Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  Not five years later, conditions along the road had vastly deteriorated. A convoy of fifty trucks carrying food and fuel for American bases was ambushed and set afire, seven of its drivers were beheaded. Two days after that, three American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed along the road; the body of one of the soldiers, a National Guardsman from New York, was dragged off and cut into so many pieces that a patrol coming upon the scene initially thought it was two bodies. “The road,” wrote the Times in a follow-up, “has become the site of extreme carnage.”

  Many prisoners from Afghanistan were incarcerated at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The super-secure prison there, Camp Delta, is slowly being phased out as I write; I visited it in 2002 for The New York Times Magazine. To get to Camp Delta from the main part of the base, one had to drive along one of the strangest stretches of road I have ever seen: a short section of pavement, maybe two hundred feet long, made into a piece of curly Christmas ribbon candy by a series of bright orange traffic barriers. It was like San Francisco’s Lombard Street writ small and flat, and watched over by soldiers in machine-gun nests. My military minders wouldn’t tell me anything about it, but I presumed it was that way to ensure that no vehicle could approach the fences of Camp Delta with enough speed to break through—and that there’d be plenty of time to blast to smithereens any vehicle that approached without permission.

  A lesson: it’s much easier to impede traffic than it is to speed it up, to make a roadway dangerous than to make it safe.

  The largest, most fully developed highway system in the world belongs to the United States. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Clay Committee sold it to Congress in 1955 as a national defense system for the movement of military vehicles and the evacuation of civilians. The same Congresses that authorized spending bills for the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, as it was officially named, knew that all those excellent freeways would simultaneously serve to consolidate the country and help its economy grow. The military motivation was real—as it was in Zanskar, so close to the site of military tensions on the Pakistan-India-China borders. But only occasionally does one see a military vehicle on an American highway.

  That is not the case in other nations. Long convoys of military trucks are a commonplace in Ladakh: if you’re driving somewhere you pray you won’t get stuck behind one, because passing fifty trucks is such a daunting prospect, particularly on narrow, winding mountain roads. I have frequently shared roads with military vehicles, in Peru, in China, and, as you will see, in the West Bank. It’s common in much of the world. Usually it’s not too scary.

  That changes in places where roads have come to be dominated by the military. In our time, that includes Iraq, Afghanistan, and the West Bank. Though photography in Iraq has been controlled by the U.S. military, one sort of image has become almost iconic: that of the burned-out military vehicle by the side of the road. It’s as stark a signifier of modern warfare as you can get without having people—dead or alive—in the photo. It’s the civilian road become a civilian no-man’s-land, a route taken over by the military. It’s the road as battleground, a place where moving vehicles can be shot by other vehicles, hit by missiles launched from aircraft overhead, or blown up by remote-controlled mines, or IEDs (improvised explosive devices). The main difference between still and video depictions of these scenes is whether clouds of black smoke in the background are billowing or not.

  How similar some of these scenes are to dystopian movies filmed twenty years ago in Australia. The Mad Max series posited a post-apocalyptic world consisting mainly of junk-strewn desert highways traversed by baroque motorcycles and muscle cars, piloted by tanned and whiskered men carrying big guns. Gasoline was like gold. The road was a Hobbesian state of nature with elements of twentieth-century military and automotive technology.

  Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing novel The Road takes the dystopic premise of those films and subtracts sunshine and mirth and cars that still run. And it adds starvation, depravity, plenty of corpses, and the terror felt by a dying parent and an orphan-to-be. In The Road, highways become the setting for everything that still happens in the world, which means the wanderings of forlorn survivors of nuclear winter, people trying to scratch out a survival from the wreckage of houses, boats, and cars in a new dark age. Some of the pavement is scorched and buckled; some is covered with slush and ice; none of it, the protagonists find, is easy to traverse with a loaded grocery cart full of one’s worldly belongings. The road is the largest remaining artifact of the pre-apocalyptic world, the source of all food and all danger, the only place to be.

