As the right-wing, ultra-Orthodox nationalist freebie Olam Katan announced on Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces intends to sever Palestinian territorial contiguity in Ramallah-El Bireh, cutting off the neighborhoods and villages in the north of the metropolitan area from the rest of it.
This will be done by permitting settlers to drive on an east-west road that runs through the heart of a Palestinian urban area. The road serves a large hospital, a university, a school and a sewage treatment plant. Opening the road to settlers will require setting up new military posts near Palestinian communities and new army checkpoints that will disrupt Palestinian movement within, into and out of the metropolis. This particular case reflects a broader process under way in other parts of the West Bank, driven by the settler establishment – the most powerful force in the government.
On Thursday, Olam Katan quoted Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council of settlements and of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council in the central West Bank. Ganz said opening the road to settler traffic had been approved in principle, a budget had been allocated and the army had already begun preparing, including legally, to open the route. According to Olam Katan, Ganz said this would involve relocating military bases and equipment and would therefore take several months.
It took the IDF Spokesperson's Unit five days to respond to Haaretz's questions on the matter, and its response effectively confirmed Ganz's remarks. "The IDF is working to put in place special security arrangements for future travel on the route," said the response, received on Sunday afternoon. It added that a section of the road passes through Area A (where the Palestinians have policing authority), and that entering Area A is "prohibited, dangerous and a criminal offense." The spokesperson did not explain how the army would reconcile Israelis driving on the road with the fact that part of it falls within Area A.
Click here to read Haaretz's explainer of the West Bank's fractured map, 30 years after the Oslo Accords.
In recent months, the settler establishment and settlement residents have stepped up pressure on the army to open the east-west road in the heart of the Palestinian metropolis to settler traffic. That pressure has taken several forms: well-publicized, filmed forays by Israelis onto the road, Israeli flags hung along it, public dancing near a city park and coverage in the settler press and on social media. These forays require some degree of military assistance – at the very least notifying the army, if not an armed escort.
The road in question runs for about 10 kilometers (6 miles), from the city of El Bireh and the Jalazone refugee camp in the east to the village of Ein Qiniya in the west. It is part of a road network planned and paved by the Ramallah municipality and known as the "Chinese Road," after China, which funded the project. The network of roads eases traffic congestion in the centers of Ramallah and El Bireh.
The route the settlers are demanding to use was carved out in 1994 between the settlements of Beit El in the east and Dolev in the west by the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, without the approval of the army or the Civil Administration's planning authorities. The council head at the time was Pinchas Wallerstein, one of the pioneers of the post-1967 settler movement. He was behind several roads in the area carved out without official permits to link settlements and shorten travel times between them, but it is this one that bears his name: Route 463, known as "Wallerstein Road." The roads Mateh Binyamin carved out after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 were meant to limit the size of the territory to be handed back to Palestinian planning and administrative authority.
Then-IDF Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak opposed letting Israeli civilians use Route 463, but then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres approved it. Since the second intifada, the army has barred both settlers and Palestinians from the road. A locked iron gate was placed at its western end, between Ein Qiniya and the settlement of Dolev.
The ban on Palestinians gradually lapsed, but their access to the Ramallah area from the west was blocked anyway. The settlements of Talmon and Dolev – and the outposts that have sprung up around them and grown into independent settlements and neighborhoods – have taken over an area rich in springs and olive groves belonging to nearby Palestinian villages, and they bar Palestinian movement in and through it.
In late August, several right-wing websites reported that hundreds of residents were organizing to demand the right to drive on the road. On September 9, six Israelis were seen and photographed putting up a Hebrew sign at the busy Surda junction, where Route 463 meets the north-south road coming from Birzeit. It turned out that relatives of Ita and Ephraim Tzur, a mother and son from Beit El who were killed in a shooting attack there in December 1996, were naming the junction "Tzur Junction" in their memory. A Palestinian security service removed the sign.
The following week, religious-looking Israelis showed up along the Chinese Road on two to four occasions, depending on the account. They hung Israeli flags on two traffic circles and along the roadside, and approached a large city park, half running, half dancing. A resident of Ein Qiniya told Haaretz they had come in several cars from the direction of the settlement of Dolev. To get there, they needed the army to open the iron gate, which is overlooked by a military pillbox. "Returning the road to Jewish hands," read the caption on a video documenting the flag-hanging.
