Whoever doesn't work for the construction of a security fence will be responsible for the murder of Israeli citizens." The speaker was Eitan Cabel, a Labour Knesset member, who was addressing his fellow parliamentarians on 17th June at the launch meeting of the "lobby for a separation fence." Over the course of an hour, more than a dozen of the legislature's 120 members dropped in to express support for the accelerated implementation of last year's government decision to build a barrier dividing Israel from the West Bank.
Cabel was preaching to the converted, but his message is simple and popular in Israel. Three months short of the third anniversary of the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada, with the number of Israeli victims of the violence exceeding 800 (mostly civilians), the government has an obligation to construct a physical barrier which will enable Israel to control who enters and leaves its territory. The Palestinian ceasefire that began at the end of June-accompanied by Israeli withdrawal from parts of Gaza and the West Bank-will not change the fact that there is a consensus in Israel that the two peoples must "separate."
Although the centrist Shinui party, the second largest in Ariel Sharon's ruling coalition, was present in force at the lobby launch, the prime minister's own faction, Likud, was not. That was one of several incongruities which struck me as I sat in on the meeting. It was, after all, Sharon's cabinet that approved the so-called "seam zone" project in April 2002, instructing the defence ministry to build a barrier in three stages. So why do members of his own coalition need to establish a lobby to advance the project?
No less striking was the confusion that everyone at the meeting seemed to share about the project. Knesset Member Ilan Shalgi of the Shinui party outlined the contradictory information Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz had given the Knesset on its progress. In March, he said, Mofaz had told the Knesset that the final course of the fence, as well as its funding, would be approved by the cabinet within weeks; five weeks later, he refused to explain why neither of those things had yet happened; and by early June, Mofaz was claiming that a decision would now come from a less powerful ministerial committee, and that it was imminent. It wasn't.
Labour Knesset Member Haim Ramon, who chaired the meeting, disagreed with his party colleague Shalom Simhon over whether the course of a second phase of the fence had been finalised. Another member said she had heard that where construction was proceeding, it was behind schedule (which is actually not correct). Phase one of the security barrier, which will run 128km from Salem along the northern line of the West Bank to the settlement of Elkana east of Tel Aviv, is scheduled for completion on time, at the end of July. And Yitzhak Cohen, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, found himself corrected by Ramon when he claimed that construction was costing 10m shekels per kilometre; Ramon said the figure was half that, about $1.25m (?777,000), which is the more frequently mentioned figure.
The lobbyists for the fence also could not agree on whether they should be building a general consensus for its existence or pressing for a particular route. Ran Cohen, of the left-wing Meretz party, announced early on that "you can count me out" if the fence takes in the settlement city of Ariel, some 20km to the east of the "Green line," the armistice line that served as a border between 1949 and 1967. Uzi Dayan (nephew of the late Moshe), a former head of the national security council and outspoken supporter of the fence, pleaded with legislators: "It's a huge mistake to argue now about the course of the fence or about the settlements. You can't allow the argument over the details to prevent the building of a fence. If you do... the payment will be in blood."
Israel's on-off security barrier has become something of a national Rorschach test: in it are reflected the hopes and fears of the one beholding it. Yossi Alpher, co-editor of bitterlemons.org, an Israeli-Palestinian web newsletter, divides Israelis into three groups, according to their position on the fence. "For most Israelis," he says, "it's a way to keep suicide bombers out." They look at the fence built around Gaza after the Palestinian Authority was given autonomy there in 1994, and see that only one bomber (British citizen Assaf Hasif, earlier this year) has penetrated it-while over 150 have infiltrated the West Bank border-and cannot understand what is preventing construction of a similar fence there.
For a second group, says Alpher, a fence is part of a larger plan to dismantle many of the settlements. This group, on the left, views the fence as the future Israel/Palestine border. But, says Alpher, there is also a third group, on the right, which would like to erase the Green line completely, and is fearful that a fence will lead to just what the second group has in mind.
