The Boston Globe · 4 February 2001

CP-2001-044

Feared road offers clues to Israel vote

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more pointedly at Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has been unable to stop it, either by diplomacy or by force. If the public opinion polls are correct, the Labor Party’s Barak is about to face a stunning defeat to opposition Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon, who in Friday’s polls led by 18 percentage points.

Campaign signs plastered along Route 443 last week overwhelmingly favored Sharon, the 72-year-old former general and defense minister.

Loathed by the Israeli left and the Palestinian public for leading the bloody 1982 invasion of Lebanon and engineering the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the legendary hawk has concocted a campaign slogan his critics find almost surreal: “Only Sharon Can Bring Peace.” In a campaign where both candidates speak of peace, the mood is of war.

At roughly two-mile intervals along Route 443, three Israeli tanks stood perched on rocky cliffs, their guns trained on Palestinian villages. Armored personnel carriers crawled up winding hills with soldiers training machine guns on passing cars. New military checkpoints dotted the road.

At the entrance to the road, coming from Tel Aviv, is the sprawling town of Modi’in, a bedroom community of 40,000. It was built in the early 1990s hard along the border of the West Bank, a confident expression of an Israel poised to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors.

Now the heavy military presence and the huge concrete blocks and piles of dirt that block Palestinian villages from using the road seem to make that confidence a distant memory. Route 443 is often called the Modi’in Road. For the first six weeks after the intifadah, or Palestinian uprising, began on Sept. 28, Israelis continued to use the route.

But the conflict came closer to home in December, when the shooting started.

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