Palestinians wait near a closed shop for Israeli soldiers to check their identity cards as they try to pass an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron. (Mamoun Wazwaz, Maan Images)

It's just after dusk on Route 443, where the heavy northbound traffic from Jerusalem decelerates as it approaches the Maccabim checkpoint. The Israeli commuters, impatient to get home to Tel Aviv or the dormitory town of Modiin, have no idea that in the darkness to the left of the four-lane highway, everyday scenes are unfolding that tell their own story about this land and the conflict that has scarred it for 40 years.

We are in a side road, the one that drivers used to take if they were heading for Beit Sira and the other West Bank villages beyond it, until the Israeli military closed the entrance to cars with two rows of solid concrete blocks. Beyond them, you can just make out the distinctive green and white Palestinian number plates of some 30 parked cars belonging to the very small minority of Palestinians here who have a coveted permit to work in Israel. The labourers are on their way home after a day that may have begun as early as 3.30am to allow time to queue at the checkpoint in time to start jobs paying around £12 per day net of permit and travel costs.

As the home-bound workers with permits start arriving at the barrier, a Jewish woman is negotiating beside her parked car with a young Arab seamstress from the village over how fast she can embroider a dress for her clothing business in the orthodox religious Israeli community of Bnei Brak. "I come here because its 200 per cent cheaper," explains the woman, who gives her name only as Naomi. As she talks, an Israeli police van pulls up, its blue light flashing, with two brothers arrested that afternoon in Tel Aviv for working in Israel without a permit.

The older brother Walid, 53, is a veteran illegal worker, as skilled in negotiating the 10 kilometres or so of hill paths that will avoid the checkpoints and patrols of the Israeli military until he catches an Egged bus to the city, as he is in his trade of electrician. No he says, although they were bound they had not been beaten or humiliated by the policemen on this occasion. And no, it will not deter him from taking the risk again. "I will go back to Tel Aviv tomorrow," he says defiantly.

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But it is the highway itself that underlines the separation between Israelis and Palestinians here. For Naomi it is a supremely fast and convenient route to a meeting with her workers. Palestinians, like Walid face a fine for even walking on or across it, let alone driving on it. For while this stretch passes straight through the West Bank, only Israelis are actually allowed to use it. Tens of thousands do so every day. And next week the traffic may be even heavier. While the Israeli authorities are understandably reticent about the security arrangements for the visit of President George Bush, the speculation is that the main Route 1 through Israel from Tel Aviv will be closed to ensure his safe passage from Ben Gurion airport, and normal traffic diverted to 443.

There is a mild irony in the prospect that a visit by a US president dedicated to hastening a Palestinian state may oblige many thousands of Israelis to drive straight through the occupied territory on which Palestinians hope that state will be created. For the Israeli motorists who already use it it is a harmless and convenient way of cutting journey times. But for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel the prohibition on Palestinian use of the road is "an extreme and grave example" of what it calls "the State of Israel's publicly declared policy of separation and [illegal] discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin in territories under its control."

Until 2002, 443 was the main artery connecting the seven villages along the road with each other, with much of their farmland, and with Ramallah, the city to which the 37,000 villagers have long looked as the city they visited for work, for shopping, for medical, especially hospital, services and to visit relatives and friends. Before the intifada, the Israeli authorities, seeking an alternative route to the rapidly expanding dormitory town of Modiin, and to relieve congestion on Route 1 the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, began the process of widening the road, using some privately owned Palestinian land in the process. The Israeli Supreme Court had approved the land requisition more than a decade earlier on the understanding that the widening would benefit local Palestinians as well as Israelis. Five years ago, however – after of a series of attacks, including, in the first years of the intifada, shooting attacks, on Israeli motorists – the military closed off all the feeder roads to 443 from the Palestinian villages alongside it.

Israel argues that the prohibition is needed to guarantee the Israeli users of the road security. But another Israeli human rights organisation, Btselem, while recognising Israel's duty to keep its citizens safe, said the blanket prohibition "appears to be based on extraneous reasons, the most important being Israel's desire to annex, de facto, the area along which the road runs." It added: "If Israel were only interested in protecting the lives of Israelis using the road, without annexing the area, it could limit or even prohibit the travel of Israelis on the road, and build other roads and provide other means of transportation to connect Jerusalem and Tel Aviv."

The military has built three "fabric of life" roads for Palestinians – again confiscating Palestinian land to do so – which link the villages with a winding, badly worn, single track route to Ramallah and which the military says are kept under review but "adequately and fully address the traffic needs of the Palestinians in the area." The mayor of Beit Sira, Ali Abu Safa, says they create a journey of between 60 and 90 minutes to the city compared with the 12 minutes it took when they used 443.

Mr abu Safa, 51, points out that this is rather more than a tiresome inconvenience. "There is no point in calling an ambulance if someone is sick because it will take more than an hour to arrive," he says. The mayor claims that several villagers have died on the long journey to hospital by private car, the latest, four months ago, a 10-year-old boy from Beit Sira called Ahmed Yusef Ali, who had been badly injured in a road accident.

To read the full article please visit The Independent.