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Israel Building Barriers to Keep Palestinians Out - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum Israel Building Barriers
to Keep Palestinians OutBy Daniel Williams
Washington Post
April 9, 2002In a speech Monday pledging to proceed with his offensive in the West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said his next step would be to isolate the Palestinians from Israelis with what he called buffer zones.
In fact, the Israeli attempt to build protective barriers has been going on for months. The project is visible all over the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. At the southern exit of Ramallah, just 10 miles from Jerusalem, new railings have been erected along the main road, outlining what looks like a permanent border post to replace a makeshift checkpoint.
Jericho, below sea level about 20 miles east of the Israeli capital, is virtually surrounded by ditches that make averting Israeli military blockades difficult. A 30-foot-tall fence separates the Palestinian village of Husan from a Jewish settlement and its service road near Bethlehem, the main Palestinian market town just south of Jerusalem.
Fences have long ringed the Gaza Strip. In the past 18 months, the Israeli military has razed citrus groves and residential neighborhoods alike to clear broad swaths of territory along the frontier between Israel and Gaza. In effect, free-fire zones have been created to prevent infiltration; such a strip runs along the frontier almost completely from Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip's far north about 30 miles southward to Rafah on the Egyptian border.
Perhaps most striking is the series of fences and walls rising piecemeal along stretches of borderland between central Israeli towns that hug the West Bank, from the Palestinian town of Qalqilyah north to Tulkarm. Some are electrified, topped with barbed wire and equipped with video surveillance cameras. Not long ago, Sharon and top military officials toured the area to survey sites destined to be fenced off.
What began piecemeal has fast become policy. In his speech, Sharon said that once Israeli troops finish their task in the current offensive, now in its 12th day, they will pull back to "defined security zones" that "constitute a buffer between the Palestinian territories and our territories."
The threat of armed attack from Palestinians coming from the West Bank and Gaza supplies the rationale for what Israelis call "separation." Repeated terrorist attacks inside Israel have raised cries among the public for sealing off borders between Israel and the Palestinians.
But the frontiers of Israel are not the only points of contact between the two populations. Israel maintains 140 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, populated by more than 200,000 Jews. The intertwining of roads and the proximity of Israeli settlements to Palestinian towns and hamlets vastly complicate the creation of buffer zones.
Settlement construction and expansion continue. Last month, a report from Peace Now, an Israeli organization that opposes the settlement program, said Sharon began work on at least 30 new settlements during his first year in power. Mobile homes and other forms of temporary housing dot hilltops across the West Bank. Such structures traditionally herald the construction of permanent houses.
Government officials say the expansion is only what they call "natural growth" of existing settlements, not creation of new communities. Peace Now pointed out that some of the new sites lie two miles from the nearest settlement.
Successive Israeli governments have promoted settlements since the West Bank and Gaza Strip were captured in 1967, even during the past decade when peace talks meandered forward. Palestinians have often criticized them as a major sign of bad faith. The Palestinians consider construction of settlements and roads, and other services for the Jewish residents, as signs that Israel will never agree to pull out of the occupied land.
In areas near new buffer zones, plans call for including dozens of Palestinian hamlets within Israeli areas of control. The communities would, in effect, be annexed. About 400,000 Palestinians would fall under permanent Israeli jurisdiction, according to critics of the plan.
One vulnerable town is Baka Gharbiya, along the Israeli border with the West Bank. Residents there regard separation glumly. Even before the current offensive, the streets of the town were habitually deserted. Baka is cut off not only from Israel, but also from the rest of the West Bank, by ditches and military checkpoints. Israel fashioned special entry permits for Palestinians who want to travel there from other parts of the West Bank. Only Jewish settlers, who travel under military escort, pass freely through Baka.
"And they don't stop to shop," said math teacher Fahed Asaad, who moonlights as a toy salesman. "Sometimes I sit on the balcony of my house and look over at the Israeli side of the border. I see traffic there, people going to shop. I hear the noise. And I wonder, how long will I live in a cemetery?"
There are still hidden ways of getting to Baka, through olive groves along dirt roads. It is a drain on time and energy. "It takes me three hours to get to work," said Adnan Abu Shawarb, a grocery worker. "It should take only a half-hour. But so far, they haven't given me a permit."
Some Israeli observers say unilateral separation is folly. "It's all fantasy," said Avishai Margolit, a political philosopher. He reckons that with all the twists and turns necessary to accommodate settlements, the total length of the border would be 10 times the 200-mile length of the original West Bank frontier limits. "As if a fence would really shield us," he said.
Tom Savia, a former West Bank military commander, said: "The location of the settlements makes it impossible. All the stories of a double fence or wall or a ditch full of hungry alligators are all nonsense," he told a radio interviewer. Still, Israelis living close to Palestinians have greeted the proposal with enthusiasm.
Bat Hefer is an Israeli bedroom community of 6,000 residents, inside Israel but near Tulkarm on the other side of the line. The town is a pioneer of separation. Bat Hefer first put up a wall in 1995 to keep Palestinians out. Lately, it extended and raised its wall, upgrading it with electrical wire and video. It is about a mile long. It cost almost $2 million. Residents say the wall has saved them from danger during the conflict. Bullets pass over the wall, not into the low-rise houses, they say.
"Without the wall, Palestinians would run freely here and do what we see on TV -- shooting, throwing stones, bombs," said Sharon Ezer, an aerobics instructor.
Nahum Itkovitz, head of the regional council, claimed credit for masterminding the wall. "I believe separation is the best way to give quiet to Israelis in the middle of the country. It's too easy for Palestinians to come over. We won't need a wall in the fields. We'll need only electric fences and alarms."
Plans to hem in the Palestinians have a long history. Soon after the 1967 conquest, Israeli officials drew up plans to settle Jews on the periphery of the West Bank, creating buffers between the West Bank and Jordan, to the east, and between the West Bank and Israel, to the west.
Later, Israeli governments began to populate central parts of the West Bank and areas of the Gaza Strip with settlements as well. Under the Likud party, to which Sharon belongs, settlements are the fulfillment of a biblical promise giving all the Land of Israel to Jews. Sharon has served in a variety of government ministries during his long career and has made it his life's work to create settlements, build roads and develop infrastructure in the occupied territories.
Although some military officials want to simplify separation by uprooting settlements scattered deep within the West Bank, Sharon has made it clear that is unacceptable. In his speech Monday, he said Palestinians are trying to expel Israelis from their homes. He included Elon Moreh, a settlement deep in the West Bank near Nablus.
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