Palestinians Losing Land to the Fence

The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. “Mortal danger; military zone,” they read. “Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.”

And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land -- but exclude the people.

“We can see our land, but we can’t reach it,” Habbas said. “We are like birds now, stuck in a cage.”

In the year since construction began, Israel’s West Bank wall has evolved into a political quandary. Settlers think that it’s perilous; Palestinians think that it’s poisonous. Some of the Israeli security experts who originally pressed for its construction have forsworn the project in disgust. And the United States has warned that the miles of coiled barbed wire and electronic currents could spell the subversion of fragile peace talks.

President Bush has said it will be difficult to build confidence “with a wall snaking through the West Bank,” and he pledged to raise the contentious issue with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during the Israeli leader’s White House visit Tuesday. But Israel is pressing on, spending millions of dollars and squandering goodwill to raise the wall.

When construction began last summer, the barrier was introduced to a terror-battered Israeli public as a security or “separation” fence that would keep suicide bombers at bay. With hundreds of Israelis dead at the hands of Palestinian militants, it was time to build a wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories, defense officials said.

Since then, the wall’s path has shifted east to consume swaths of the West Bank as one Jewish settlement after another demanded to be included on the side of the fence that is closer to Israel. Palestinians, Israelis and international peace mediators all fear the fence will harden into a border. The wall’s final route is a mystery, even to the Israeli lawmakers who were pressured last week by Sharon to set aside an extra $170.5 million for it.

So far, only the northern portion has been finished -- the more than 90 miles of wall run west across the north of the West Bank, then cut a looping path south to peter out just below the town of Kalkilya. More layers of fencing are rising on the outskirts of Jerusalem, including here around Rafat, and officials are talking about walling off the Jordan Valley. But they remain circumspect on the question of where -- and when -- the rest of the fence will be raised. Many analysts say that’s because the debate is still crackling among Israel’s highest officials.

Palestinians say Israel plans to wall off more than half of the West Bank. In other words, they say, the territory where Palestinians hope to found their long-awaited state is being whittled away by a fence line.

“The Palestinian vision is being crushed every hour,” said Saeb Erekat, a veteran Palestinian negotiator. “Israel will tell you it’s about security, but it’s really about confiscating land and fait accompli policies. It seems to me that everything is about to collapse on the ground.”

The Israeli government describes the fence as a badly needed security measure -- and nothing more. “You have to defend yourself,” said Uzi Dayan, former chair of Israel’s National Security Council and one of the wall’s most vocal advocates. “Otherwise we are exposed, we are vulnerable.”

In the face of U.S. warnings, Israeli officials have upheld their right to self-defense.

Speaking to Israel Radio last week, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom lamented what he deemed Palestinian success in swaying world opinion to believe that the wall “will make their lives more difficult and create facts on the ground.”

“The construction is intended to keep out terrorists and extremists seeking to blow up the peace process,” he said.

The wall’s staunchest advocates mention the Gaza Strip, which was wrapped in fences when Israeli troops withdrew in the early 1990s. The notorious walls of Gaza have drawn the ire of Palestinians and human rights groups, who point out that more than 1 million Palestinians live penned in a sprawling beach-side cage, generally unable to come and go.

But Israel lauds the Gaza arrangement as a stunning success -- after all, security experts say, in nearly three years of fighting, not a single suicide bomber has managed to slip from Gaza into Israel.

But the lawmaker and former army commander who pioneered the construction of the Gaza fence in 1993 and 1994 bristles at the comparison between his pet project and the West Bank wall. Much like the Palestinians, Matan Vilnai thinks that the original notion -- to wall off the West Bank with a security fence -- has been hijacked.

Vilnai argues that, despite ongoing peace talks and Sharon’s repeated statements in support of Palestinian statehood, the fence’s path illustrates the true intentions of a government fundamentally opposed to a Palestinian nation forged on territory some Israelis regard as their rightful land.

“It’s not a security fence from the point of view of the government, but rather a political fence,” Vilnai said. “It’s meant to make sure that under no circumstances can there be a Palestinian state. They talk about a Palestinian state, but they don’t believe in it, and they’re doing everything they can to prevent it.”

If the government wanted to build a security fence, Vilnai argued, it would have stuck to the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. “The line of the fence is a catastrophe,” he said. “It’s not to secure our people, it annexes thousands of Palestinians to Israel. And we don’t need them, and they don’t want it.”

Vilnai echoes the complaint of Palestinian officials: that Israel has no right to nudge the construction into the West Bank. “They can put a wall in Israel proper, and it can reach the sky. It’s none of our business,” Erekat said. “But to put a wall in the heart of our land -- we’re going to turn into the biggest prison in the world.”

Jewish settlers in the West Bank are of two minds about the project. As long as government-sponsored pioneers have been homesteading the Palestinian territories in the name of “redeeming the land,” the idea of erecting fences has been anathema to most ideological settlers.

When Israel began to move in earnest to build the fence, many settlers decried the project as a betrayal. While Palestinians complained that turf was being grabbed, settlers warned against abandoning a stake in biblical lands of the West Bank.

“It’s a mirror image of Palestinian concerns, that the territories beyond the wall have already been, in effect, conceded,” Israeli political analyst Mark Heller said.

But as the months passed, and the layers of barbed wire, towering concrete walls and military roads crept south through the West Bank, some settlers grew nervous about the prospect of being abandoned on the wrong side. Abruptly, complaints shifted.

“If the Israeli government decides to build a fence, then we should have one also,” said Ron Nachman, mayor of one of the West Bank’s largest settlements, Ariel. “If there’s to be a fence, the Israelis should be inside the fence.”

The trouble is, about 230,000 Israeli settlers live scattered throughout the West Bank -- and encompassing settlements means annexing Arab towns and villages too. Ariel, a massive, secular community complete with a hotel, university and industrial park, lies about 10 miles into the West Bank. According to most predictions, the fence will dip all the way into the West Bank to protect Ariel.

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. Especially when Abu Mazen wants to know too,” said Nachman, referring to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

In the nearby settlement of Karnei Shomron, an unruffled settler said she was sure her government wouldn’t wall her town out. “That America is pressuring Israel doesn’t interest us -- we want to see what our government will do,” Sondra Oster Baras said. “And we see the bulldozers -- it’s being built to the east of us.”

Last week, members of Sharon’s Likud Party staged a minor revolt, refusing to endorse the budget for the fence until they knew where it would run and precisely how the money would be spent.

The entire discussion enrages Dayan, who argues that the wall should have been built by now.

Innocent lives could have been saved, he said, if Israel hadn’t allowed the construction to be bogged down in politics. “I can’t accept that, because of people’s views about where the fence will go, we sit around and do nothing,” he said.

But on the ground, as bulldozers rumble and walls grow higher, the debate fades into background noise. Palestinians are finding themselves hemmed into their villages, divided from their land by a fence they are forbidden to approach. Palestinians refer to it as the “apartheid wall” and compare the project to the Berlin Wall.

Mahmud abu Habseh stood on the hilly rise of his Rafat backyard on a recent afternoon, tracing with his finger the distant, curling path of the wall -- a layered series of barricades including a road for army trucks, coiled stacks of barbed wire and a sand pit to trap footprints. Abu Habseh, an electrician, lost more than an acre of land to the fence.

“Look how it moves -- see how they took the land and left the homes?” he said. Below him, the fence curved inward to skirt the buildings.

“It makes it clear they want the land and not security,” he said. “They took it against our will. But if the judge is your enemy, to whom do you complain?”