West Bank's great divide

PROTECTION OR OBSTRUCTION?

West Bank's great divide

Israel says it needs to block terror attacks; Palestinians call the wall, to stretch 491 miles, 'dehumanizing'

BY EDWARD A. GARGAN
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

April 25, 2004

QALQILIYA, West Bank - It rises from the earth like a great, gray beast.

Slashing through olive groves, breaking up fields of cauliflower and tomato, truncating roads, severing village from village, sundering families - a silent ash-gray concrete wall, coupled with miles of electrified fences, is relentlessly pushing its way through the West Bank and Jerusalem, through the lives and hopes of millions of Palestinians. It is also stirring for many Israelis hopes of their own, hopes of security from suicide bombers.

Not since 1961, when communist East Germany began construction on a 96-mile-long barrier of concrete walls, barbed wire and mine fields around West Berlin, has a nation embarked on a project of such size to wall itself off physically from its enemies.

Now under way for more than a year and a half, Israel has constructed more than 112 miles of a projected 491 miles of walls and fences stretching from the Jordan River in the northern West Bank, slicing off huge chunks of Palestinian land on its western flank and ending in the vast Negev Desert.

For Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and for many Israelis, the wall is a necessary and urgent response to a continuing wave of terrorist attacks that have taken the lives of 958 Israelis since the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation began in September 2000; more than 2,900 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks over the same period.

For Palestinians, the wall is both the symbol and reality of their persecution, humiliation and impotence. For both, the wall marks the stark reshaping of these lands.

But the wall has become more than a barrier against terrorism, serving equally as a cleaver of territory. It is a tool, according to Palestinians, to annex land west of the Green Line, the 1949 Armistice Line between Israel and Jordan, land that has historically been owned by Palestinians, and to unilaterally create a permanent border between Israel and Palestine. A UN Security Council Resolution - vetoed by the United States - would have condemned Israel's construction of the wall.

As a December UN report on the wall notes, 210,000 acres of the Palestinian lands are being walled off from the West Bank, fully 14.5 percent of the West Bank itself. The wall's path, the report says, "separates Palestinian communities, severs social and economic links, and blocks access to health and education services."

"It will compound existing access restrictions and will have severe humanitarian, social and economic implications for Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank."

For the Israeli government, the reason for the wall is simple. "The fence is an efficient and nonviolent means of self-defense," Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy UN ambassador, said last year.

On older maps, this town of 43,000 lies hard against the Green Line. Surrounded by patchwork vegetable fields that gird the economy here, Qalqiliya is a quiet place of stone houses, two or three stories high. It has a center of slumbering shopfronts shaded by sloping arcades redolent more of an aging town in the American West than an Arab community on the frontlines of conflict with Israel.

Empty sidewalks

Once a thriving West Bank commercial center for Arabs and Israelis alike, today the streets and sidewalks are nearly empty, the stillness ruffled by a passing throng of schoolchildren, or an occasional taxi or truck. Shop owners sit on low stools outside their doors, sipping thimble-sized cups of syrupy, bitter coffee, smoking, chatting, watching another day pass, waiting for a stray customer.

On the outskirts of Qalqiliya, where the vegetable fields begin, there rises now Israel's great, gray wall. But the wall, and the high-voltage barbed wire fences joined to it, do not merely hem the town in from Israel, but surround it completely, amputating it from the rest of the West Bank.

"Qalqiliya is surrounded and looks like a prison," said Nadal Sheikh Ahmed, a small, graying man of 46 who works for the city's skeletal government. "We are suffering. Unemployment is now 65 percent. Farmers are cut off from their fields. No one can come here anymore."

A single strip of asphalt runs from Qalqiliya into the West Bank, its gates manned by Israeli troops armed with automatic weapons, who inspect every car, every passenger. "I don't go outside the city," Ahmed said, "lest I expose myself to humiliation. If my father emerged from his tomb in Nablus," a city to the east, "I would not go."

Across the West Bank, Palestinians complain bitterly about the humiliation they endure at the Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints that are sprinkled throughout the Palestinian territories. Pregnant women complain of being forced to wait in the sun while soldiers mull whether to let them through. Schoolgirls say they are ogled by male soldiers. Young men say they are accused of being terrorists.

