Israeli Security Barrier: Bar to Terror or to Peace?

October 4, 2003By JOHN F. BURNS
HARIS, West Bank, Oct. 3 — For much of the last year, the 2,500 Palestinians who live in this ancient village in the stony hills above Tel Aviv, and about 45,000 Jewish settlers and students who live in hilltop communities nearby, have talked feverishly about the approach of the huge Israeli security barrier that has cut a broad scar down the West Bank lands to the east of Israel's pre-1967 border.
The 90 miles of barrier already completed, up to 100 yards wide, consists of high, electrified fencing, plunging ditches and twinned roads of dirt and asphalt that can take Israeli tanks and lighter vehicles on security patrols. At a cost that Israeli officials have put at $2.5 million a mile, it is at once an engineering feat and the focus of yet another bitter dispute that threatens to raise new obstacles to any peace settlement.
To Israeli supporters, the fence is a trump card in the battle with Palestinian militants who have mounted scores of suicide bombings and other armed attacks inside Israel in the three years of violence in the Palestinian intifada. To the Palestinians, it is an emblem, in steel and concrete, of what they see as Israel's determination to annex large parts of the West Bank, pre-empting their return in any future land-for-peace deal.
For Palestinians and Jews in these hills, the concern has been whether the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would confirm Israeli plans to have the fence turn sharply east and loop 15 miles to enfold a dozen Jewish settlements like Ariel. A wide swath of Palestinian land would be enclosed, cutting off a score of Palestinian villages from the rest of the West Bank.
On Wednesday, Mr. Sharon's cabinet endorsed initial steps toward completing that thrust inland, and in effect approved a $1 billion outlay of a further 270 miles of fencing.
The decision prompted an outburst of passions mirroring those that have fueled intifada violence and Israeli reprisals. Four of the Palestinian attacks, one of them a suicide bombing at a bus station last month that killed two Israeli soldiers, occurred in the last 18 months just outside the smaller fence that surrounds Ariel. According to Palestinians, Israeli reprisals in the area have included the demolition of dozens of homes and scores of arrests.
Here in Haris, Palestinian men erupted in anger and despair at the Israeli decision and at the Bush administration's decision to hold off for now on its threats of financial penalties on Israel. They called the fence a "barrier of death" that would cut the village off from the olive groves that sustain many families and compound the miseries suffered since Israel, early in the uprising, blocked 300,000 West Bank Palestinians from entering Israel to work.
"We have been living in an open jail, and now the gates will be closed," said Bassam Sultan, a 43-year-old teacher with eight children.
Israeli road closures around Haris have forced Mr. Sultan, who says he suffers from heart problems and diabetes, to walk 45 minutes to his school, instead of making the five-minute drive. Often, too, he has been barred by Israeli soldiers from tending his olive grove. "Why don't they just kill me?" he said.
In Ariel, some residents say they worry that the barrier will further antagonize Palestinians, without putting an end to attacks. But most seem to share the delight of the settlement's founder and mayor, Ron Nachman, 61, who called the cabinet decision a triumph for the quarter century of work he has invested in Ariel since setting up a tented camp on the barren hills in 1977.
"Israel has planes and submarines and tanks; the fence is just another way to protect its people," he said. But moments later, he implied that the fence would be a step toward the greater Israel that the settler movement craves. Mr. Nachman described this as involving a partitioning of the West Bank between Jews and Palestinians, with Jordan becoming a Palestinian state with "fingers" of territory on the West Bank.
For the moment, the cabinet ruling is a halfway measure only, involving approval for horseshoe-shaped fences to be built around Ariel and the other settlements, with a view to further decisions to close the horseshoes and link them to the main fence later. With the American presidential election on the horizon, supporters of the fence believe that the Sharon government may be able in six or nine months to make a final decision on the "Ariel loop" without drawing the penalties threatened by the Bush administration, which has said it could deduct the cost of fence-building it opposes from $9 billion in loan guarantees.
To a visitor who last saw the West Bank a few days before the current uprising began in September 2000, the length of barrier already completed and the wider changes in the territory brought about by the intifada are a shock. Three years ago, an air of hope and growing normality prevailed. Mostly, Israelis and Jewish settlers moved safely through Palestinian areas, visiting casinos and shopping at roadside bazaars.
Now, the West Bank has the appearance of a wasteland. Life is mostly at a standstill, with big cities, as well as the towns and villages, cut off from one another by a maze of Israeli-built "bypass roads" — open to settlers but closed to most Palestinians — Israeli Army checkpoints and new concrete-slab walls and fencing and piles of bulldozed rubble blocking roads everywhere.
To a Westerner with a permit to travel the territory, it seems like an archipelago of brooding ghettos, of weary men, women and children crossing a patchwork quilt of checkpoints and barriers. East of Jerusalem, where only limited sections of the fence have been completed, it cuts across the hills near Bethlehem. North of Tel Aviv, at Palestinian cities like Qalqilya, which has been surrounded by the fence, farmers heading for their lands and children heading for school must reach gates operated by Israeli soldiers at the set opening hours, especially at dusk, or face camping out overnight.
The deep divide between Palestinians and Israelis is captured by the mood here and in Ariel. Ariel projects modernity and middle-class prosperity, with its blossom-lined avenues, attractive stone houses and apartment blocks, arts and sports centers, well-equipped hospitals and schools, and its own Japanese-financed mini-golf center. It is the citadel of settlements, a vision that the 230,000 Jewish settlers across the West Bank and Gaza, many still in trailers, see as their future.
Haris, barely two miles away, is deeply dispirited. Here, only two of the men, among a dozen who stopped to talk about the fence, had work of any kind. The men focused part of their recriminations on President Bush, dismissing as "theater" American pressure on the Israeli government over the fence. Mostly, they spoke of their fears.
Perusing maps prepared by Israeli and Palestinian groups opposing the barrier that have studied Israel's plans, they have concluded that the fence is likely to sear the village's southern flank, 100 yards from the nearest houses, sweeping along a hillside of dense olive trees that overlooks the bypass road that many Ariel settlers use to reach jobs 25 miles away in Tel Aviv.
"When they take your land, kill your sons, deny you food for your family, demolish your houses, and deny you any freedom of movement, what do they expect you to do?" said 52-year-old Najeh Souf, who returned to Haris from more than 20 years working as a hospital clerk in Kuwait and invested his savings in olive groves near the bypass road. "All this I will write in my diary, all they have done, all we have suffered, so it will be read and remembered by my children, and my children's children. We will never give up. Write that down. We will never give up."
Mustafa Salami, 24 and never employed, belongs to the under-30 generation of Palestinians that Israeli security officials regard as most threatening. Most days now, he said, he stands by the road, selling artificial sunflowers to passing motorists.
Early on Wednesday, before the cabinet decision, he watched as Israeli troops with a bulldozer demolished his uncle's corrugated shed beside the road for continuing his plant business without an Israeli permit that had been regularly denied.
"I am very angry, very angry," he said. "I can't work, I can't marry, I can't build a house. "Life is not worth living. I want to die. Many of us do not care if we live or die."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company