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CHAPTER 1
Wall and Route
'BEAUTIFUL PHOTOS'
On 29 July 2003, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and US President George W. Bush met at the White House. Sharon was the foreign leader most favoured in Washington: it was his eighth visit to the White House and his tenth official meeting with the president. The Bush administration was sympathetic to Sharon's right-wing Likud Party to a degree unusual even by partisan US standards, and this regard had increased after '9/11' and Sharon's efforts to portray his counter-insurgency measures in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of the global war against terrorism. Sharon, therefore, had every reason to expect a cordial reception from his host, and yet a certain disquiet preceded his meeting.
Four days earlier at the same venue, Bush had hosted the new Palestinian prime minister, Abu Mazen. The Bush administration hoped that Abu Mazen would use his newly created position to wrest power from the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat, who was discredited in US eyes as an obstacle to peace. Abu Mazen was also crucial to the success of the Road Map, the recently launched peace initiative. Bush was thus uncharacteristically attentive to Palestinian concerns. At their meeting Abu Mazen raised the issue of the wall. His concern was somewhat belated as the first phase of construction, some 125 kilometres through the northern West Bank, was due for completion in less than a week. Local farmers, human rights organisations and international solidarity groups had been warning of the wall's negative political and humanitarian impact since the first olive tree had been felled almost a year earlier. The Palestinian Authority had been laggard in its response, but grassroots pressure was such that Abu Mazen could not afford to ignore the issue if he was to maintain credibility with the Palestinian public.
Abu Mazen expressed the hope that Bush would demand a complete halt to construction of the wall. At the very least, he urged, the president should use his influence to have the wall rerouted towards the 'Green Line' – the internationally recognised border between Israel and the West Bank – and stem its intrusion into Palestinian territory. The president listened attentively and appeared to take Abu Mazen's considerations on board, especially his account of the suffering the wall was inflicting on ordinary Palestinians. At their joint press conference afterwards, Bush described the wall as 'a problem', declaring that it was 'very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank'.
Such publicly expressed reservations were unwelcome to Sharon, as was Bush's referring to the 'wall' with its connotations of a permanent border: Israel preferred the more homely term 'fence'. Before his encounter with Bush, Sharon had scheduled a separate meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice at which he requested that the president stop using the expression 'wall'. Rice explained that Bush used the terms 'fence' and 'wall' interchangeably and that no political inference should be drawn. At this point, Sharon reached for his photos:
beautiful photos, as members of his entourage put it, of the fence being built, which prove that it is not a wall, but rather a barrier comprised of fences and patrol routes ... [produced] to offset the impression of the presentation that the Palestinians brought on the same issue – trying to show that it is a wall.
In his meeting with Bush the following day, 'the best and most intimate meeting to date', Sharon's concerns were put to rest. '"Ariel", Bush kept referring to Sharon, and underscored his points by touching the Prime Minister's knee often.' Bush brought up the subject of the wall and its impact on the Palestinian population. 'This issue troubles us because we are aware of the price that the rural population is paying. People are being cut off from their fields. Something has to be done about that.' Sharon pulled out a photographed copy of Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall and presented it to Bush. He quoted the last line, 'Good fences make good neighbours'. 'Construction on the fence will continue', he declared, 'but I promise to check how damage to the daily life of the Palestinian population can be reduced.'
At their joint press conference afterwards, Sharon praised Bush as a world leader in the fight against terrorism and vowed that Israel, like the United States, would never surrender to terror and evil. For his part, Bush referred to the 'fence' rather than the 'wall', which was downgraded from a 'problem' to a 'sensitive issue'. Following the Washington meetings, construction of the wall was not halted or reversed as Abu Mazen had requested, and as the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) would later demand. Five weeks later, Abu Mazen resigned as Palestinian prime minister, undermined both by Sharon and by Arafat who had their different reasons for wanting his downfall. However, he would be back at the White House in May 2005, this time as Palestinian Authority President, successor to the deceased Arafat. Again, the wall would be one of the main issues raised, but by then it had become another Israeli 'fact on the ground', snaking through the West Bank with an air of permanency, with the Palestinian rural population – now trapped in enclaves and 'closed areas' – still paying the price.
WALL OR FENCE?
What are the components of the structure that Sharon's 'beautiful photos' portrayed as nothing more substantial than a fence? According to the official Ministry of Defence website, the fence is only one element of 'a multilayered composite obstacle'. This is a wire-and-mesh 'intrusion-detection' or 'smart' fence, approximately three metres high, mounted on a concrete base. It is equipped with electronic sensors, including cameras with night vision capacity, to warn of infiltration attempts. An intruder touching the fence triggers a signal to a nearby command centre or 'war room' where military personnel monitor computers and television screens. As each section of the route is numbered, a military unit can be deployed to the affected locale within eight minutes.