"The Israelis are leading a systematic process of humiliation," said Ahmed.

On the edge of town, in the shadow of the 26-foot-high wall, Rashid Silmi perspired heavily as he hacked at the hard ground to carve a small irrigation channel for his vegetable fields. A son worked near the wall, near a huge, concrete cylindrical watch tower, hoeing rogue weeds that found their way into the celery crop.

"I hate the wall," the 50-year-old Silmi said. "I hate it. We are suffocating. What is the reason behind the wall? If the Israelis were not supported by the West, there would never be such a wall."

For 35 years, Silmi said he has rented 60 dunums of land to grow cauliflower, celery, potatoes and lettuce, about 15 acres. With the erection of the wall, he said, his fields have shrunk, with 10 dunum now on the other side of the looming wall. "I am supporting 15 people," he said, "but what can I do? I cannot go beyond the wall to farm."

Like many residents here, Silmi said he had not ventured outside the town since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, what they call the intifada. "This is a big jail," he said. "If I go outside, it is a big humiliation. This little humiliation is better than the big humiliation outside."

Further along the wall, Abdullah Shreem sat on a plastic chair outside a corrugated steel warehouse, smoking, chatting with the few workers he still can afford to hire.

"They confiscated 160 dunum," about 40 acres, "when they built the wall," shrugged Shreem, 42, mustachioed, and at one time one of the wealthier citizens of Qalqiliya. "What could we do? They have the guns. We have inherited this land from our great-greatgreat-grandfather's generation. And the Jews have taken it."

Businesses in trouble

With a mix of businesses including growing ornamental plants, a citrus tree nursery and a breeding farm for a rare, long-haired goat, Shreem's business attracted customers from all over Israel and the West Bank; Israelis, Shreem said, made up 60 percent of his customers at one time. Today, with the wall, almost no one can reach him.

"Nobody can come," said Shreem. "My brother cannot come here from Habla," a village scarcely a mile away that because of the wall has been totally cut off from Qalqiliya. Because Shreem owns greenhouses in Habla, he is allowed to travel through a barbed-wire gate guarded by Israeli troops to Habla in the morning and return in the evening, showing his permit to the guards each time.

But with few customers, he said, his business is collapsing. "There used to be 40 families who were supported by this business," Shreem said. "Now, only 10 people, not families, are working here. And if business is really bad, then there are only five workers."

"Only God knows what the future holds," said Shreem, his eyes tracing the march of the wall across his lands. "You see your money and work destroyed by bulldozers. The question is, does this really provide security. Put yourself in our shoes, as someone who had their land taken. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who had nothing to lose."

Several Israelis lay claim to the wall's parentage, but it is perhaps Uzi Dayan, a former major general and for two years, until September 2002, Israel's national security adviser.

Dayan said he sent a proposal to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in July 2001. "I called for a continuous and effective security fence around Judea and Samaria," the designation many Israelis use to refer to the West Bank. "He didn't like the idea.

"There were three objections," Dayan said in Tel Aviv. "One, it won't be effective enough. Two, we didn't have enough money. Three, the Americans won't let us do it."

But, Dayan said, terrorists continued to infiltrate into Israel and the death toll of Israelis continued to mount. To Dayan, the solution was self-evident: "If you want to save lives you have to build a fence."

Justifying the wall

Today, Dayan heads a lobby group called Security Fence for Israel, or SFI, a small organization of noted Israelis who believe that only by walling itself off completely from the Palestinians can terrorism be defeated.

"We're managing to have a significant impact on Israeli public opinion," said Dayan, 55, a thick-set former combat officer. In large measure, it was the seemingly unstoppable series of suicide bombings, almost all carried out by young men from northern towns on the West Bank such as Nablus and Jenin, that began to shift public opinion in favor of the wall. Three weeks ago, for the first time in many years, two suicide bombers smuggled themselves out of Gaza, which has been tightly sealed by Israel, and killed 10 Israelis in the port city of Ashdod.

