Build a Berlin Wall in the Middle East

Something even worse than violence, terror and human tragedy is taking place between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East: the escalation beyond all proportion of rage, bitterness and unhealable psychological scars that makes any normalization nearly inconceivable for many years to come.

This untenable confrontation calls for more drastic measures--the complete physical separation of both communities in all respects. We need a Berlin Wall.

As long as the occupation of the West Bank continues, Palestinians will employ armed resistance and terror. Israel will not talk to the Palestinians until the violence ends--and we know it will not. A political problem has become a racial war. Regional war looms on the horizon. Washington seems powerless.

The infrastructure for simple terrorist actions is deepening and the militants are gaining. The more Israel employs armed repression, the more radical the Palestinian response becomes. Meanwhile, the Israeli left has been almost mortally wounded and silenced, for who can talk of concessions while children are dying? Moderates have lost control, and the reservoir of rage and suspicion ensures that the hard-liners on both sides can consistently trump more liberal postures.

The most radical of the Palestinian elements now aspire to open a broader war against Israel’s existence and will seek every opportunity to prolong the confrontation and killing. It is folly to believe that Yasser Arafat will be capable of preventing it; the logic of the situation makes it impossible for him or any other Palestinian leader to do so. The Israeli radical right would even like to eliminate him and the Palestinian Authority--as if that would accomplish anything except a requirement for deeper and indefinite Israeli administration and occupation in the face of urban guerrilla warfare. What are the implications of such a depressing Berlin Wall?

The Palestinians would gain their independent state but have no ties with Israel and the economic lifeline that represents. It would have to entirely reorient its economy and require new Arab investment to survive. The Palestinians would simply cease to be a part of the Israeli economy.

Israel would have its much needed security and would be free of the intolerable burden of trying to control several million desperate Palestinians--any number of whom are willing to die in order to kill Israelis and end occupation. Most Israeli settlements scattered in the West Bank--wildly unrealistic and unsustainable in this violent atmosphere--would be shut down.

International forces would patrol the Palestinian side to ensure that the wall functions for as long as it takes for some normalcy to return.

Jerusalem would be divided again, although psychologically and functionally hasn’t it already been divided for many years now?

One day, such a wall can come down again--likely many years off--when the logic of total separation has brought the necessary fruits of calm and dispassion that could facilitate the slow reopenings of more normal relations. A wall and miles of fences is a terrible thing. But does anybody believe the intifada can end as long as Israel requires occupation of the territories for its own security and Palestinians are willing to die in large numbers until it ends?

It is intolerable for Israelis to have to live in terror of enjoying the simplest amenities of public places, every Arab a potential terrorist, miles of traffic jams and police checks. Worse, even if the occupation were to end soon, remnants of radicalized Palestinians socialized in today’s violence and desperation would not cease in their push to punish Israel unless they were physically barred.

The mere concept of physical separation and ethnic homogenization on both sides of the line is repugnant and dismaying to believers in rational human solutions.

And the procedural problems of establishing such a physical barrier are manifold and not readily worked out. But surely these problems are more manageable than what we have today: spiraling escalation, long-term polarization, no signs of a way out, unprecedented destruction of the Israeli and Palestinan moderate voices, dangerously rising tensions along Israel’s borders with other Arab states, a ready-made situation that strengthens Saddam Hussein and Iranian radicals, that weakens moderate Arab leaders in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and that compromises U.S. freedom of maneuver across the whole Middle East. Nothing good emerges from this scenario.

Sometimes, a wall just makes better sense.