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.
Why is it then called a "wall"? To make it sound and look more forbidding, echoing the Berlin Wall. But the Berlin Wall was built to prevent people from fleeing to freedom. This fence is intended to preserve freedom--the freedom from terrorism Israelis have found in their democracy. This is why 83 percent of Israelis favor its construction.
True, the fence would impose a dual hardship, on those Israeli settlements located on the wrong side of the security fence and also on some Palestinians living adjacent to the fence. But the alternative to the barricade is continued violence, death, injuries, and retaliation. The calculation is simple: Fences are reversible; the loss of life is not. Eliminate the terrorism and the fence would not have to be built.
The location of the security fence with the security zones on either side would leave the Palestinians about 86 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza. This is a somewhat worse outcome for the Palestinians than what might have been negotiated--possibly an incentive for second thoughts. But to be effective, these security lines must follow the lines of bloodshed rather than the borders derived from lines of battle and of armistice. While the fence does deviate from the armistice line in some places, it is only to secure the high ground and safeguard substantial Jewish communities. In any case, those armistice lines now invoked have never gained true legitimacy, for in 50 years they were not accepted by the Palestinians and even now are not accepted as the border of a legitimate Israeli state.
Those who argue that the fence should be built exactly along the 1967 armistice line play directly into the Palestinian strategy of creating a de facto Palestinian state. Moreover, that state would be created without requiring the Palestinians to cease terrorism, to recognize Israel's right to exist in peace, or to abandon their "right of return"--let alone ending the conflict. It would vindicate the "terrorism pays" school of thought and would virtually guarantee that the Palestinians would revert to violence in future disputes.
Construction of the fence has also been inaccurately described as some kind of major land grab. The opposite is true. Land is being yielded, and the fence constitutes only a minor modification of borders, one that can be adjusted to some degree by future negotiations of other Israeli territory. It is not a project conceived and supported by the Israeli right but by the Israeli center, which does not want any part of ruling over the Palestinians yet sees no way reliably to negotiate with them. Nor will the fence be a permanent border. It is simply a response to murder in the compressed geography of Israel. Again, fences can be torn down; human lives are irreplaceable.
In fact, the fence can contribute to the ultimate aim of a two-state solution. It sets a provisional dividing line and makes a Palestinian state possible, even before a final settlement. It facilitates the Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian cities and the abandonment of checkpoints that have affected the dignity and convenience of Palestinian life.
Room for talks. Far from a barrier to peace, the security fence is the opposite. Now Hamas and Islamic Jihad can hold the peace process hostage by initiating attacks every time progress seems possible. The fence would block that obstructionist strategy and, by taking terrorism off the table, give both sides more flexibility for serious negotiations. Anyone familiar with the Palestinians knows they will not negotiate seriously as long as they believe terrorism is winning for them.
The core of the Palestinian objection to the fence has three roots: The fence, establishing a de facto ratification of the permanence of Israel, undermines the Palestinians' refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state. It also undermines their strategy of keeping Israel's population vulnerable to terrorists. And it dramatically reduces the Palestinian advantage in the media war, since the Israeli withdrawal would put an end to the televised pictures of Israelis fighting terrorists on the West Bank with tanks and helicopter gunships.
By contrast, the Israelis know that reducing Israeli casualties would strengthen their country's political will as well as its economic ability to sustain a war of attrition. It would also lessen Israel's need for retaliatory and defensive operations. Reduced Israeli casualties would also result in lower Palestinian casualties. At the same time, the completed fence would warn those Israeli settlers determined to remain outside: Live under Palestinian rule or be abandoned.
Any country facing a comparable security threat would build such a barrier, and no one would challenge it. Those who oppose the project, including Sen. John Kerry, are denying Israel the most elementary right of self-defense for its citizens, while ensuring that the current conflict will be longer and bloodier.
The Palestinians, of course, are trying to block the fence by going to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), using their automatic majority in the United Nations General Assembly and in the court, to put Israel in the dock. Fortunately, the vast majority of western countries, including 15 members of the European Union, 10 EU members in waiting, the United States, Canada, Russia, South Africa, and Cameroon, have joined Israel in submitting briefs to the ICJ contesting its authority to rule on the fence. The briefs invoke the traditional grounds that intervention by the court would violate the long-standing principle that the ICJ can claim jurisdiction only in disputes where the parties mutually agree in advance to abide by the decision.
The predisposition of the court, however, is to proceed with this trial and to condemn Israel. Just read the words of the Egyptian justice who has, before any hearing, stated his views that Israel's arguments are groundless and its actions illegitimate and that the court should convict Israel in order to prepare the grounds for imposing sanctions. Some court of justice!
Of course, it would have been preferable to have two states, a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel, through negotiations with the Palestinians, with benefits for both sides in exchange. Unfortunately, this is an impossible dream, but the present situation is a nightmare. In pursuing his unilateral disengagement, Sharon has taken an enormous risk, not only of losing his governing coalition but also of adopting a policy that risks being seen as an achievement of terrorism. Still, Sharon's security policies do retain the support of over 60 percent of the Israeli public. In this, he also deserves the support of America.
This story appears in the February 23, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.