Dayan contends that walling off the Palestinians accomplishes three goals: It ensures the security of Israel from terrorists; it establishes Israel's borders and ensures that, demographically, Israel will remain a Jewish state; and it promotes the goal of human rights. "The first human right," he says, "is the right to life."

And although the Sharon government continues to build the wall - bulldozers, cranes and workers are erecting sections of the wall every day - Dayan insists that the barrier is not being built quickly enough. "They could have completed it a year ago and saved hundreds of lives," he said.

The former general waves away questions about the wall's routing, about the expropriation of Palestinian lands, about dividing villages. "I don't want to fall into the trap of discussing the route of the fence," he said. "I don't want to give the government an excuse for not building the fence."

And yet, he admitted, "I'm not saying it doesn't disturb people," he said. "I'm not arguing the fence is the grand strategy of Israel. The fence is the precondition for policy. The fence is a fence of self-definition. It will create disengagement from the Palestinians. It will create a situation of co-existence."

Stoppage efforts

Battling Dayan's vision of a walled-off Israel, Daniel Seidemann, a Jerusalem lawyer, has been shuttling back and forth among the country's courthouses trying to halt construction of the wall in Jerusalem, so far without tremendous success.

"This wall is a Berlin-like divide," said Seidemann, a wiry lawyer who speaks at great velocity. "This is not going to make terror impossible, but make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people miserable. We are cutting deep into the West Bank. And we are in fact building a wall around Jerusalem, which hasn't been done since 1535, when the wall around the old city was built."

Seidemann said that many Israelis, encouraged by Dayan, whom he calls "the high priest of separation," see the wall as the ultimate panacea to the crisis of violence in the region. "The fence is an Israeli north star," he said. "Israelis really need to believe if we do this one thing, everything will be all right. There is very little compassion in Israel for Palestinians. There is very little compassion in Palestine for Israelis."

But, Seidemann added, "Do we want to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and look like East Berlin? There is a growing awareness how this is dehumanizing us, how this is subjugating the Palestinians."

In the east of Jerusalem, a landscape of limestone houses strung along winding streets, home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, a 26-foot-tall curtain of concrete is being strung between neighborhoods, dodging between houses, slicing through yards

Before the wall, the official boundary between the Jerusalem municipality - its boundaries expanded dramatically after the 1967 war - and neighborhoods like Abu Dis was indiscernible. Some houses were built halfway in Jerusalem, halfway in Abu Dis. The Convent of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul sits square on the boundary line. Families lived here and there, some members in Jerusalem, some in Abu Dis.

But for Israel, indeed for the Palestine Authority, Abu Dis is legally in the West Bank. And so, in its drive to construct an impermeable barrier between itself and the Palestinians, Israel is driving the concrete wall relentlessly through neighborhoods ensuring that the residents of Abu Dis, many of whom have family in Jerusalem, go to school in Jerusalem, work in Jerusalem, trade with Jerusalem, will never again cross into Jerusalem. And more, by walling off Jerusalem from the West Bank, Israel ends any discussion with the Palestinians about sharing the city as a capital for both states.

"All through our lives we lived free. There were no barriers dividing us from Jerusalem," said Ahmed Zaror, 30, owner of a mini-market only feet from where the wall severs Al Shaih Street, once a main road into Jerusalem. "I have relatives living in Jerusalem, my uncles, my sister, my cousin."

As he spoke, Palestinians - young couples and students in blue-smock uniforms with the blue identity card that accords them the right to study, work and live in Jerusalem - lined up outside Zaror's store, waiting for Israeli soldiers at a yard-wide gap in the wall, to let them pass.

In spots, the wall stops dead in its tracks. In those places, people clamber over the rubble, avoiding the soldiers at the checkpoint, but risking arrest.

For Nidal Gazel, 33, owner of the Gazel Restaurant, the wall up the street is a serious worry.

"My wife Rasha is pregnant," he said. "She can't go across and there are no hospitals in Abu Dis. I am thinking about this always." And like many Palestinians here, his family has been split by the wall. "My mother and father, two sisters and one brother are on the other side," he said. "How can we live like this?"