The 'smart' fence is augmented by a number of static security features. On at least one and usually both sides of the fence are paved roads for patrol vehicles. Smoothed strips of sand on either side of the patrol road will show the footprints of any intruders. On the 'Palestinian side' there is a ditch or trench 'or other means intended to prevent motor vehicles from crashing into and through the fence'. This is flanked by a pyramid-shaped stack of coiled razor wire, some two metres tall. An additional razor wire barrier lies on the 'Israeli side'. The complete obstacle is generally between 30 and 70 metres wide, although it spans 100 metres in certain areas. Signs are placed on the razor wire on the Palestinian side with warnings in Arabic, Hebrew and English which read: 'Mortal danger: military zone. Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
The major part of the barrier is composed of this multilayered system. The remainder is made up of precast concrete sections, generally eight metres high. According to the Israeli authorities, these concrete sections are built 'in areas where the threat of sniper fire is real and immediate or in areas where it was impossible to build a fence for topographical reasons.' In practice, such sections are erected alongside Palestinian population centres close to the Green Line, such as the towns of Qalqilya and Tulkarm, where the wall is capped with surveillance towers and cameras. Concrete slabs also dominate much of the 'Jerusalem Envelope', the term employed by the Israeli authorities for the wall around the greater Jerusalem area, including large sections of the adjoining Ramallah and Bethlehem districts. The concrete wall appears more formidable and oppressive, especially as it predominates in built-up urban areas. It should be borne in mind, however, that the more extensive 'fence' segment takes up more Palestinian land for its 'footprint' than the wall segments, and that it is equally effective – and destructive – in terms of its security and humanitarian impact.
It is disingenuous to describe such a formidable construction as a 'fence', a term which cannot convey the magnitude of a structure that carves a 670-kilometre path through the West Bank landscape. The undertaking is the largest infrastructure project in Israel's history: as one Israeli commentator observed, 'even the national water carrier or the draining of the Hula swamps look like an exercise in sandcastles compared to this colossal project'. Nor does it appear temporary, for all the Israeli claims to the contrary: as the same commentator observed, 'You have to be almost insane to think that somebody uprooted mountains, levelled hills and poured billions here in order to build some temporary security barrier "until the permanent borders are decided".' Its permanent nature is borne out by the cost, which doubled from an initial estimate of 8 million shekels ($US 1.75 million) per kilometre when the project started in 2002 to 15 million shekels per kilometre by February 2004. Sums of between $US1 and 3.4 billion have been cited for the overall cost. By 2005, the estimate was 5.6 billion shekels ($US 1.3 billion) and the high cost of construction was cited by the State of Israel in the High Court as a reason not to alter the route, 'as it would be very expensive to move'. Although the term 'barrier' is often employed to describe the structure, this implies that the main purpose is the stated one of providing a security obstacle to prevent the infiltration of Palestinians into Israel. While accepting that it also fulfils this function, 'wall' more accurately conveys its true purpose, even if most of the structure does not constitute a wall in the strict sense of the word. However, as the International Court of Justice observed, the term wall 'cannot be understood in a limited physical sense,' and the term 'wall' best conveys the main purpose and significance of the project, which is to obliterate the internationally-recognised Green Line and to create a new border deeper within West Bank territory, in the process annexing major settlements, territory and water resources to Israel.
BORDERS AND BARRIERS
Reflecting its conflict-ridden history – and its refusal to declare where its official borders lie – demarcation lines and defensive barriers have marked Israel's boundaries with its neighbours. The best known of these is the 1949 'armistice demarcation line' or 'Green Line', separating Israel from the then Jordanian-ruled West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Green Line ceased to exist after Israel's occupation of the West Bank in 1967, although it remains the internationally recognised border as far as the international community is concerned. The boundary with the Gaza Strip also disappeared in 1967: a fence was constructed along Gaza's relatively short borders with Israel following the Israeli military withdrawal from the Strip in the mid-1990s, and rebuilt and strengthened during the second intifada. Barriers to prevent infiltrations have also been constructed by Israel along its border with Lebanon, along the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and in the Jordan Valley.
