Israel Gives In to Fence

In the spring winds, they are tangled together: The strains of the Jewish teenagers’ Pink Floyd, floating over the chlorinated waters of the swimming pool. The Palestinian call to prayer. And the gunfire that rumbles between the two.

This is where Israel meets the West Bank, one of many unlikely battle zones in a claustrophobic land that reinvents itself from one hill to the next. This peak is a cozy cluster of basketball hoops, red-tiled roofs and gaudy flower beds. On the next hill, past the barbed wire and a scrubby stretch of no man’s land, a Palestinian village rises in concrete-block homes and a mosque’s minaret.

“This is a dangerous, very tense area. There’s shooting all the time,” said Amir Aloni, the pistol-packing security chief of Salit, glowering behind his sunglasses. “We have hostile neighbors.”

Pressed against--or, if you ask the Palestinians, imposed upon--the edge of the Palestinian territories, this sleepy Jewish settlement is wrapped in guard posts and floodlights. A few weeks ago, the Israeli army cut a trench in the red earth at the foot of the hill to block unwanted cars from climbing toward Salit.

Those barricades are only the beginning. This spring, Israel is doing something it has long avoided: building a wall between itself and the swath of desert, orchard and hills known as the West Bank. Barbed wire and motion detectors, concrete barricades and razor wire are sprouting steadily over the rough ribbon of land.

On Sunday, bulldozers flattened the dirt along the northern Israel frontier to make way for the snaking wall. Soon, Israeli officials have said, the whole West Bank will be walled off.

This month, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--who scorned the notion of a fence until the recent spate of bloody Palestinian attacks on Israelis--changed his mind, and approved a plan drafted by Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

The first posts were sunk into the fertile countryside near Megiddo, where 17 Israeli bus passengers were killed this month by a bomb set off by a young Palestinian militant. The construction represents a major shift in mainstream Israeli thought, which for decades bristled at creating anything that could resemble a border. Even as the fence begins to rise, radical Israeli coalition members are threatening to bring the government to a halt if the construction continues.

Both sides, meanwhile, are asking what Israel, in the words of the Robert Frost poem, is “walling in or walling out.” Palestinians believe the fence will strip them of jobs, dignity, freedom of movement--and land, the most precious currency in this old turf war. Israel hasn’t announced the path of the entire fence but has said it will wall an “adjusted” boundary rather than stick to the pre-1967 Israeli-Palestinian frontier.

Khalil Turfakji, a cartographer for the Palestinian Authority, has examined Israeli army documents indicating that the fence will chop at least 30 square miles of earth from the Palestinian territories.

“They’re not going to put it on the real border; they’re going to put it well into Palestinian territory,” said Michael Tarazi, a Palestine Liberation Organization negotiator. “It’s a formalized annexation, a de facto land grab.”

Nationalist Israelis are also distressed--they don’t want to cleave the land they regard as the God-given home of the Jews. But quaking under relentless assault, many Israelis have come to regard a wall to protect them from Palestinian invasion as an inevitable inconvenience. “If a fence can save lives,” Aloni said, “we should have a fence.”

Radical Palestinian snipers and suicide bombers continue to make their way into Israel over the desert, along old farming roads and through the back streets where urban neighborhoods press together. No matter how many roadblocks Israeli soldiers construct--and no matter how many times they storm West Bank villages to interrogate and arrest militants--the attackers keep coming.

“They’re shooting all the time,” Hamatul Kadman said. The 23-year-old kindergarten teacher lives down the road from Salit in Eyal, a broad, leafy kibbutz that comes under frequent fire from the Palestinian territories. “A lot of people are scared.”

Just a few months ago, a young Kfar Sava girl was killed when a Palestinian sniper opened fire on a group of students. A short walk across flat fields from the West Bank, the city is an easy target.

“All of us wake up in the morning hesitating, wondering what day we’re coming into,” Kfar Sava Mayor Yitzhak Wald said. “The fence is a must.”

It wasn’t always like this. A few years ago, the Jewish mayor visited back and forth with his counterpart in the nearby Palestinian city of Kalkilya. They spoke of a shared sewage system and garbage routes, a hospital, a day care center for Palestinian mothers. In those days, Palestinian workers set out at dawn to tromp the dusty road to Israel. They hung around on the roadside, waited for foremen to swing by with offers of farm and construction jobs.

But when the Palestinian intifada erupted in the fall of 2000, the mayors stopped speaking to each other. Now, on the outskirts of Kfar Sava, the Israeli army has set up concrete barricades to protect highway construction workers from the Palestinian bullets that come raining across the sun-baked fields.

And so, there will be a fence. Or, in the words of some Israeli bureaucrats, an “obstacle.” Others shun the word “border” in favor of “buffer zone.”

“It is not a fence,” defense spokesman Yarden Vatikay snapped. “It’s a security perception. There is no fence.”

In a land where people call their national boundary a “seam” and argue over whether there’s such a thing as a Palestinian, syntactical debates are nothing new. But this one is particularly sensitive.

The fence will be a physical boundary, and boundaries have a way of turning into hard borders--which is the last thing many Israelis want.

Ever since seizing the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in 1967, many Israelis have dismissed the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel as an imaginary division.

And to the chagrin of peace activists and Palestinians, thousands of Jewish settlers pushed across the boundary to build controversial, heavily guarded compounds--such as Salit--on soil claimed by Palestinians. The homesteaders regard themselves as pioneers. Their Palestinian neighbors consider them intruders.

Not all Israelis buy into settlement ideology. Conscience-stricken soldiers periodically refuse to cross the Green Line. Peace protesters have spread green canvas along the “seam” in a symbolic call to pull out of the West Bank and leave the Palestinians to set up a state.

But what of the settlements? If the fence promises protection to the nearby settlements, it taps into a tangled dispute over the future of the more remote West Bank colonies. The barricade would strand thousands of settlers within a walled Palestinian region.

“Some of the settlements may be dismantled,” Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh said. “I wouldn’t keep the border open just because of a few settlements. The fence is very, very essential to our protection.”

But after years of dangling generous cash inducements to get settlers to stake out the West Bank, the Israeli government would be hard pressed to turn its back.

Still, among war-weary residents of Israel, a groundswell continues: Many people now argue that the army ought to let the settlers come back across the Green Line--or fend for themselves. If the army can’t protect its home turf from attack, they say, it’s time to stop sending troops to outlying territories.

“We have to give up some of our dreams and come down to reality,” said Yehiam Prior, a 54-year-old physics professor active in the Movement for Unilateral Disengagement, a group pushing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and establish a permanent border. “The gap is so deep, there’s simply no hope. We’ve got to once and for all convert Israel into a normal state with borders.”

Like it or not, the border is cropping up already. Deep trenches and razor wire now line the edge of Bethlehem.

On the Palestinian side, women pick their way homeward on the rubble-strewn road. On the Israeli side, a lush olive orchard rises toward the rooftops of Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood.

Outside Ramallah, Palestinian commuters prop old car doors against the razor-wire fences and scramble over to avoid sitting in checkpoint lines.

“It’s apartheid; they are putting us in prison,” said Nabil Kukali, a Palestinian economics professor who spends four hours a day hitchhiking and trekking his way through a series of checkpoints to get to work.

“I swear to God, we suffer every day.”