In 2018, I was in Ramallah, the de facto administrative capital of the Palestine Authority, to cover Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Palestine. A day after Mr. Modi wrapped up his visit, I prepared to leave the city. My flight was from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. While leaving the West Bank for Tel Aviv, my driver, a Palestinian Arab from occupied East Jerusalem, warned me about the Israeli checkpoints on the way. I had to call a taxi from Jerusalem to come and pick me up from Ramallah and drop me at Tel Aviv as taxi drivers in Ramallah are not allowed to go to Tel Aviv and Israeli taxis seldom come to Ramallah.
There were three checkpoints between Ramallah and Tel Aviv airport. The first, in Kalandia, is the main checkpoint between the northern West Bank and Jerusalem. Thousands of Palestinians who live in the northern West Bank and work on the other side of the security wall, which Israel built, cross this point every day. My driver greeted the soldier with a ‘ shalom’ while he handed him his permit card. I gave my passport to the soldier with the entry permit that the Israelis had issued at the airport. We were asked to wait. A while later, the soldier returned my passport and waved us on.
From there, we entered Highway 443, which Israel had built to link Jerusalem with Tel Aviv. The driver told me in broken English that the road was not open for Palestinians. “On the right is Palestine, on the left is Palestine, but this road is Israel,” he said. He was able to enter the road because he lived in East Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel after the 1967 war. On the exit points, the road was blocked by concrete walls or metal wires. This was what journalist Rachel Shabi had referred to as “the apartheid road.”
