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Aha! Shunpiking in the West Bank
IN 18th century North America, British colonial authorities built turnpikes, financing their construction and maintenance by charging farmers a toll to bring their produce to market. People responded by establishing their own "shunpikes" - craving paths in front of and behind the toll booths, shunning the toll gates on the turnpikes - and giving rise to "shunpiking". Similarly people forded streams rather than paying the troll the toll on the bridge. More recently, New Brunswickans forced the government to remove toll charges on the Trans-Canada Highway through a campaign of mass defiance of tolls. a similar campaign was waged by Scots against tolls on the Skye bridge. According to Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff, Palestinians have also picked up on and revived this popular practice - in the far more lethal conditions of a brutal, illegal, military occupation of the West Bank that has continued for the last 58 years. 22 January 2007 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/816346.html The Israel Defense Forces admitted on Sunday that the 44 dirt obstacles it said had been removed from around West Bank villages did not actually exist. Last Tuesday, the IDF announced that it had removed 44 dirt obstacles that blocked access roads to West Bank villages, to fulfill promises made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas during their meeting a month ago. Olmert had pledged measures to ease the lives of Palestinian civilians. However, a military source admitted on Sunday that these obstacles "had either been removed before the political level decided on the alleviations or had been bypassed by Palestinians earlier, and a decision had been made not to rebuild them." This statement confirms a claim made recently by United Nations organizations operating in the territories: that most of these barriers were not removed, because they had not existed for months. In response, the IDF Spokesman's Office said: "The IDF recently removed 44 barriers in an effort to ease the movement of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria. These actions are being carried out in line with assessments of the situation." The IDF has erected close to 400 such dirt obstacles in recent years. |
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