No exit: An Israeli Arab city’s second-class status Umm al-Fahm has roads that lead to nowhere and until two years ago no public transportation at all.
By Tali Heruti-Sover | Apr. 26, 2015 Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.653323
On one side of the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm is a two-lane road that ends suddenly — the money ran out — and on the other side is the main exit, a bottleneck that narrows even further the closer it gets to Route 65, the main highway that runs through Wadi Ara.
A visit to the second largest Arab city in Israel, where 53,000 residents live, in the Wadi Ara area of northern Israel illustrates the impasse faced by many Arab towns in the country.
The afternoon we visited traffic flowed easily. But that’s not the case during rush hour at 5:30 a.m., seven days a week, when some 20,000 drivers try to leave town.
“It takes 20 to 45 minutes [to get out],” says Saliman Mahamid, the long-serving city engineer. “Every resident knows that in order to get to work they must make it through the traffic jam, and 12 hours later they will get stuck on the way back,” says Mahamid, noting that over 50% of the population works out of town. “People work all over the country so they leave early, but everyone sits in the same unbearable traffic jam. There is no city in Israel, certainly not of this size, where the exit and entrance are controlled by one small traffic light. I assume that in a Jewish city of the same size they would have already dealt with the matter,” he says.
It seems Mahamid is right: Over 10 million shekels ($2.5 million) was invested recently in another interchange for the second largest neighborhood in Hadera, Givat Olga, where some 12,000 residents suffered from an infuriating, but much smaller, traffic jam. Today they enjoy a new and impressive road that connects to the coastal road (Highway 2). In Umm al-Fahm, by comparison, they will wait — and not because there are no plans, which there have been for decades. This traffic jam is the parable and moral of the story of generations of Israeli governments whose actions are defined by discrimination and Chelm-like stupidity.