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AN ISRAELI VIEW
Chronicle of a good idea gone sour
By yossi Alpher Monday, August 11, 2003
I was personally involved in campaigning for the West Bank security fence. I am increasingly unhappy with some of the results.
Around two years ago, as a member of the executive of the Council for Peace and Security, a non-governmental organization that groups some 1,200 former senior security personnel, I supported our sponsorship of the fence. Our idea was to base the fence on the green line (1948 armistice line) between Israel and the West Bank. The primary objective was to keep out suicide bombers, who at the time were walking and even driving across the border freely, with devastating effect on Israel. An earlier fence around the Gaza Strip has proven a formidable barrier against suicide bombers. It seemed to us that it is the primary obligation of any Israeli government to protect the 97 percent of its citizens who live within the green line by building a fence.
The fence as we conceived it had several additional purposes. One, at the strategic level, was to delegitimize the isolated settlements (but not the settlement blocs) that lie beyond it. We advocated their immediate removal, if only to free up the large numbers of Israeli security forces that guard them, so they could patrol the fence. We argued that even if the Sharon government did not remove the settlements, the existence of the fence between them and the State of Israel would contribute to their withering away. In the atmosphere of the past three years of failed peace process and Palestinian suicide violence, the fence was a legitimate expression of the desire of the vast majority of Israelis to separate our Jewish democratic state from the Palestinian territories, once and for all. Not to occupy or annex, but rather to go our separate ways and protect ourselves.
The fence had additional, tactical objectives. One was keeping out illegal Palestinian "returnees", whose numbers inside Israel have reached around 100,000. Another was to stop rampant thievery--of cars, agricultural equipment and produce, etc.--from across the green line.
The only deviations from the green line that we contemplated were for topographic security considerations, and to include settlements located directly across the line.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initially opposed the fence, essentially because he feared the repercussions for the settlements, which ensure long term Israeli control over the West Bank. For obvious reasons, so did the settlers themselves. Eventually Sharon bowed to extensive public pressure, some of which we engineered, and undertook reluctantly to build the fence more or less along the green line.
When pressure was applied by settlers to include more and more of their homes within the fence, Sharon saw an opening to "hijack" the fence for his own purposes. This began with rather extensive deviations--and consequent hardships imposed on Palestinian towns and villages--to accommodate more distant settlements. Thus, in order to include Alfei Menashe inside the fence, the town of Qalqilya had to be fenced in on almost all sides and rendered a virtual enclave.
Still, most of the first two sections of the fence, the northernmost, are on or close to the green line. Along with some 22 kilometers of fencing in northern and southern Jerusalem, they have contributed in recent months (even before the ceasefire) to a genuine reduction in penetrations by terrorists into Israeli territory.
But when it came time to plan Section III of the fence, linking the Elkana-Ariel settlement region with Jerusalem, Sharon, now backed by the settlers, instructed the security establishment to plan a fence that deviates deep into the West Bank and attaches numerous settlements to Israel. Many Palestinian villages caught inside this area would themselves be fenced in and turned into enclaves. Sharon also revealed that he envisaged an "eastern fence" cutting off the West Bank mountain heartland from the Jordan Valley. In other words, Sharon intends to transform the fence from a security-separation barrier to a means of defining the enclave-like nature of that 50 percent or so of the West Bank that he intends to offer the Palestinians as a "state".
This is where the Bush administration has stepped in. Its protest against the fence, while generalized, is primarily (and legitimately) aimed at Sharon's attempts to politicize what is essentially a sound security measure and to create disastrous "territorial facts" regarding final status, at a time when the two sides should be contemplating renewing negotiations.
While a skillful Palestinian public diplomacy campaign was instrumental in energizing the administration on the fence issue, the famous Palestinian power point presentation that made the rounds of Washington is also instructive for its own distortions of the issue. It calls the fence a "wall" even though only nine kilometers out of 183 under construction or completed are configured as walls. While it legitimately highlights human rights abuses generated by the fence, it conveniently ignores the real reason for building it: the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign that was perceived by Israelis as a quasi-existential threat, and which the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization did nothing to stop.
It is Palestinian terrorism that caused the fence to be built in the first place. Against terrorism, the fence works. If built on or near the green line, the concept is right, and could ultimately also have positive strategic political ramifications for both sides. Now, unfortunately, thanks to Sharon's excesses, the fence has taken on the dimensions of a fiasco. -Published 11/8/03©bitterlemons.org
Yossi Alpher is coeditor of bitterlemons.org and bitterlemons-international.org. He is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Barak.