Again, the walls come tumbling down

ANYONE TRYING to understand the roots of the conflict between Arab and Jew might find answers in the archeological ruins of the oldest city in the world, Jericho.

Here, the Bible says, Joshua led the Israelites across the Jordan. They brought down the city’s walls with a great shout and a blast of trumpets, staking a claim to the Promised Land that many Jews say is still valid.

But today, a far more recent ruin in Jericho epitomizes much of the agonized modern history of Israel and Palestine: the crumbled masonry of the city’s main jail, where an Israeli tank this week blasted a hole in the wall and soldiers took custody of six wanted Palestinians inside. The incident highlights the symbolism and explosive power of prisons in the region.

The jail in Jericho was built by the British in 1937 as part of a network of about 70 forts commissioned by Sir Charles Tegart, a colonial official who served as a security advisor. These concrete strongholds were built at strategic spots across Palestine to subdue the great Arab revolt of 1936-39. They have become as much a part of the landscape of the Holy Land as its rocky hills and stone houses.

Jericho’s Tegart fort passed into the hands of Transjordan’s Arab Legion when the British left in 1948; was captured by Israel in 1967; and served as the local headquarters for Israeli military administrators until April 1994, when it was transferred to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian forces under the terms of the Oslo accords. In 2002, the deployment of U.S. and British monitors there (to ensure that the six Palestinian militants being held by the Palestinian Authority remained in custody) made it the most visible symbol of equivocal Western involvement in security issues.

Over the years, some Tegart forts, such as the one at Latrun (where the young Ariel Sharon was badly wounded in 1948 in the failed assaults by Jewish forces to dislodge the Arab Legion), have become museums.

Another, the muqataa in Ramallah, is still the nerve center of the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Arafat was besieged there until he became fatally ill in 2004. Much of the building has been demolished and the wreckage cleared to make way for a parking lot. The surviving parts of the fort are now the offices of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat’s body lies in a small shrine next to it, awaiting reburial in Jerusalem.

The handover of the Tegart forts in the occupied territories to Palestinian forces in 1994 and 1996 helped convince many that the incomplete Oslo accords would eventually lead to a permanent peace. As the Israelis ceded parcels of territory, they often would slip out of the forts in the dead of night, and Palestinians would then swarm in, some of them reliving their time spent in detention.

The first city to be given to Palestinians was Jericho in 1994. When they left the fort, the Israelis carted off all the desks, fixtures and even the air conditioners, while the Palestinians celebrated by firing off guns and posing for pictures in camouflage uniforms. Israel, as part of the process, freed many Palestinian prisoners, but it insisted that those with “blood on their hands” should stay behind bars.

It was possible then to believe that peace could come. But soon the prisons came to represent the frustrating ambiguity of Oslo. The Palestinian flag replaced Israel’s colors, but the jails began to fill up again -- initially with militant opponents of the peace process but eventually with some of those who fell out of favor with Arafat.

Arafat used his prisons to play Machiavellian games with both Israel and the Islamists, whose suicide bombing campaign threatened the peace process beginning in 1994. Arafat would at one moment kiss Hamas leaders and at another throw them in jail; one day he would suppress the militants to salvage the peace process, the next he would open the prison doors to strengthen his hand in negotiations or to win support among his people.

Inside Palestinian prisons, inmates accused their jailers of being Israeli stooges and mockingly addressed them in Hebrew. Sometimes the Palestinian Authority brought militants into the jails to use them as sanctuary against assassination attempts by Israel.

In the last seven decades, Palestinians have seen the Tegart forts as symbols of colonial subjugation, Israeli occupation, independence and betrayal. But they have also been incubators of political organization and even cooperation with Israel.

Many Palestinian inmates learned Hebrew in Tegart forts or other Israeli prisons; later, that knowledge helped forge important links between Palestinians and Israeli leaders. Several ex-prisoners even successfully ran for office in the Palestinian parliament.

Someday it is possible that one of them -- perhaps even the popular Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, now serving a life term in an Israeli prison -- will return to lead a new attempt at reconciliation. Then, perhaps, the Jericho jail will become just another relic of the past.