My search for the West Bank's 'invisible' town

My search for the West Bank's 'invisible' town


Sarah Helm set off by car to see Palestinians in Jenin but soon found that her road map was of no use. In the four decades after the Six-Day War, a labyrinth of walls, unmarked roads and checkpoints has arisen, hiding whole towns from Israeli eyes

Sunday June 3, 2007
The Observer

'Jenin? you want to go to Jenin?', asked a Palestinian villager, standing near an unmanned Israeli roadblock somewhere in the northern West Bank. The villager scratched his head as if surprised to hear the city's name, although we could not have been more than five miles away as the crow flies. 'It's a problem', he said.

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Not only can Israelis nowadays not 'see' Palestinians any more, but to all intents and purposes whole Palestinian cities have disappeared. Journeying through the West Bank my own disorientation began from the moment I set out from Jerusalem. At first I tried to leave the city by one of my old routes, but just before the Arab suburb of Abu Dis I ran into the Wall. 'Warsaw ghetto/Abu Dis ghetto' was emblazoned on the wall at this point and my friends were quite unreachable on the other side.
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Somewhere on the road north, however, I completely lost the plot. I turned to my new UN map of the West Bank, which meticulously traced even the roughest of Palestinian roads and marked every boundary, including the 1967 old Green Line, separating Israel from the West Bank. The UN map also marked the new Israeli barrier, but none of this was any help because it showed not a single West Bank settler road, so it was impossible to see how or where the two networks might intersect. I tried holding the UN map next to an Israeli map, but the two would not join.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2094164,00.html


So, why are they deleting towns off of the maps? Is it one of those things that if they don't see them they don't exist? Seems pretty strange to me. And I doubt seriously it was an oversight or some other innocuous reason.