  FOUR

  A WAR YOU CAN COMMUTE TO

  AS A TEENAGER, Fares Azar expected that one day he would run the family business, a bus line connecting Ramallah to Jerusalem, fifteen miles south. But over the past few years things have changed. Now there is no direct service between the two towns. Instead, there are vans and group taxis from Ramallah to Qalandia, a heavily fortified checkpoint run by the Israeli army. Then, on the other side of Qalandia, there is another set of vans and taxis into East Jerusalem.

  So Fares doesn’t know exactly what to do. He attended college in Utah and ran a restaurant in Provo for a while with his brother. (A friend of a friend of mine knew him from there.) But he missed home and came back. Luckily, his family still has money: Fares drives around Ramallah in a speedy BMW, eats out most nights, parties when he can. He’s a Palestinian Christian, and most comfortable around other Christians—and there aren’t that many Christians in Ramallah. One day he picked me up in the late morning and took me to a Christian-owned coffeehouse, parking nearby in an abandoned lot between two buildings—his father’s former bus yard. When we met I thought he was just laconic but now I could see he was depressed. He slept late, drank too much, and, though only twenty-nine years old, obsessed about the past. He ordered a coffee and I pulled out the map given me by a car rental agency in Tel Aviv; I wanted to ask him about roads. But Fares grabbed it and flipped it over, immediately scanning the room to see who might have noticed: the map had some big Hebrew lettering and a drawing of the Israeli flag. “They’ll think …,” he started. He didn’t need to finish.

  As it turned out, he was a bad one to ask about roads in the West Bank: he stays home, loath to travel because of the humiliations it entails, even with a U.S. passport. “The Israelis don’t respect a U.S. passport if it’s in the hands of a Palestinian,” he explained. “It doesn’t make any difference.” Fares, with his U.S. passport, could in theory get a visa to cross into Israel, but he would risk losing his Palestinian residency permit if he did. The only practical way to get out of the West Bank—as he had done a few months earlier with a bunch of buddies going to a beach resort in Egypt—is to make the arduous overland trip east to Jordan, and fly from there. The thought of going through Jerusalem, the nearest big city, and negotiating Qalandia, subjecting himself to inspection by soldiers, to the detested security precautions that ruined the future, makes him vaguely sick.

  I wanted to know: How could a mere checkpoint change a road, change a life? In the modern world we’re used to waiting, and I wanted to see why this checkpoint was so potent. I’d been stopped by the police before; so what? You wait a while, you show your documents, you’re on your way. Why was this different?

  Fares wouldn’t go with me. But he walked me to a street where I could catch a van of the sort that replaced his family’s buses. We’d see each other tomorrow, have a another drink …

  At first I was nervous to climb into a Palestinian taxi, walk around a Palestinian city—wouldn’t people here suspect that I was an American? And wouldn’t they be against Americans, as the principal donors of foreign aid to Israel? But nobody was unkind. When I needed to ask a question, people around me would find somebody who spoke English and could help. The man next to me in the van, an unemployed librarian, explained that I wouldn’t need to know where to get out—Qalandia was the end of the line.

  It was only
a five-or ten-minute drive to the south side of Ramallah, along busy commercial streets with low concrete buildings and a few palm trees, until we came to the end of both businesses and trees. The road turned to dirt and was channeled by concrete barriers. An Israeli guard tower—cylindrical cement with blank walls and tiny windows, the tallest structure I’d seen in Ramallah—loomed over the area ahead. The taxi swerved into a dirt lot, where passengers paid and got out. As I fell into step with the dozens of people heading past the guard tower, past concrete road dividers spray-painted with graffiti (“Israel Out”), past the cameras mounted atop poles, toward a low structure ahead with a corrugated roof, a red light next to the single lane for cars, and cyclone fencing and loops of razor wire on the sides, Fares’s reluctance to leave the town made more sense: this was starting to feel like prison.

