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Description
JERUSALEM--THE BEST WAY TO UNderstand just how Ariel Sharon plans to crumple and fold the road map to Israeli-Palestinian peace is to get out on the roads of the West Bank. Drive east from Jerusalem. Pass the stone-faced apartment buildings of Ma'aleh Adumim, a suburb of 25,000 that is the largest single Israeli settlement in the territories. Before Jericho, turn left onto a two-lane strip of asphalt that rises and plunges, in a tangle of stomach-wrenching switch-backs, through the desolate hills of the Judean Desert. To the side of the road is the settlement of Alon, a cluster of stone houses and mobile homes where several hundred Israelis live.
Keep going north. A sign points to Ein Prat--an "outpost" where a single family of settlers lives in a house built in the time of British rule. A short distance beyond is another outpost. The place is called Ma'aleh Hagit--a handful of mobile homes, a water tank, a power line that loops around the hilltop to feed the perimeter lights. An army jeep stands by a plastic swing set and slide; a pair of soldiers stand guard over the three or four families that populate the place--though under Israel's own laws, the settlers' presence is apparently illegal, outside the bounds of any government-approved settlement.
Up the road is the outpost of Mitzpeh Danny, home to another few families. Turn west, toward the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Al-Birah, and you reach Migron, a year-and-a-half-old Israeli outpost that began with a guard watching over... |
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