Good Fences/Good Neighbors in Mideast?

Oct. 1, 2003 -- Walid Ayad is in the middle of renovating his hotel in the Abu Dis neighborhood of East Jerusalem, but an obstacle is popping up — literally.

The Israeli government is working on a 225-mile-long security barrier designed to protect its citizens — and it's projected to run right down the middle of the Palestinian's hotel.

"They cut the hotel in two pieces, the gardens will be on one side and the hotel will be on the other side," he said.

In a land where every acre and every action is fraught with meaning, Ayad's complaint does not stand alone. Thousands of other lives will be affected by the barrier — and it's becoming a major point of contention between the United States and Israel.

This summer, President Bush called the security barrier a "problem," and last month, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration "wouldn't rule out" subtracting the money Israel spends on the barrier from its $9 billion loan package.

The first 90 miles of the fence have already been built, and the Israeli Cabinet today approved an extension of the barrier that would loop around the sprawling Jewishsettlement of Ariel about 12 miles inside the West Bank. The extension will not, however, be connected to the existing security fence, which runs further west, closer to Israel.

The Israeli government began construction in June 2002 in response to the latest intifada, which has killed about 3,500 people — 2,600 Palestinians and 850 Israelis.

And while Ayad is upset, Mina Fenton, an Israeli from the Jerusalem Municipal Council, has greeted it with relief.

"We must protect ourselves, we can't let any infiltration of terrorists and suiciders who are going just to murder and injure innocent citizens," she said.

Abandoning Diplomacy?

One of the main reasons why the barrier has become so hotly contested is that it fails to exactly follow the Green Line, Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank. It encompasses a number of the largest Jewish settlements, and some critics have termed it a land grab.

"In principle, if they build [the barrier] around areas beyond the Green Line, there's no reason to give up those areas," said Richard Stoll, a political science professor at Rice University in Texas.

What's more, the barrier doesn't simply bisect Israel and the West Bank. Portions of it double back upon itself, in effect isolating certain Palestinian communities.

Some towns will have a single entry point and exit point, leading Palestinians to complain they are being put into "cages," said Ilan Peleg, a professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and former president of the Association for Israel Studies.

"I understand the logic [of the security barrier]," said Peleg, a self-described moderate Israeli Jew. However, he said, "I think in the long run, or even in the short run, I don't think it's part of a good solution."

Daily Life Gets Harder

Said Hamad, the deputy chief of mission for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington, grew up in Bethany, a few miles from where Walid Ayad has his hotel. The security barrier has been erected there, and it is already having negative effects, he said.

He said the trek to nearby Jerusalem used to take 10 minutes. Now it takes up to 45.

As a result, daily life is harder for merchants, students, and even the sick, because Bethany has no hospital. "If you go there and see what Israel is doing, you think Israel don't believe in peace," said Hamad.

Israeli officials assert that the barrier is simply a security measure and not a political border.

The security barrier is "certainly a unilateral act by nature," said Ido Aharoni, the consul for media and public affairs at the Israeli Consulate in New York, "but it's made out of necessity."

It originated in the failed negotiations between former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2000, he said. That meeting left Israel officials with the feeling that there was "no one to talk to" — so they began a policy of separation, or "unilateral disengagement."

The Israeli military planned the route of the security barrier independent of its politicians, he said. "The fence is being built regardless of the Green Line and not as a political boundary," said Aharoni.

"It's not an attempt to set facts on the ground," Aharoni said. "We're still committed to negotiations with the Palestinians."

In Search of Security

There are also questions about whether or not the barrier will be effective at all. Proponents point to Israel's well-guarded borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, where they've seen very few terrorist infiltrators.

"If Palestinians weren't murdering Israelis every day, nobody would be building a fence," said Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America.

The Gaza Strip was fenced off in 1994, and not a single Palestinian suicide bomber has entered Israel from Gaza during the current intifada. Before 1994, Gaza was a major entry point.

But what applies to Gaza and Israel's other borders might not apply to the West Bank, said Lou Cantori, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who is an expert in military policies in the Middle East.

"Gaza is more desolate and less populated," said Cantori, a former Marine. "The terrain lends itself to a greater degree of separation."

Security barriers also don't prevent other types of attacks, he said. Palestinian militants have launched mortar attacks from Gaza. Hezbollah has attacked targets in northern Israel with ground-to-ground Katyusha rockets launched from southern Lebanon.

Furthermore, in response to more security at home, militants may redouble their attempts abroad. There may be more attacks like the ones that took place in Kenya last year, where a hotel bomb blast killed at least two Israelis and an Israeli airliner narrowly escaped a missile strike.

Counterintuitive

The argument over the security barrier doesn't simply fall along the usual lines, though.

Klein, of the Zionist Organization of America, said he supported Israel's right to build the fence and defend itself — but his organization had not yet made a decision on whether or not it supports the fence itself yet.

One reason, he said, it because the fence may isolate the Israelis in the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria — the settlers in the West Bank who live east of the fence.

Giving up Judea and Samaria would also mean the end of the dream of a Greater Israel. "There is land beyond the fence that Israel could never give away," Klein said.

For the Palestinians, there is also the potential that the security barrier could become a blessing. Cut off from Israel for jobs and income, Palestinians might develop a self-reliant and robust economy.

But the unorthodox opinions will be hard to swallow when both the orthodox reasons, when simply put, seem reasonable enough.

"Why should we cut from each others, we should live together, survive together, trade together and live together in one country," Ayad said.

"Our obligation, responsibility, is defending our citizens," Fenton said.