Israelis have never agreed on the future of Judea and Samaria (the biblical name for the West Bank). For members of the so-called national religious camp, Israel "liberated" the 6,000km2 of the West Bank in the six day war, reuniting parts of the land of Israel partitioned by the 1947 UN decision that paved the way for the establishment of Israel. Although others on the right may not have shared the belief that Israel had a God-given right to the West Bank, many were convinced that security considerations prohibited Israel from evacuating the territories, certainly before a comprehensive peace settlement.
The interest in seeing the area remain in Israeli hands prompted the creation of "facts on the ground"?Jewish settlements across the West Bank and Gaza, beginning in 1967. One of the great friends of the settlement movement, at least until he endorsed the road map and described Israel's presence in the territories as an "occupation," was Ariel Sharon. From 1990-2, the two years he served as housing minister, 14,000 housing units were built in the West Bank and Gaza.
Even Labour, which has always spoken of the possibility of a territorial compromise, has taken an active part in settlement building, not only just after 1967 but also during the prime ministerships of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. Since 1993 when Rabin's government signed the Oslo agreement, the Jewish population in the territories has doubled, from 110,000 to over 220,000, in 150-plus settlements.
Yet Israel has never annexed the territories. Such a move would, of course, meet with international disapproval, but that didn't stop Israel from taking East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Nor has it prevented Jewish construction in the territories, which most international lawyers regard as a violation of the fourth Geneva convention.
The real reason for the lack of an annexation policy is the fact that Israel is a democracy. Within Israel proper, all of its citizens?Arabs and Jews?have equal rights, at least on paper. But the demographic trends are not working in favour of a greater Israel. Today, Jews constitute about 55 per cent of the 10m people living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. Parity will be reached by decade's end, and by 2020 Jews will make up only 45 per cent of the projected population of 15m. Annexation of the West Bank alone would require offering citizenship to nearly 2m Palestinians (with another 1.2m in Gaza), which would quickly challenge the Jewish majority of the state.
Dayan says: "The essence of Israel's existence is to be a Jewish democratic state and society. To be this we need to preserve a Jewish majority, and this must be done in a moral and democratic way. This means we have to separate from the Palestinians." The alternative would be an apartheid system, whereby Arab residents of the expanded state would have the status of second-class citizens. An unwillingness to face this dilemma means that the land Israel has held since 1967 remains in limbo.
This limbo has meant that there are already two systems of law operating in areas under Israeli control. Israeli citizens living east of the Green line or in Gaza maintain their rights and privileges as Israelis, whereas Palestinians live under a civil administration controlled by the Israeli defence forces. They are tried in different courts, served by different roads, have different rights regarding land ownership and use. Separation, it is argued, is now necessary if Israel is to avoid formalising an emerging system that distinguishes between the rights of Jews and Arabs.
Amazingly, no one knows where Ariel Sharon-Israel's "bulldozer," whose temperament and position make him best suited to get the fence built-really stands on the question. His spokesman Ra'anan Gissin told me that Sharon's previous opposition to a fence (last year he was calling the idea "populist") was "based on military considerations, not political ones. It had to do with his opposition to a static versus mobile defence, but now he says that it can provide security, if it is controlled by troops with force and fire."
Ilan Tzion, the young lawyer who heads the non-partisan public council for the creation of a security fence, is dubious. He insists that despite his government's having approved the barrier in principle, "Sharon doesn't want a fence. But since he can't object to it, he simply makes sure that it fails." Tzion refers to an interview Sharon gave a year ago to a reporter from a local paper in the region north of Tel Aviv, where pre-1967 Israel is at its narrowest. In it Sharon gave numerous reasons why a fence was impractical, including the traffic jams it would cause. But Tzion is convinced that Sharon's basic objection is that "he's very right-wing: he doesn't want to give up on Judea and Samaria."
Ron Nachman, the mayor of the West Bank settlement city of Ariel, told Yediot Aharonot, Israel's largest daily paper, that the most recent version of the fence's course "is the same map that I've been seeing on every visit here by Sharon since 1978. He told me he's been thinking about it since 1973."
The course of the fence, although still unofficial, has undergone big changes since planning began last year, so that it now veers repeatedly eastward from the Green line to take Jewish settlements into its embrace-including Ariel, 20km east of the line.