Israel's policy since 1967 of colonising the West Bank through Jewish settlement and of attracting Palestinian day labourers into Israel militated against a reinstatement of a physical barrier along the old Green Line. The porous boundary between Israel and the West Bank survived the first intifada of the late 1980s, the suicide bombings in Israeli cities of the mid-1990s and the years of the Oslo Accords, although the number of Palestinian labourers commuting daily into Israel dropped sharply due to the imposition of a 'closure policy', which severely restricted Palestinian internal and external movement. This changed with the devastating wave of West Bank-originated suicide attacks in the second intifada. The apparent effectiveness of the Gaza fence in preventing suicide bombers from the Gaza Strip from infiltrating into Israel led to demands from the Israeli public for a similar structure along the West Bank.
However, the differences between the two remnants of historic Palestine are considerable. The Gaza Strip has the Mediterranean Sea to its west and a fortified border with Egypt to the south, which from the time of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1982 until the second intifada had remained largely quiet. The section of the Strip abutting Israel proper is 50 kilometres in length, compared to the 315-kilometre Green Line. Gaza's relatively flat and sandy topography ensured that construction of a barrier was technically undemanding and inexpensive. Furthermore, the Gaza barrier does not separate Palestinians from their lands or from one another, although it confines over a million inhabitants to one of world's smallest and most densely populated territories. The Gaza barrier was also built on the original demarcation line, so that Israel's right to build a structure on internationally recognised borders has not been legally challenged. By contrast, the Green Line winds much further through more difficult terrain. In 1967 Israel also conquered and later illegally annexed Arab East Jerusalem, investing the city with the status of its 'eternal and undivided capital'. The insertion of Jewish settlements throughout East Jerusalem and its environs makes a separation of the Arab and Jewish populations there virtually impossible.
Despite such technical difficulties, plans to cordon off all or parts of the West Bank and to block the unregulated entry of Palestinians into Israel go back to the mid-1990s, and took on greater urgency with the outbreak of the second intifada. In November 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak approved a plan to establish a barrier along a section of the northern and central West Bank to prevent vehicles crossing into Israel. This was not initially implemented, and an estimated 70,000 day labourers continued to commute to their jobs across the Green Line as late as February 2002, at the same time as a regime of checkpoints, earth mounds and trenches was crippling social and economic life within the West Bank itself.
With a rising civilian toll from suicide bombs inside Israel, the new Prime Minister Ariel Sharon bowed to public pressure. In June 2001, he established a steering committee, under National Security Council director Uzi Dayan, to come up with a more comprehensive plan to prevent Palestinians from infiltrating into Israel. The steering committee's recommendations led to the implementation of Barak's earlier plan and suggestions of a pedestrian barrier along certain high-risk locations along the 'seam zone' – a strip of land extending on both sides of the Green Line. It was not until April 2002, however, after an especially lethal round of suicide attacks inside Israeli cities, that the Israeli cabinet approved a decision to establish a pedestrian barrier in three areas of the West Bank. A Seam Zone Administration was established and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) began requisitioning and levelling land. By June 2002 the Seam Zone Administration had formulated a plan to build Phase I of the wall, through the northern part of the West Bank and parts of the 'Jerusalem Envelope'. The plan was approved in principle by the cabinet in Government Decision 2077 in June 2002, and formally approved in August.
Secrecy characterised the route from the beginning. The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem requested a map of the route from the Ministry of Defence but was informed that publication was not authorised, a policy 'that flagrantly violates the rules of proper administration and hampers informed public debate on a project of long-term, far-reaching significance'. The government did not publish an official map of the complete route until October 2003 and maps of the ongoing phases were based on land levelling, progress in construction and local maps distributed by the IDF as part of the land requisitioning process. According to the cabinet-approved plan of February 2005, the wall will extend some 670 kilometres with just 20 per cent running along the Green Line, with the rest located inside the West Bank (apart from a few kilometres inside Israel proper). No target date was set for completion, and the much-delayed project was not expected to be finished before the middle of 2006.
The wall was not constructed in one continuous segue but in different phases. Phase I, through the Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqilya districts in the northern West Bank, was officially completed in July 2003 (Chapter 2 examines the impact of this phase on the local Palestinian population). In January 2003, work began on Phase II, a 45-kilometre-long section running east into the Jordan Valley which, combined with Phase I, completely seals off the northern West Bank. The long route through the central and southern sections of the West Bank, Phase III, was initially approved in October 2003. Intruding deep into the West Bank to encircle Ariel and surrounding settlements, this proved to be the most controversial phase and led to protracted negotiations with the US administration before the route was finally approved in February 2005 (see Chapter 4). The 'Jerusalem Envelope' encircling the Jerusalem area and parts of the Ramallah and Bethlehem districts also results in major disruption to Palestinian life; because of its importance as a political, social, economic, religious and cultural centre for Palestinians, the Jerusalem wall is examined in Chapter 3.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The West Bank Wall"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Ray Dolphin.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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