  The checkpoint queue was structured like a funnel: wide enough where it began for maybe thirty people to stand side by side, at the end of an open-air shed with a corrugated tin roof, but narrowing maybe thirty yards farther on, where everyone was pushing toward two tall turnstiles. That afternoon in the fall of 2004 it took forty minutes to reach the front. It was an exercise in gradual compression: I went from having some choice of movement (I headed for the left turnstile) to having none at all, as my footsteps were foreshortened by the people in front of me, my arms were pinioned by the presence of people beside me, and my shoulders were bumped by the people behind.

  Checkpoint queues create a sense of instant community: a shared suffering, a shared imprisonment. And conversation provided relief. The man at my right, it turned out, was a doctor. He was returning home to East Jerusalem from work at a clinic in Ramallah, as he did every day. Israel’s strategy is “to make it so bad we will leave,” he said. They forget “we have nowhere else to go.”

  Because this was my first time through, I expressed some concern about the squeeze to which we were increasingly subjected. He warned me not to drop anything—an ID, for example—because it would be impossible now to stoop down and pick it up. He looked tired as he told me that it had been even worse before the Israelis put up the metal roof and created some shade.

  I shuffled forward, resigned to no longer having much choice about things. If the crowd panicked, we would all be in trouble. Just a month earlier, I knew, bombers en route from Jenin to Haifa had exploded a device at this very checkpoint, killing two Palestinians and wounding six Israeli policemen. And only the day before, a Palestinian woman had blown herself up in the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill, just a few miles from Qalandia, killing two Israeli policemen.

  The doctor and I were separated a few minutes later when the funnel moved us toward separate turnstiles. These were full height, like those in some less-trafficked New York City subway stations, and next to mine the pressure from behind had grown so great that the decision about when to step into it seemed practically beyond my control; I started leaning backwards to keep from walking into the ends of the turning bars and getting pinned. To my relief, a muscular man approaching the turnstile at the same time used his bulk, like a dike against the ocean, to create a small discretionary pocket of space for me. A minute later I stepped through the turnstile of my own accord and said, “Shukran”—thanks.

  It would have been a relief to be on the other side, approaching the end of the shed, except that this was where the guns were. About ten Israeli soldiers were visible that day, all of them young and dressed for combat, M4 assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Things moved faster now. A young female soldier examined the contents of my shoulder bag. Ten steps beyond her another soldier, protected by a wall of concrete blocks, a thick plastic window, and goggles, motioned me forward. I handed him my passport and journalist’s ID. He studied them, pausing (as Israeli officials tend to) at a visa I had gotten years before for a travel magazine trip to Saudi Arabia. Then he handed them back wordlessly and turned to the person behind me. Apparently I was through. Walking out into the open air beyond, into the bustling taxi lot, I felt as though I’d been paroled.

  During the centuries of European expansion and colonization, roads were built to consolidate empire and develop economies. (The plan for the chaddar road in Zanskar has a similar goal, which now might be called nation-building.) Recently, colonization is rarer, or subtler; when armies are not at home, they may be occupying an unfriendly land, aiming not to annex the territory outright but rather to chase out enemies and install a friendly regime. Switzerland, as part of its effort to avoid occupation by the Nazis, booby-trapped the many bridges a traveler must cross to traverse the mountainous nation by road. But the nations surrounding Switzerland had no such defense; their roads provided both an entry for Axis tanks and an escape route for the thousands and thousands of people who fled before them.

  Occupations may be the characteristic military action of our time. Scores have taken place in the past hundred years. While most occupations involve disputes between neighbors, air travel has made possible not only American participation in the Vietnam War but far-flung occupations such as the present-day operations of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. No matter how their armies got there, however, occupying powers face a similar set of challenges. Their militaries need to dominate by controlling movements of goods and of people, and these travel on roads. At the same time, soldiers on roads are vulnerable in ways they are not inside their bases. In this era of occupations, roads have shaped up as a principal battleground.

