpoint. The checkpoints are much more tense than they used to be. 'They're always stressed,' he says of the soldiers. 'Before, you could drink tea with them and chat.'
PHOTOS BY ILENE R. PRUSHER
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