BACKGROUND

Today Israeli-only roads across the West Bank have become a defining feature of the apartheid policies implemented by Israel in the Palestinian territories. In addition to violating Palestinians’ freedom of movement and access, with serious repercussions for health, education and livelihoods, the apartheid roads have consolidated and strengthened the presence of Israeli colonies across the West Bank, ensuring superior access for settlers at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians. The consequences include an inability to access core services and increased forced displacement pressures for Palestinians.

The impact of the apartheid roads, however, extends beyond their humanitarian consequences as they destroy both the economic and political prospects of the Palestinian people.

The territorial fragmentation created by the roads is according to UN OCHA, ‘at the root of the West Bank’s declining economy,’2 while their continued construction is making a just solution to the illegal occupation increasingly difficult to envisage. In fact, although Israel’s occupation policies have led to analogies being drawn with South African apartheid, as a number of commentators have noted, the presence of these roads represents a situation much worse than the apartheid in South Africa;

“When Israel...connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”
Former US President Jimmy Carter3

‘The term ‘the crime of apartheid’, shall apply to... Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups... the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof…’
International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid Article 2 part 41

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