  Israel manages its occupation of the West Bank—which is home to 1.3 million Palestinians and 400,000 Israeli settlers and is roughly the size of Delaware—to a large degree by restricting the travel of Palestinians. The most famous symbol of this restriction is the “security fence” still taking shape alongside and east of the Green Line, which marks the de facto border of pre-1967 Israel. Although the fence has become controversial for impinging on Palestinian territory and cutting off some Palestinian farmers from their land, it has succeeded in greatly reducing the number of suicide bombings inside Israel proper. But more meaningful than the security fence to daily life in the West Bank is Israel’s dominion over Palestinian roads. The Oslo Accords, in 1993, and Oslo II, in 1995, granted Palestinians the right to govern their own cities, but gave Israel control over the main roads in the territories. One result is that Palestine may be said to resemble an archipelago of cities and villages cut off from each other. The checkpoints enforcing Israeli control of the roads, once few and temporary, have become numerous and often permanent. Although their number varies according to the security situation, about seventy checkpoints dotted the West Bank at the time of my visit. There are nearly as many five years later.

  In much of the West Bank, separate roads carry Israelis and Palestinians. This modern, elevated portion of the 60 Road carries settler traffic between Jerusalem and Bethlehem (over the horizon). The narrow, curving road beneath is for the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, out of view on the left. A series of concrete panels on the highway’s left side, near the top, serves to protect Israeli vehicles from projectiles.

  Each checkpoint has a different character. Most permit both vehicles and pedestrians to pass, but some allow only pedestrians. Some close at dusk and open at dawn, permitting no passage at night. Others are closed to vehicles at night but allow pedestrians through. Some allow anything to pass once the soldiers have left for the night. And some change the rules from day to day.

  In addition to permanent checkpoints like Qalandia—which typically feature traffic dividers and concrete blocks behind which the soldiers stand, and sometimes roofs for shade and tanks of drinking water—there are “flying checkpoints,” which exist for only hours at a time and may be run by as few as two or three soldiers or border policemen, often acting on intelligence tips.

  Israeli officials say that like almost everything else Israel does in the West Bank, checkpoints are for security: they enable the Israeli army to interdict weapons and bombers. The army hopes to find some of these through random sear
ches; others may be captured through the powerful Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, which provides daily updates on who and what to look for. But soldiers at checkpoints spend most of their time examining the identity documents issued by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority to every Palestinian age sixteen and up. If a man’s residence is in Nablus but he’s headed for Bethlehem, the soldiers may turn him back. Or they may not. The arbitrariness of checkpoint rule enforcement makes life miserable for Palestinians. For them checkpoints have become not just bureaucratic irritants but symbols of Israeli arrogance.

  Whether at crossings of the security fence or at strategic points inside the territories, checkpoints provide the human face of the occupation: this is as close as some Israelis and Palestinians will ever come. The face is seldom friendly: grim-lipped soldiers meet put-upon civilians, investigate their documents, and decide (often according to mood, Palestinians say) whether they may cross over to the other side. Sometimes the soldiers make Palestinians wait for hours in holding areas. For the soldiers, checkpoint life is often grindingly dull, stress-inducing, and alienating. For the Palestinians, it is monumentally frustrating, humiliating, and anger-provoking.

  Checkpoints can also be brutal. During my visit, the Israeli military convicted the commander of the Hawara checkpoint, just south of Nablus, of beating numerous Palestinians and smashing the windows of ten Palestinian taxis. One of the army’s own cameramen had videotaped the commander in the act of bashing a Palestinian man in the face with his fist while the man’s toddler held on to his shirttails; the camera’s audio then picked up the sounds of the man being punched or kicked in the stomach inside a hut where the commander had dragged him. One of the cruelest indignities to which they are subjected, Palestinians say, is the capricious and sometimes hours-long detention of ambulances carrying Palestinian patients; according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, at least seventy-one Palestinians have died because they were delayed unnecessarily at checkpoints.