West Bank Savors Fall of Barriers

The president of the West Bank’s leading university stood on a sun-scorched roadside Sunday, watching beat-up cars stream past, churning up choking clouds of dust. A beautiful sight, he declared.

Hours before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon departed for the United States for talks this week with President Bush, Israeli forces dismantled 10 checkpoints inside the West Bank. The barriers had prevented tens of thousands of Palestinians from traveling to jobs, school, relatives’ houses and doctors’ offices, or forced them to spend long and arduous hours doing so.

Dozens of other such checkpoints remain scattered across the West Bank. But for those Palestinians suddenly able to travel to nearby towns and villages without scrambling over earthen barriers or trekking for miles, it was a sweet moment.

“To me, this is the beginning -- this is the first time we are seeing something real as a result of this ‘road map,’ ” said Hamid Bazar, a grocer in this village outside the city of Ramallah, referring to the U.S.-backed peace plan.

The Surda checkpoint, in place for the last two years, was one of the most hated Israeli barriers in the West Bank. Located on a main north-south road, it had cut off more than a dozen towns and villages from Ramallah, the area’s commercial center, and isolated the prestigious Birzeit University.

To pass through the checkpoint, Palestinians -- the elderly, the infirm, mothers with small children, pregnant women -- had to scramble over two high dirt barriers separated by half a mile of scorching asphalt.

“It was difficult and dirty and very humiliating,” said Hanna Nasir, the president of Birzeit. “And there were so many people who had to do this every day, twice a day, to get to work.”

As Israeli bulldozers moved in to dismantle the barricades, Palestinians honked their car horns and cheered from the back of horse- and donkey-drawn carts that have done a brisk business carrying passengers through the no man’s land between the barriers. Women ululated in celebration.

Palestinians and human rights groups have long argued that roadblocks cutting off one part of the West Bank from others -- as opposed to restricting movement in and out of Israel proper -- served no genuine security purpose.

“They created a reality under which people could barely conduct their daily lives,” said Yael Stein of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

The first large-scale removal of internal checkpoints in the West Bank was one of a series of measures by Israel meant to strike a conciliatory note in advance of Sharon’s White House visit.

Mindful of the warm reception given to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas last week in Washington, the Israelis were eager to signal willingness to move ahead with the U.S.-backed peace plan. The initiative was endorsed by the two sides nearly eight weeks ago at a summit presided over by Bush, but progress in implementing it has been slow.

In what Israeli officials described as a move meant to bolster Abbas’ government, Israel’s Cabinet voted Sunday to approve the release of 100 Palestinian militants, including members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, when it gives freedom to several hundred prisoners.

But Israel’s envisioned release of prisoners falls far short of demands by Palestinians, who want to see most, if not all, of the estimated 6,000 to 8,000 jailed Palestinians freed.

The main Palestinian militant groups have been warning that without some movement soon on the prisoner issue, the unilateral three-month truce they declared June 29 is in jeopardy. The cease-fire has brought one of the longest periods of calm since the intifada erupted 34 months ago.

At Tuesday’s talks with Bush, Sharon is certain to come under pressure over Israel’s construction of a security barrier whose planned route appropriates large swaths of Palestinian land. After his talks with Abbas on Friday, the U.S. president called the security fence a “problem.” Israel insists that the barrier is meant to keep out suicide bombers and other attackers, rather than to lay claim to Palestinian territory.

Sharon, however, has never been enthusiastic about the fence to begin with, and some analysts suggested that he might in fact be glad to trade a halt in construction for American support in other matters.

Israeli officials said the prime minister will argue that because Abbas’ government has not moved forcefully against militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, these organizations are using the truce hiatus to rearm and reorganize.

“We will be explaining to the president that the Palestinians have to undertake more serious action against the terror infrastructure, or in a few months’ time, we will be back where we were, but with these groups having had an opportunity to strengthen themselves,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled.

Israel has indicated that it is prepared to move ahead soon with more troop pullbacks from Palestinian cities and towns, as mandated by the peace plan. While Sharon is in Washington, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is to meet with the Palestinian security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, to discuss which areas will be handed over next to Palestinian security control.

The Palestinians have asked that the Israelis leave Ramallah, the site of the shell-battered compound to which Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat is confined. Israeli officials, however, are offering instead to pull back from Jericho -- where there is only a light Israeli troop presence -- or from the northern West Bank towns of Kalkilya and Tulkarm.

Palestinian officials said that in last week’s Washington talks, they had for the first time received a sympathetic hearing from the Bush administration on restoring Arafat’s freedom of movement. The Bush administration supported Israel’s decision to isolate Arafat in his headquarters more than a year ago, but the Palestinians say keeping their leader penned up is damaging Abbas’ public standing.