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Tarring a road, building an elevated traffic island as a lane divider, leveling an area and cleaning it - there is no reason for these to take up a single line in the newspaper. Tarring a road, as common sense would have it, means using taxpayers' money for their benefit, a service that goes without saying, that is part of the ongoing contract between citizens and the authorities.
But when this tarring takes place on a road north of Bir Zeit, and the one executing it is the Israel Defense Forces, which also grabbed under GOC order dozens of dunams belonging to several Palestinian families, and commandeered one family's home in its absence, then we're dealing with an ongoing contract of another sort. It is a contract between the state authorities and the Jewish citizens of Israel which permits them to use Palestinian land and property to the detriment of the Palestinian public.
The tarring is under way right now, and it deserves more than a line in the paper. But the problem is that even 50 lines, and even were these to appear on the front page, would not put a stop to this evil plunder.
When the authorities build a traffic island in Kfar Saba and designate driving lanes, they do so for the public good and for the sake of its safety. When the same thing is done at the end of a road like the one at the Bir Zeit/Atara junction, the objective is different: to erect another permanent checkpoint (a "monitoring area," in the IDF's euphemism), in place of the improvised checkpoint that has been in sporadic operation there for five years. And a permanent checkpoint means another violation in an endless series of violations of Palestinian freedom of movement.
This means another, nearly final, step toward completing the military and settler encirclement of the Ramallah region. In other words, another measure in severing the Ramallah province from the rest of the West Bank's cut off Palestinian enclaves.
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