Reducing the number of checkpoints in the West Bank so that Palestinians can live normal lives, go to work, do their shopping, visit relatives, go to school and even (as in Hebron) cross the road without having to make a kilometers-long detour, should not have to be considered a "gesture" to Mahmoud Abbas, but rather something that should have been done a long time ago. The Defense Ministry, focused on security issues, has had plans for removing checkpoints, but apparently the leadership capable of implementing them was not to be found.

The world of the West Bank checkpoints has been documented in Israeli and foreign-made documentaries, and sometimes it looks like a laboratory experiment designed to test the limits of the human capacity to adapt to impossible conditions. Conductor Daniel Barenboim appeared in a film describing the daily life of an orchestra whose members cannot get to Ramallah for rehearsals and concerts because of the permanent and "flying" checkpoints on West Bank roads. An orchestra might be considered a luxury, but the same situations face workers who are then unable to leave their villages and towns in order to support their families, students who cannot get to their exams and parents who cannot reach the doctor to get antibiotics for their children.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz promised to make changes in this area, and during his term the number of roadblocks in the West Bank has increased by 27 percent. These are not entry checkpoints into Israel but rather hundreds of various obstacles of that block movement between communities. In order to reduce the friction between soldiers and Palestinians, the number of staffed checkpoints has been reduced, and the number of dirt mountains and giant concrete cubes blocking passage has been increased. The unmanned roadblocks, however, hurt the Palestinian population indiscriminately. In addition, there are about 150 flying checkpoints every week, which make it impossible for the Palestinians to plan a daily schedule.

	Advertisement

In 2005, a plan drafted by Baruch Spiegel, an aide to the defense minister, specifying 49 roadblocks that could be removed, was submitted to the cabinet. It was not implemented because no one took an interest in it until there was a need to make a "gesture" to Palestinian Authority Chair Mahmoud Abbas. Now Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is offering to build road bypasses. This development shows Israel cannot meet the task of managing the lives of people under its occupation but is also unwilling to part from them so as not to be forced to part from the settlements as well. The separation fence, which was intended to obviate the need for the roadblocks in the West Bank and set temporary borders for the country, cannot fulfill this function as long as there are settlements to its east.

Israeli-Palestinian relations are the key to preventing further radicalization in the Middle East, as King Abdullah II of Jordan said this week, but the conflict is still languishing at the stage of gestures. In the absence of a determined leadership, it is the brigade and battalion commanders who are determining how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks in daily life; every checkpoint and roadblock and dirt pile and concrete cube is another brick in the wall of hatred. Reducing the number of checkpoints is a gesture not to the Palestinians, but to ourselves.