West Bank split into isolated enclaves: World Bank

Source: Reuters

West Bank split into isolated enclaves: World Bank

Reuters - 27 minutes ago

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli restrictions have divided the
occupied West Bank into 10 economically isolated enclaves,
severing financial links and denying Palestinians access to
some 50 percent of the land, the World Bank said.

The Washington-based international lending agency, in a
report released on Wednesday in Jerusalem, said Israeli
security concerns were "undeniable and must be
addressed".

But the World Bank said Israel's West Bank barrier and
system of road and zoning restrictions were aimed at
"protecting and enhancing the free movement of settlers
and the physical and economic expansion of the
settlements at the expense of the Palestinian
population".

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been hard hit
economically by a year-old Western embargo of the
Hamas- led Palestinian government.

-snip-

Read more: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20070509/tpl-uk-palestinians-access-43a8d4f.html

Take action. End the Occupation. Work for peace, work for human rights.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/

to 1967? you really think that the jordanians or the egyptians did anything to help the palestinians between 1948-1967?

hells until 1988 jordan claimed the west bank to be its own not a palestinian state.

Quick look over there!! Ignore reality on the ground. Look at this lovely little duck...brick in color. One could say almost red.

Claims and reality are two very different things.

what did egypt and jordan do prior to 1967 to help establish a palestinian state?

The old question game to avoid reality...

Doesn't it ever get boring? Oops. I asked an off-topic question. Now I must demand an answer before I engage in any discussion.

How many of these "enclaves" existed prior to 2000?

the wall is being looked at as a solution for those pesky sunnis and other riff raff ...

‘A Dubai on the Mediterranean’

>snip

The part of the Plan that relates to the West Bank calls for the evacuation of four of the 120 Jewish settlements in ‘an area’ to the north of Nablus, allowing for territorial contiguity for Palestinians there. However, in July the Israeli security cabinet determined that Israel would ‘retain security control of the territory around the four West Bank settlements and keep existing military bases in the area’. In other regions of the West Bank, Israel will ‘assist . . . in improving the transportation infrastructure in order to facilitate the contiguity of Palestinian transportation’. This ‘contiguity of transportation’ will have to accommodate the following conditions.

1. A planned 620-kilometre wall (of which 205 kilometres have been built) made of nine-metre-high concrete slabs and impermeable fences, constructed on confiscated West Bank land; at present 10 per cent of all Palestinians – 242,000 people – are isolated in the closed military zone between Israel’s border and the western side of the wall, and 12 per cent are separated internally from their land because of settler roads and housing blocks. At best Palestinians will have access to 54 per cent of the West Bank once the wall is completed.

2. Twenty-nine settler highways or bypasses spanning 400 kilometres of the West Bank, explicitly designed to provide freedom of movement for 400,000 Jewish settlers while imprisoning three million Palestinians in their encircled and isolated enclaves.

3. Forty planned tunnels in the West Bank (of which 28 have been completed, compared to seven a year ago) that will connect Jewish settlements to each other and to Israel.

4. The planned construction of 6400 new settlement houses in the West Bank. At least 42 settlements are being expanded and colleges, hotels, commercial areas and parks being built.

5. The isolation of East Jerusalem – the commercial and cultural heart of the West Bank – from Ramallah and Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank.

6. The separation of the northern and southern West Bank; and the separation of Gaza, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Salfit, Nablus and Jenin.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n21/roy_01_.html

From The Age:

A new World Bank report has harshly criticised Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, trade and residency rights which it says make economic progress impossible in the occupied territories.

Cast in unusually forthright language, the 18-page report notes that the number of roadblocks and other restrictions on Palestinian movement has increased by 44 per cent since Israel signed a November 2005 agreement - brokered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - to reduce them.

It says that Israel's network of Jewish settlements, military bases, security zones, fences, barriers, roadblocks, checkpoints and "settler roads" (from which most Arabs are banned) has turned the West Bank into 10 disconnected Palestinian cantons, which continue to shrink as the settlements expand.

"While Israeli security concerns are undeniable and must be addressed, it is often difficult to reconcile the use of closure for security purposes from its use to expand and protect settlement activity and the relatively unhindered movement of settlers in and out of the West Bank," the report states.

The report questions Israel's continuing control over the Palestinian population registry, whereby Israeli military rulers decide where ordinary Palestinians can live, work and travel within the occupied territories.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/israel-condemned-over-restriction-of-movement/2007/05/09/1178390385550.html

<snip>

"Peace campaigners in Israel are protesting about a new government policy which has banned West Bank Palestinians from bathing in the Dead Sea.

In a letter to the Defence Minister, Gush Shalom says that under a new policy, army roadblocks in the North Dead Sea region completely deny West Bank Palestinians from having access to the Dead Sea shore. Many Palestinian families and groups of school children, on their way to bath in the sea, have been turned back by the soldiers.

In the arrid country where summer temperatures can reach 40C - the Dead Sea was the last stretch of water open for bathing to West Bank inhabitants. Access to the Mediterranean had been denied for decades.

The North Dead Sea region is an inseparable part of the West Bank, occupied in 1967. In the Olso Agreements the State of Israel took the specific obligation to let Palestinians have access to the Dead Sea."

http://www.indcatholicnews.com/deadse327.html

<snip>

"Every few weeks some international body issues a report directly linking the policy of restricted movement imposed by Israel on the occupied territories and the state of economic deterioration there. The report is often accompanied by a warning that the situation cannot persist. Last week it was the turn of the World Bank to issue a cautionary report, entitled "Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy."

Dozens of international researchers and economic attaches are busy researching the Palestinians' economic deterioration, and many more similar reports will yet be written, as long as the countries that finance them settle for words and do not take steps to halt the policy of social and economic destruction that Israel is imposing on the Palestinians. The newest report is comprehensive, but there is nothing new in it and it stresses what has been written and said for years: Israel is inflicting enormous damage on the Palestinian economy and on its private sector.

In 2002, following the release of a report on the impact of Israel's closure policy, the previous World Bank representative in the occupied territories, Nigel Roberts, praised the Palestinian society's endurance and suggested that any Western society would have collapsed had it undergone an economic disaster similar to that experienced in the territories. Today, five years after that report's warnings and pleas, Palestinian society's collapse is more worrying than ever - primarily in the Gaza Strip and Nablus, which not coincidentally are the areas facing the harshest Israeli siege.

And why should Israel take into consideration the warnings of the World Bank when they have no teeth? It is not enough to mention the apartheid roads in connection with the expansion of the settlements, or the fact that around 50 percent of West Bank territory is not accessible to Palestinians. It is not enough to count the trucks at the Karni crossing that do not enter and exit, or to calculate the small number of days when the Rafah terminal is open. It is not enough to adorn the reports with scholarly charts presenting the Palestinian territories as a perpetual disaster area."

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