Yechiam Sasson, until a year ago the head of Sharon's counterterrorism task force, was involved in the initial stages of the fence's planning. He reiterates that his team looked at a fence as "part of the solution to the terror challenge." It was to be a "security fence, not a political border." Terrorists, he said, "exploit places where illegal workers sneak into Israel. There is a market of people who get them in, and house them-almost 100,000 come in each day to work."
Ron Shatzberg, a project director with the Economic Cooperation Foundation, the think tank that helped generate the Oslo accords, says that in the Israeli-Arab city of Umm al-Fahm, which is just on the Israeli side of the Green line, "the population is 30 per cent higher than it was three years ago." Palestinians, he says, "haven't stopped working in Israel," despite the state of official closure that has existed for most of the intifada period. What they do is "cross in once a week, and stay during the week in an apartment, in say, Umm al-Fahm."
Almost all who cross illegally-via unguarded dirt roads-are looking to work, not to kill. But even the army checkpoints along the 350km Green line are not sufficient to prevent the passage of terrorists into Israel. A study by Israel's state comptroller noted that army records showed "most of the suicide terrorists and the car bombs crossed the seam area into Israel through the checkpoints, where they underwent faulty and even shoddy checks." This begs the question of whether the fence project needs not only to seal the border but also to improve the methods used to check those coming through legal crossing points.
The defence ministry's initial proposal called for the fence to stretch from the Palestinian town of Salem, in the northern Jordan valley, to Arad in the south. The barrier was planned to follow the course of the Green line itself, with some topographic adjustments. The first phase, of 128km, does stick relatively close to the border, if you consider straying 6km into Palestinian territory to be close. It is scheduled for completion by the end of July (though by mid-June only 6km of it was actually operational). The course of phase two?from Salem eastward to Beit Shean, at the northern end of the Jordan valley?has been approved as well, and work began in January. It is the course of the third phase, the one that includes Ariel, that has seen the most changes since planning began. So significantly has it been adjusted to take in Jewish settlements that the projected length of the fence is 630km?almost twice the length of the Green line itself. Additionally, an "envelope" is nearing construction around Jerusalem, which is surrounded on its north, south and east by the West Bank.
The "seam barrier" has left Palestinians in shock. As one of the largest building projects in Israel's history gets underway, the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of them are threatened with severe disruption.
For one thing, the barrier is far more than a fence or wall. Rather, it is a series of obstacles with an electronic fence in the centre, which will alert a command centre when someone tries to cross it. To its east will be a service road, and a pyramidal structure of six coils of barbed wire, and a trench; to the west is a "trace" road that will allow trackers to determine if someone has crossed over; and there is a third road for armoured vehicles, as well as another pyramid of concertina wire. The defence ministry says that the average width of the barrier complex will be 60 metres, though at points with especially difficult topography, it could eat up as much as 100 metres.
A report by B'Tselem, the "Israeli information centre for human rights in the occupied territories," notes that west of the wall, but east of the Green line (still in the territories), there will be five enclaves with a total of 13 Palestinian towns. The towns in each enclave will be isolated, with very limited access to the rest of the West Bank. And east of the wall, there will be another 19 communities in five enclaves, with a total of 128,500 residents. There are over 35 cases where the fence will cut off the residential section of Palestinian towns from their fields, and farmers will be dependent on Israelis opening gates for them so that they can work their lands. Israel has promised to operate 26 such gates in the first stretch of the fence. They will not be permanently manned but serviced by military patrols that will pass each day.
The city of Qalqilya is now surrounded on all sides, part of it by fence and part by an imposing, eight-metre-high wall. The encirclement leaves the town with a single gate for entry or exit, and has cut it off from most of its agricultural land, among the most fertile in the West Bank. The wall, which makes Qalqilya look like a prison camp, is marked every 50 metres by watchtowers from which Israeli soldiers can shoot invaders. Yet it didn't stop militants in mid-June from cutting through metal grating in the wall, and firing at cars travelling on the new Trans-Israel highway. A seven-year-old girl, Noam Leibovitz, was killed as her family returned home from a bar mitzvah in Jerusalem.
