Not since the Tower of Babel has a human construction been so profoundly condemned as the security fence the Israelis are building through the West Bank.
A Rube Goldberg concoction of barbed wire, trenches and sections of concrete wall, it has been denounced by the pope and the European Union. The UN General Assembly recently asked the International Court of Justice to look into the legal ramifications.
President Bush, otherwise a staunch ally of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has questioned the wisdom of the Israelis’ project. So, too, have Israeli peaceniks, even though the idea of putting a barrier between their fellow citizens and the Palestinians originated not with Sharon’s Likud Party but the left-leaning Labor Party.
So accepting that logic for the moment, let’s debate the opposite proposition: Resolved, the West Bank fence might just be the last best hope for peace in the Holy Land.
The Israeli argument for the fence derives from plotting mortality statistics against geographical realities. Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2001, more than 900 Israelis and foreigners have been killed by suicide bombers and in other attacks. Terrorists repeatedly have slipped into Israel from the West Bank–not just the authors of the carnage but others the Israeli military managed to intercept.
Yet almost never have bomb-carrying Palestinians managed to cross into Israel from Gaza Strip, which already is surrounded by a fence on its land side. Ergo, the Sharon administration concludes, its best bet for keeping its citizens alive is to build a similar fence in the West Bank.
Liberal intellectuals in Europe and the U.S., joined by mainstream church leaders, make a counterargument based on the idea that no mechanical device is perfect. Sooner or later, some militants will figure a way to thwart any physical barrier, it is said, so wouldn’t Israelis be better advised to get to the root of the problem–the Palestinians’ frustrated hopes for a homeland–by returning to the negotiating table?
No matter how ethically attractive that argument might be, it is hard to sustain it with numbers.
Land for no peace
During the early 1990s, the Israelis and Palestinians engaged in numerous negotiating sessions as part of the Oslo peace process. The Israelis progressively withdrew from Gaza and the most populous sections of the West Bank, according to the talks’ formula of trading land for peace.
By the end of the decade, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians were living in towns and villages administered by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had banked his political future on a commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Yet the violence never stopped. During the years of Oslo, 160 Israelis were killed and scores more wounded in car bombings, ambushes and other terrorist attacks. From the Israelis’ perspective, they gave land but got no peace.
The Palestinians make it clear that, should negotiations resume, they won’t cut the Israelis a better interim deal. Two successive Palestinian prime ministers have said they won’t disarm militant groups, even though that was a stipulation of the Bush administration’s latest peace initiative, called the road map.
It is easy to see why they don’t want to surrender the potential to do terrorist mischief: It’s the Palestinians’ trump card. From their perspective, it can be a means of weakening their opponents’ resolve.
But by a kind of ethical symmetry, don’t the Israelis have a parallel right to build their trump card, the West Bank fence? As it slowly snakes south from the hills of Samaria to the deserts of Judea, it puts a time limit on the effectiveness of terrorism.
And if there is one thing both sides have lacked, it is a clear view that the clock on the wall is ticking. Hard-liners–both Israeli and Palestinian–assume that each of their peoples can endure hostilities forever. Moderates are for peace but too willing to postpone the due date of their laudable goal.
An alternative proposal
Recently, there has been a flurry of media interest in a peace proposal put together by group of Israelis and Palestinians. They worked without the authorization of either Arafat or Sharon, hoping the court of public opinion would force their leaders to consider the plan. It essentially repeats the proposal offered by Barak and endorsed by President Bill Clinton in 2000: The Palestinians would get statehood, Gaza and virtually all the West Bank, while Jerusalem would be divided between the parties.
The last time that offer was on the table, Arafat said “no.” Now, “no” is a word rarely heard during any kind of negotiations in that part of the world. The Middle East is the land of haggle and bargain. Shopkeepers name a price; customers make a counteroffer. The dancing continues until a deal is struck.
But Arafat made no counteroffer.
He didn’t say, “Yes, but,” or even hint at his idea of a possible peace. He must have thought that time was on his side and that he could hold out for something much better.
So why should he even consider the same proposal done up in new packaging?
He should take into consideration the implications of the new fence.
The Israelis’ security barrier doesn’t hug the boundary between the West Bank and Israel. It zigs and zags into Palestinian territory. The Israelis say that is a matter of temporary logistics and claim the present line of the fence won’t prejudice future negations about where Israel will end and Palestine begin.
But if that isn’t sophistry, it’s a close relative. Political realism suggests that whither the wall goes, so goes the border.
So if the Palestinians choose to stall for time, they could wind up with less rather than more.
The fence also sets a time limit to an operating assumption of Israeli hard-liners. In recent decades, Israel has had an alternating series of prime ministers on either side of the country’s perennial debate over whether peace and equality between Jews and Arabs is possible.
Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Barak belong to the optimist camp. Benjamin Netanyahu and Sharon represent a school of thought that the only thing Palestinians understand is a mailed fist.
To Israelis weary of wondering whether they are sharing a bus with a suicide bomber, the pessimists offer a reverse land-for-peace formula. Likudniks say that letting go of the West Bank is just too dangerous. If we don’t fight the terrorists on their home ground, we will have to fight them on the streets of Tel Aviv, Sharon’s supporters claim.
Yet, a completed West Bank fence would rob that argument of its logic.
Safe to think
If a physical barrier can control terrorism, voters can ask themselves whether it’s worth risking the lives of Israeli soldiers trying to hold onto the occupied territories.
The fence would also politically separate some of the hardest of the Israeli hard-liners, the West Bank settlers, from the rest of the electorate. Voters could judge whether they want to mortgage their future to the settlers’ vision that they have a God-given right to the whole of the Holy Land.
Opponents of the fence make their closing argument on aesthetic grounds. Barbed wire and concrete barriers, they say, are just plain ugly, which is true enough. Palestinians dwarfed by a kind of reincarnation of the Berlin Wall don’t make a pretty picture. Neither do scenes of bus bombings in Jerusalem.
Politics has to be about more than appearances–especially in a part of the world where for too long, they have been transacted on a life-and-death basis. So consider the possibility that the West Bank fence could stanch the bleeding on both sides–and start old enemies on the long road toward friendship.
It might be a case where the flinty old New Englander of Robert Frost’s poem got it right when he said, ” Good fences make good neighbors.”
