A Fence in the Sand: From the Israelis, a last, near-desperate measure - fence to be built along West Bank in efforts to curb suicide bombings - Brief Article

National Review, July 15, 2002 by David Pryce-Jones

The Israelis are building a fence between themselves and the Palestinians on the West Bank. It is a last and almost desperate measure in the war they are currently fighting against terror. Trying out the gamut of possible approaches, they have offered concessions, they have coaxed and cajoled; and alternatively they have sent in the tanks and threatened yet more extreme retaliation, for instance exiling Yasser Arafat and closing down the Palestinian Authority. Thanks to operational intelligence of a high order, they identify and capture something like four in every five potential suicide bombers before they set out. But the one who gets through is deadly. In the past 18 months, some 70 bombings have killed 547 Israelis, which in proportional terms is the equivalent of about 26,000 Americans, or over eight times the number of victims of September 11. Several thousand more have been maimed, blinded, and wounded. According to the Israeli Finance Ministry, the period has seen the loss of 75,000 jobs and output worth $5 billion. The Israelis may not be losing to terror but they are not winning either.

The fence is designed to run for 225 miles more or less along the old Green Line demarcating Israel from the West Bank. This is not an international border, but simply the line thrown up by the armistice after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. There will be watchtowers, trenches, patrol roads, electronic sensors, and the rest of it, gradually erected in the course of the coming twelve months in a local version of the Iron Curtain. Such a fence already surrounds the Gaza Strip, and it is effective. Israelis have been killed within Gaza, but to date no suicide bombers have managed to break out of that territory and attack Israel proper.

The West Bank is not a geographic entity so easily contained. The first stage of the fence is in the north, cutting off the town of Jenin, which affords close and quite camouflaged access over the hills towards Tel Aviv, Hadera, and Netanya, all cities that have been hard hit. No suicide bombers are known to have set off from Hebron in the southern part of the West Bank, and perhaps the fence need not extend to cover that. Even if interrupted in some areas, the fence might still serve to funnel would-be suicide bombers into paths where they could more predictably be intercepted.

Until the war of 1967, Jerusalem was divided by its imitation of the Berlin Wall, with a crossing-point at the Mandelbaum Gate, so called after the owner of what was then a crucially located house. But now about 200,000 Arab Jerusalemites have been incorporated into Israel, and the populations are too inextricable for the Mandelbaum Gate to be reinstated. Israeli spokesmen speak of some special six- or seven-mile section of reinforced concrete segments running within the city's limits, but this will necessarily incorporate Arabs on the Israeli side of the fence.

Critics of the whole concept of a fence are many, and vociferous. Disquietingly, the implication is that Jews are safe only among themselves, that, in other words, they are creating a modern ghetto. Some compare this project to the Maginot Line, so flawed strategically that any accompanying sense of protection is merely a delusion. The 200,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank are afraid that the fence has every chance of becoming a permanent international border, and they will find themselves on the wrong side of it. Most of Ariel Sharon's Likud party, and in particular Uzi Landau, the minister in charge of internal security, are against the fence for ideological reasons. To them, such a division concedes the reality of Palestine and a two-state solution to the conflict between the two peoples. Some in the Labor party believe that the fence and a simultaneous dismantling of settlements might prove a successful campaigning issue in national elections due next year.

As for the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat has been quick to identify the new fence with "Nazism" and "apartheid." Always the opportunist, he no doubt foresees that the fence will indeed be an obstacle to terror, and therefore not in his interest. The majority of Palestinians seem in the grip of a nationalism that has swollen into psychosis, the kind of hysteria that more usually fires religious cults, immune to logic or such mundane factors as the balance of power. Confined in a small society, shielded from outside intellectual and moral considerations, they are listening only to inner calls for death and destruction. According to polls, just over two-thirds of Palestinians believe that suicide bombing will achieve the desired end of obtaining a state.

In reality, non-violence alone can achieve such a goal. This is the entire thrust of President Bush's recent speech: Palestinians can have statehood and independence but first they have to renounce terror. With fortunate timing, 55 Palestinian intellectuals, including Sari Nusseibeh and Hanan Ashrawi, have just published a joint appeal (with qualifications, to be sure) to stop the violence on the rational grounds that it is self-damaging. They represent a minority. So inflamed is the street that even this approach attracts charges of treason. It is a measure of this society's emotional disturbance that about 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by their own people, outside the law and often atrociously, as suspected collaborators.