Building a freedom fence
In a stunning policy reversal, prime minister Ariel Sharon announced a unique plan for unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians. If the Palestinian leadership does not make good on its security pledges within a few months, Israel, of its own initiative, will evacuate virtually all of its settlements from the Gaza Strip and another group from the West Bank. This proposal, never before put forward by any Israeli prime minister, has convulsed Israeli politics.
Israel had essentially only two choices: preserving the siege with all of its terrorism, violence, checkpoints, and retaliation; or proceeding with the construction of the security fence and withdrawing from Gaza and parts of the West Bank territories. Sharon has chosen the latter course.
Sharon's judgment that a negotiated partition is out of reach is a reasonable, indeed inescapable, conclusion. The Palestinian response to the unprecedented offer of 95 percent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, at the Camp David summit, was terrorism. The response to the even more generous Clinton parameters was even more terrorism.
The Palestinians and their leaders in the Arab world--who created the whole tragedy by waging a war of extermination in the first place, second place, and third place--have shown no willingness to accept Israel, no matter what concessions are offered. The vast majority of Israelis, and now their leaders, find the moral, financial, and political burden bearable no longer. Conflict management, not conflict resolution, is the only real option. The security fence is intended to provide a defensible and stable border. It would enable Israeli defense forces, on their own, to keep as many Palestinians as possible outside of Israeli control while keeping as many Israelis as possible inside. Thus it would block terrorism and leapfrog the deadlock in negotiations.
Invitation to terrorism. The lack of a secure border has made it ridiculously easy for terrorists. Many of the suicide bombers traveled fewer than 10 miles to do their odious work. In just a few months of last year, three individuals came 7 miles from the West Bank city of Tulkarm to commit murder three times in the Israeli town of Netanya; seven came 2 miles from Bethlehem to murder eight others in Jerusalem. This is not to mention the suicide killers who have stayed overnight at a "terrorist bed-and-breakfast" in Anin and walked across the Green Line in the northern part of the West Bank to carry out multiple murders. By contrast, since 2001 not one suicide bomber has succeeded in entering Israel from Gaza, which was fenced off in 1994. The experience of the already built first stage of the security fence reinforces this point. Attacks have been reduced from 59 in a one-month period last year to three in the same period this year. Captured infiltrators have confirmed they were blocked by the fence and had to make their way to an unfenced area to the south to penetrate the Israeli border.
It is extraordinary how much this security fence has been misrepresented in the West. It is not a wall, as it has been called. About 3 percent of the fence will be a concrete barrier, and half of that portion was built in 1995 to hinder snipers shooting into Israeli communities. The same is true of the new half. Some 97 percent is a chain-link fence equipped with monitoring sensors and surveillance equipment, which means that nighttime will no longer offer a cover. If anyone gets through, alarms on the fence will immediately mark the spot where the breach occurred so that pursuit of terrorists can begin at once.
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