The B'Tselem report estimates that between the fence and the enclaves, the new "seam" will eat up over 40,000 acres of the West Bank: nearly 3 per cent of its land mass. But, overall, it is far more than that. A map of one possible course of the completed barrier fence, based partly on leaks and speculation, shows that the Palestinian areas would be divided into two distinct cantons, without contiguity between them (although recent remarks by Sharon seem to indicate sympathy for the Palestinian need for contiguity). As the map looks now, the Palestinians would be left holding only 48 per cent of the West Bank, compared with the 52 per cent that would remain under Israeli control-including a large part of the eastern West Bank. Small wonder that most Palestinians regard the wall as another land grab by Israel. Even US officials, most publicly Condoleezza Rice at the end of June, have criticised the fence. The US objects to the creeping eastward movement of the blueprint for the unbuilt part of the fence, rather than to the general idea of the barrier, and so far they don't seem to have had much impact on Sharon.
To get an idea of what life is like in an enclave, in early June I visited the town of Zeita, in the northern West Bank, about 5km north of the Palestinian city of Tulkarm. The mayor, Jamal Hassouna, explained that the town had lost 90 per cent of its land in 1948 as a result of the war of independence; those lands have been absorbed into the Israeli city of Hadera, about 12km to the northwest, and Kibbutz Magal. Zeita was left with some 500 acres, nearly half of which is built upon. The rest is used by its population of 3,000 for agriculture, largely in hothouses. When the closures of the intifada stopped them transporting their produce to the wholesale vegetable market in Nablus, families started to use their lands for subsistence.
Now more than 100 acres of Zeita's agricultural land is going to be caught between two fences. One is a fence, nearly complete, that cuts off the town from most of its fields. The other, further west, is up against the Green line. Hassouna took me to visit a 75-year-old farmer, Zikralla Akkad, whose hothouses are trapped in this way. To get there, we had to leave our car, and descend into a chasm cut into the terrain to accommodate the new fence.
When we arrived, Akkad was not at home. Only a daughter from his first marriage, who looked to be about 50, was present, and she shyly invited us into the family's one-room house and prepared sweetened tea as we tried to get her to answer questions. She had a resigned attitude towards her family's situation: she said that her stepmother and her four children from Akkad, who are aged four to 12, would probably find a place to live in Zeita, so that they would be able to get to school when it resumes in the autumn, by which point the fence should be operative.
The following week I saw what the fence means in East Jerusalem. My guide was Muhammad Dahleh, an Israeli Palestinian who runs a thriving law office in East Jerusalem. Dahleh, 35, was the first Israeli Arab to clerk in the Israeli supreme court; he has a law degree from the Hebrew University and a masters in international law from the US. He is that impressive type of charmer who understands the codes and mindsets of the two societies he straddles.
Driving to the Arab suburb of Abu Dis from central Jerusalem, one travels on a road through the Kishon valley, the walls of the old city on your right. As the golden Dome of the Rock, atop the Temple Mount, recedes in the rearview mirror, you enter the neighbourhood of al-Azariyya, just minutes away from the spectacular walled city. Here you are suddenly confronted by another wall, perhaps eight feet tall, which has been constructed out of thick concrete slabs, each three or four feet wide, which line the length of the road like pieces on a children's board game.
Clearly assembled in haste, the wall demarcates the eastern limit of Jerusalem, and therefore the end of Israeli sovereignty. On the other side is the West Bank, but from where I was standing it just looks like the main street of a small village that has been rudely cut off from its other half. Some of the slabs have been defaced with Stars of David with swastikas inside; others have Arabic graffiti I cannot read.
Though the top of the Abu Dis wall is covered with barbed wire, young men on the eastern side are passing crates of cucumbers over to the Israeli side through a gap between the wire and the concrete. A few minutes later, I see that the "smuggled" vegetables are out for sale on a small stand.
Here in Abu Dis, it is hard to see what purpose the wall is serving, other than to make the lives of Palestinians on both sides of it more difficult. Difficult, but not impossible, as I discover when Dahleh and I come upon another road that ends at the wall. Now, at the end of the day, vans and taxis are lined up along it. For reasons unclear to us, there is a breach in the wall here, and many Palestinians-men, women, children, people carrying babies, people on crutches-are scrambling over it, in both directions. At one point a bus pulls up on the Israeli side, and dozens of people who have been working, or visiting clinics, or going to school, get off. They scurry down the road to climb over the wall as fast as they can. I ask one of them why they're rushing and he tells me they are afraid an army patrol will come by. Israeli soldiers show up intermittently and sometimes when they catch people crossing the fence they make them stand for hours in the sun. To cross into Israel legally, Palestinians need a permit from the military government, and must travel to a checkpoint at the Jerusalem suburban settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.
