Fence Leads to Heart of a Great Divide

The would-be suicide bomber’s plans were laid with painstaking precision, with chilling and methodical calm.

His target was carefully chosen -- an Israeli vocational school with hundreds of teenage students. His hand-sewn belt, primed with 22 pounds of explosives, was ready to be donned and detonated. His videotaped farewell, in which he expressed joy at the prospect of imminent “martyrdom,” was already recorded and secreted away by Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian militant group to which the bomber belonged.

But as the attacker and a guide set out on that cold December morning from a village outside the West Bank town of Jenin, they were troubled by one detail.

To make their way to the school in this tidily nondescript Israeli industrial town, they would be forced to take a long and indirect route -- one that skirted the heavily fortified and tightly guarded Israeli barrier that runs along the northern edge of the West Bank.

That detour, Israeli investigators said later, proved the bomb plot’s undoing. As the pair neared the end of a 30-mile journey to a lonely stretch of territory unprotected by the barrier, Israeli troops acting on intelligence reports -- and working against a relentlessly ticking clock -- swooped down and captured them.

To the great majority of Israelis, cases such as the foiled Yokneam suicide bombing are the most compelling argument for completing the barrier, which Israeli officials refer to as the “anti-terrorism fence.” At the vocational school that was the intended target, students and their teachers unequivocally believe it was all that stood between them and the same bloodstained fate as hundreds of other Israeli victims of suicide bombings.

“We escaped by a miracle,” said Rivka Zafir, the school’s principal. “These children are our treasure, and they could have been taken from us, so many of them.”

Despite a solid consensus among Israelis that they desperately need a bulwark against suicide attacks, however, debate over the route of the barrier has left the country deeply divided. Uneasy questions are raised daily as to whether what is intended as a measure to protect Israel’s citizens will ultimately render the country an even more dangerous place because of the Palestinian fury over the barrier’s appropriation of swaths of the West Bank.

Many Israelis’ feelings about the fence are complex and conflicted. Even among those who believe that modifying the barrier’s path to ease Palestinian hardship is a moral and practical necessity, there is a pronounced weariness of world criticism. Few here relish the notion of Israel in the dock, if only figuratively, at hearings that will begin Monday at the International Court of Justice.

In a much-questioned move, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has declined to mount a courtroom defense of the barrier, saying it does not recognize the right of the world court to rule in a matter involving Israel’s national security. But Israel will nonetheless be a highly visible presence in The Hague, the court’s seat.

A private Israeli group that provides emergency medical aid at the scene of suicide bombings shipped the charred and mangled remains of an Israeli bus to The Hague. Last month, a bomber killed 11 passengers on the bus. Relatives of bomb victims will hold public marches outside the courthouse, with some demonstrators carrying portraits of slain loved ones. A team of veteran Israeli diplomats will be on hand in the Netherlands to publicly press Israel’s cause.

Any opinion rendered by the court, the highest adjudicating body of the United Nations, will be nonbinding. But Israel, embroiled in a ferocious 41-month-old armed confrontation with the Palestinians, is concerned that the case may open the door to attempts to bring other issues related to that conflict before the international judges.

In the weeks leading up to the court date, Israel -- prodded by the Bush administration -- has shown signs of willingness to make the route conform more closely to the so-called Green Line, the de facto border before the 1967 Middle East War. About one-quarter of the barrier’s planned 452 miles has been completed, and the sections mapped to cut deepest into the West Bank are those yet to be built. Israeli officials say that even finished portions of the project are subject to change.

“A fence like this is removable and reversible -- but the lives that would be lost without it are gone forever,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled. “It’s a last resort, because of the terrible situation we now face. This is a matter of life and death, absolutely.”

Both sides accuse the other of using distorted language to characterize the barrier, which at an estimated cost of $3 million a mile is one of Israel’s most expensive public works projects. Israeli officials are incensed when Palestinians call it a wall rather than a fence, because only about 5% of the total will be made up of the towering concrete barricades so often seen in news photographs.

But the remainder is daunting to gaze upon as well: miles of electronically monitored fencing punctuated by a maze of watchtowers, entrenchments and rolls of razor wire, with patrol roads whose surfaces will be kept carefully swept so the footprints of intruders can be spotted.

Construction of the barrier, begun in August 2002, has created a strange and shifting tangle of political alliances. A separation barricade was originally the brainchild of the previous left-leaning Labor government. Sharon for years had dug in his heels in resistance, not wanting to fence out Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

It was only under intense public pressure, and amid the rising Israeli toll from suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants, that the prime minister agreed to move ahead. Now he is the project’s chief defender, fending off accusations by domestic opponents that the barrier is more a political measure than a military one, a bid to seize territory the Palestinians want for their future state.

One of the most hotly contested points in the barrier debate is whether a dramatic drop-off over the last year in attacks by Palestinian militants is a result of the barrier, as both Sharon and the security establishment contend.

From October 2002 to last September, the number of attacks fell from 446 to 241 compared with the same period a year earlier, the government said. But that time span also coincided with a tight Israeli military clampdown on nearly all the cities of the West Bank, and with a strenuous push by Israeli troops to hunt down Palestinian militant leaders.

That period also included a self-imposed seven-week hiatus in attacks last summer by Hamas and the other major militant groups after the formal launch of the U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan. The fragile truce collapsed amid the fierce renewal of suicide attacks and an Israeli campaign to assassinate Hamas leaders.

In Israeli towns and cities near the Green Line, the barrier’s steady advance has been accompanied by a palpable sense of relief. Kfar Saba, a Tel Aviv bedroom community, was hit by repeated suicide bombings before the barrier was built but has had none since the neighboring West Bank city of Kalkilya was sealed off from it last year by a seemingly impenetrable concrete wall.

“I must admit the fence does give me some sense of security, but I don’t think it will solve our problems,” said Benzi Atas, the proprietor of an electronics shop steps from where a suicide blast in November 2002 killed a security guard and a shopper. “Only an agreement will solve it. The Palestinians hate us, and that is the thing we need to resolve.”

Even within the security establishment, few see the barrier as a foolproof means of defense. Israeli military sources say they believe Palestinian militants at some point will try to launch rockets and missiles over the barrier. And while construction progresses, suicide bombers still manage to make their way into Israeli cities and towns.

Whatever the eventual shape of the barrier, it is likely to remain freighted with ambivalence.

“You know, I had a problem with the fence, because of the suffering it causes Palestinians,” said Zafir, the vocational school principal. “That is what I thought before -- and what I still believe, in a way. But after what happened here, I can only think that we must find a way, even if the world does not like it, to keep ourselves safe.”