Palestinian motorists wait in line at a container checkpoint outside of the West Bank city of Bethlehem. (Luay Sababa, Maan Images)

Ali Abu Safia, the mayor of this Palestinian village, steers his car up one potholed road, then another, finding each exit blocked by huge concrete chunks placed there by the Israeli Army. On a sleek highway about 100 meters away, Israeli cars whiz by.

"They took our land to build this road, and now we can't even use it," Abu Safia says bitterly, pointing to the highway with one hand as he drives with the other. "Israel says it is because of security. But it's politics."

The object of Abu Safia's contempt - Highway 443, a major access road to Jerusalem - has taken on special significance in the rinding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the first time, Israel's Supreme Court, albeit in an interim decision, has accepted the idea of separate roads for Palestinians in the occupied areas.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel told the Supreme Court that what is happening on the highway could be the onset of legal apartheid in the West Bank, a charge that makes many Israelis recoil.

Built largely on private Palestinian land, the road was first challenged in the Supreme Court in the early 1980s when the justices, in a landmark ruling, permitted it because the army said its primary function was to serve the local Palestinians, not Israeli commuters. In recent years, in the wake of stone-throwing and several drive-by shootings, Israel has blocked access to the road to Palestinians.

This month, as some 40,000 Israeli cars - and almost no Palestinians - use it daily, the court handed down its decision, one that has engendered much legal and political hand-wringing.

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"There is already a separate legal system in the territories for Israelis and Palestinians," said Limor Yehuda, who argued the case for the civil rights association on behalf of six Palestinian villages. "With the approval of separate roads, if it becomes a widespread policy, then the word for it will be 'apartheid.'"

Many Israelis and their supporters reject the term, with its racist implication.

"The basis of separation is not ethnic, since Israeli Arabs and Jerusalem residents with Israeli ID cards can use the road," argues Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a conservative research organization. "The basis of the separation is to keep out of secure areas people living in chaotic areas. If the Palestinian Authority, which has thousands of men under arms, had fought terror, this wouldn't have been necessary."

The court's latest decision is significant because it accepted the idea in principle put forth by the army: that because it had no choice but to ban Palestinian traffic from the road because of anti-Israel attacks, some of which it says originated from the surrounding villages, it would build separate roads for the Palestinians.

The court, which has never ruled on the legality of separate roads, despite a growing network of them around the West Bank, issued an interim decision saying it wanted a progress report in six months on the building of new Palestinian roads and other efforts to offset the villagers' difficulties.

The clear implication is that such an approach to the problem is in keeping with the law. A court spokeswoman said the justices would not comment.

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