Facing the Fence
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It’s time for a confession. For the past year, I have been writing about the controversial “security fence” that Israel has been constructing in the West Bank – arguing for its necessity and defending its wisdom even though I was once dead-set against fences as a way of solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
Until several days ago, however, I had never actually toured the fence, or seen any of it close up except for an un-fencelike section of 26-foot-high concrete wall along Israel’s new Highway 6, where it brushes – 12 miles northeast of Tel Aviv and a stone’s throw from the old 1967 border – the Palestinian city of Kalkilya. As much as I supported it, the fence was an abstraction for me.
Last week, I spent several hours in the Kalkilya district with a small group, having the fence explained to us by an Israeli colonel in charge of the area. The result was that I came away a stronger supporter of it than ever.
Yes, I know. We weren’t getting an “objective” picture. We were the targets of a public relations campaign that the Israeli army and government are conducting. The colonel – not a Jew, but a Druze – had instructions on what to tell us and what not to. A journalist mustn’t be gullible.
Even taking all this into account, however, I was positively impressed.
To begin with, there is the purely physical appearance of the security fence. There has indeed been much debate as to whether it should be called a “fence,” as it is by Israel, or a “wall,” as it is by the Palestinians. Its urban sections, such as the strip along Highway 6 or those winding through Jerusalem – which are the ones that the international, Jerusalem based press have most displayed – are in fact walls.
And yet more than 90% of the West Bank barrier zigzags through rural countryside, like that around Kalkilya – and here, as I could see, it is truly a wire-mesh fence: Some 10 feet high, with electronic sensors that signal any contact to control centers and a patrol path that is swept clean every evening and checked for footprints in the morning. Similar fences run along Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, and while there is nothing particularly pretty about them, they look much the same, when seen from a moderate distance, as do cattle or property fences anywhere. For the most part, the fence is certainly not the terrible blight on the Palestinian landscape that I had expected to see.
Of course, it is not the fence’s aesthetics that have been most attacked by the international community, but its disruptive effects on Palestinian life – i.e., the way it has separated villagers from their fields, schoolchildren from their schools, rural inhabitants from the cities they shop in, and urban areas from their hinterlands. These are the things that the International Court of Justice in The Hague condemned the fence for in terming it a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which calls on occupying powers to respect the rights of the occupied.
The colonel who guided us did not deny any of these effects. He was candid about admitting them. Yet at the same time, he pointed out how, apart from ameliorating features planned in advance, such as the large number of gates through which, at appointed times, Palestinians can cross to their fields, schools, and other destinations, Israel has made a genuine effort to adjust the fence to unanticipated or unexpectedly burdensome problems.
In some places, for example, Israel has done away with checkpoints that turned Palestinian enclaves into virtual prisons.
Kalkilya itself, once cut off by a checkpoint that everyone entering or leaving it had to pass, now has unhindered access to the rest of the West Bank.
In other places, it has extended the hours that gates are open and made passage through them easier. In one place, we were shown a sunken road, costing millions of dollars, built to connect Kalkilya to the nearby town of Habla, thus greatly shortening the distance for Palestinians traveling to Ramallah and Jerusalem.
Running through several hundred yards of land on the Israeli side of the fence, this road passes under a bridge carrying another road from the Israeli city of Kfar Saba to the large West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe.
The colonel claimed – and was able to back himself up with facts, figures, and anecdotes – that, although the Palestinians on its other side are often unhappy with the fence, they are the first to concede that it has in some ways improved their lives.
Now that terror attacks and suicide bombings – let alone ordinary crime like car theft and burglary – coming from Kalkilya into Israel have been reduced by the fence to practically zero, thus occasioning a parallel reduction of Israeli military incursions and curfews, life on the Palestinian side is more peaceful and economically prosperous than it has been for years.
The armed intifada in the Kalkilya district is, at least for the moment, all but dead, in no small measure due to the fence, which has resulted in the saving not only of many Israeli lives but also of many Palestinian lives.
The fence is not an ideal border. It meanders crazily, both to keep to the topographical high ground and to embrace as many Jewish settlements as possible, while at the same time leaving other Jewish settlements on the Palestinian side. There is no reason why, at some future point, it cannot be dismantled.
Yet meanwhile, by imposing for the first time since 1967 a basic separation between Jews and Palestinians, it has taken a large step toward freeing them of each other. It is unfortunate that the world, which has been calling for such a separation for years, refuses to recognize its advantages now that it is happening.