Whereas consistent and updated information on the fence is in short supply on the Israeli side, the Palestinians are well organised with maps, position papers and spokespeople, all emphasising the terrible price the Arab residents of the West Bank will have to pay for the Israeli "obsession" with security.
Just a week before the murder of Noam Leibowitz, I sat in the office of Marouf Zahran, Qalqilya's mayor. A reasonable man who sounds committed to the idea of peace with Israel, Zahran says a wall will not keep terrorists out.
"Isolating us behind a wall," he said, "only strengthens the extremists." Most Palestinians I talk to stress that they can understand security checks, but can't accept being humiliated in the process. And they display ironic resignation to an Israeli system of due process, which gives Zeita residents one week to appeal the expropriation of their lands for the fence, but at the same time imposes a 14-day curfew closing off Tulkarm, the city where the appeal must be filed.
The average Palestinian can understand the need for a border fence too, although not the unilateral manner in which Israel is building it. And, they say, if you are building a fence, why not on the Green line? This last point gets to the essence of the problem. For those Palestinians who share the vision of a two-state solution?and public opinion surveys consistently show that this applies to a majority of Palestinians living in the territories?the starting point of their vision is a total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. They may allow for some border corrections (the Green line, after all, was never an internationally recognised border) or, if they're very open-minded, the possibility that Israel could maintain some of the larger settlements that are just outside the Green line if it trades the land for "quality" territory within Israel at a ratio of 1:1. But that's it.
Whereas for Palestinians the term "territorial compromise" means giving up on the dream of ever getting back the 78 per cent of historical Palestine that sovereign Israel today comprises, Israelis assume that "compromise" means reaching a deal by which part of the West Bank at least is annexed, so that Jews living there can remain.
And so, just as Israel finally has a leader who not only is speaking about ending the "occupation" and a Palestinian state, but might actually be able to take these fateful steps, there are Palestinians who are asking whether it is too late for the two-state solution. Diana Buttu, for example, a young Canadian-Palestinian lawyer working for the PLO (which still handles foreign policy for the Palestinians) told me that "the idea of two states is being thrown out by the settlements... So, we're rethinking the idea of two states. Some are saying, let's seek Israeli citizenship."
The question Buttu says she and some colleagues are asking themselves is: "do we want to go down the path South Africa did in the 1970s, and have Bantustans established"?the cantons that the Sharon vision of the fence would create?"or do we want to go down the path South Africa went down in the 1990s?one country with equal rights for all its citizens?"
A few weeks later, after my visit to Abu Dis with Muhammad Dahleh, I sit with him in his East Jerusalem law office. He too is convinced that the kind of state destined to be created at the end of the road map would be, even in the best-case scenario, non-viable. He says that Israelis have come around to the idea of two states because "they feel they can't control 3.5m Palestinians and will be demographically overwhelmed. Now the idea is: how can we get rid of these Palestinians and how much land can we hold onto?"
He finds that insulting, and on a practical level, doesn't see how, with 1.2m Arabs within Israel, and 200,000 Jews living in the West Bank, separation can work. "Palestinians will reach a point where they say: we don't care about the name on the flag. We want to live in dignity. We will fight the fight of Mandela, not of Arafat, for civil rights, equality, sharing the land, natural resources, power and decision-making."
And so, as Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon start to implement the road map, the societies they represent continue to avoid serious discussion of the fundamentals. For Palestinians, this means that no one knows whether, by the time you read this, Abbas will still be in charge and the ceasefire in place, and if so, what comes next for organisations like Hamas, still dedicated to Israel's destruction. For Israelis, it means no one can agree on the meaning of a security fence because they are unwilling to decide, once and for all, Israel's position on the future of the settlements, the territories, the borders and, in fact, the very nature of the Jewish state.