Several kilometers along the western and eastern stretches of the road were kept in Area C (where Israel holds planning and administrative control, in addition to security control), even though they lie at the very heart of the Ramallah-El Bireh metropolis. That status now provides the formal basis for the settlers' demand to drive freely on the road.
Under the Oslo Accords, the artificial division of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C was supposed to expire in 1999. By then, most of the territory, apart from settlements and military bases, was to have been transferred to full Palestinian civil authority, along with policing powers. Overriding security authority remained with Israel throughout the West Bank in any case. Israel froze the process, citing security, and in doing so perpetuated its control over all planning, construction and development – permitted for Jews only – in more than 60 percent of the territory.
Some 400,000 Palestinians live in the Ramallah district, in 80 localities – cities, towns, villages and refugee camps – as well as in a number of herding and Bedouin communities. The district covers about 855 square kilometers (330 square miles). Like other West Bank districts in the wake of the Oslo Accords, it has been carved into enclaves by swaths of Area C, settlements and bypass roads. The Ramallah district has at least 35 enclaves, six of them relatively large. The rest are clusters of villages cut off from one another, plus several isolated villages.
Over the years, the army has installed dozens of iron gates and earth-and-rock roadblocks. These restrict and slow movement between the enclaves in each district and from one district to another. Since October 2023, still more checkpoints and roadblocks have been added, deepening internal fragmentation. Eleven recently established outposts in Area B (where the Palestinians have planning and administrative authority) in the Ramallah district bring with them a heavier military presence, which in turn further restricts Palestinian movement within the district. Route 463 would play the same role if it were opened to settler traffic: disrupting Palestinian movement and fragmenting the metropolis.
As experience in dozens of other places in the West Bank shows, protecting settlers on Route 463 will require seizing more public and private land along it for military posts and checkpoints to screen Palestinians. Eight villages and two large urban neighborhoods in the north of the metropolis will thus be cut off from the area south of the road. Their tens of thousands of residents will presumably opt for the old Route 60, which runs alongside the Jalazone refugee camp and is already well beyond capacity.
The Chinese Road network, including Route 463, provides access to the Istishari Hospital and the Arab American University campus, both in Ramallah's Reehan neighborhood, as well as the area's sewage treatment plant. It is hard to imagine how these will function with military posts and checkpoints along the road. Fewer people are already visiting Ramallah's public park, for fear that settlers will show up there again.
For decades, the settlers have demonstrated their capacity for planning and shown that none of their initiatives stands alone. This time, too, the vigorous campaign to open the road is accompanied by other takeovers of land and roads in the Ramallah district. These have gone largely unnoticed in Israel because so far they have not involved exceptional violence.
One example is a plot of land along a north-south road that branches off Route 463 toward the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Al-Tira. For years, settlers have been coming there escorted by soldiers and have been seen praying on the site. About two years ago, a security source told Haaretz that the land is owned by Jews.
In recent months, Israelis have leveled the ground there and placed two concrete blocks on it, and in early September a locked gray iron gate was installed. About two weeks ago, an Israeli flag was raised there on a tall pole, but it was removed a few days later. On Sunday, some 15 religious-looking Israelis came to the plot, planted an Israeli flag and prayed. The IDF did not respond to Haaretz's question about the leveling work there.
Moreover, settlers from the Talmonim settlement bloc are now demanding access to a road in the southern part of the Ramallah metropolis. That road was originally built to compensate Palestinians for being barred from Route 443. Meanwhile, the Transportation Ministry is planning a road that would shorten the trip for those same settlers to Route 443 and Jerusalem. It would be paved on the farmland of yet more Palestinian villages.
The army's willingness to meet settlers' demands to shorten their travel routes in the West Bank goes hand in hand with the proliferation of outposts, their official and unofficial legalization and their escalating violence. Together, these herald the further fragmentation of Palestinian space into shrinking units, increasingly cut off from one another, with travel between them growing ever longer and more disrupted.
