Palestinians cut off from their work and families say Israel's 'security fence' is a land grab designed to drive them out of their territory, writes Chris McGreal
Baqa al-Sharqia's plight is much the same as that of a string of Palestinian villages severed from their lands or caged behind barbed wire under a large red sign in Hebrew and Arabic: "Mortal danger. Military zone. Any person who passes or damages this fence endangers his life." But the mayor dwells on a single, telling distinction. When Moayad Hussain faces Israel's vast new "security fence" toward the beginning of its meandering journey through the occupied territories - which the Israeli government envisages will end nearly 400 miles later with almost the entire Palestinian population encircled - he is not looking out from the West Bank but into it. The fence carving through Baqa al-Sharqia's olive groves places the village and its 4,000 Palestinian residents on the Israeli side of the wire.
"We have asked ourselves the same question many times," says Hussain. "If the fence is for security, if the fence is to keep us out, then why aren't we on the other side? With every kilometre of fence [Prime Minister Ariel\] Sharon builds we are sure there is only one answer. This is not about security, it's about land and resources."
There are two ways to travel the 123 kilometres (76 miles) of the newly completed first section of what the Israelis used to call the "separation obstacle" - until they realised that smacked too much of apartheid and so renamed it the "security fence". You can drive its length on the Israeli side along a new motorway, straining to spot the fence on distant hilltops deep inside the West Bank. Or you can pursue a more tortuous route in the Palestinian territories along rutted tracks, tracing the barrier as it cages villages, slices through olive groves and brings once busy roads to a jarring halt in front of the ominous warning signs.
Until a month ago, there was a third option - to drive the patrol road the army uses to enforce the warning on the large red signs. But at the beginning of last month, the military officially put the fence to work. The director-general of Israel's defence ministry, Colonel Amos Yaron, declared the fence open for business by saying the Palestinians had brought it on themselves. "These people understand no other language," he said.
Ordinary Israelis, steeped in insecurity and ever mindful of the Holocaust and decades of confrontation with Arab governments, did not disagree. They had tried to make peace with the Palestinians, they said, and in return they got suicide bombers. After three years of intifada and nearly 400 murdered by the bombers, Sharon promised the fence would curb the onslaught and keep the Palestinians where they belong, albeit at the massive cost to Israel's withering economy of £1 million a mile. Gaza was the model. No Palestinian suicide bomber has made it out of the strip since it was caged by a similar fence.
Cries for the government to get the barrier finished rose again a fortnight ago at the sight of the limp bodies of six children slaughtered in the worst bus bombing of the intifada, and the threat by Hamas of "rivers of blood" after Israel's subsequent assassination of one of its leaders. But the Palestinians say that if it is security the Israelis want, they will get just the opposite from the massive barrier. The first section of the fence alone will affect about 250,000 Palestinians living in 70 villages and towns, cutting them off from their work, schools and fields. That, say its critics, is no way to curb terrorism.
The Palestinians have dubbed the barrier the Apartheid Wall, even though only a fraction is made up of the much photographed, towering concrete slabs around the city of Qalqilya. But references to apartheid resonate, largely because Sharon is evidently grabbing some of the best land and resources in the West Bank while planning to use the fence to confine Palestinians to a fraction of what was theirs.
Construction started in June 2002 at the northern tip of the green line, the 1967 border between Israel and the occupied territories. A dirt road leads past a military camp, loosely guarded by a couple of young army conscripts, to the beginnings of the wire next to the Arab-Israeli village of Salem. The most striking feature is the vast snaking scar across the landscape carved by the same type of monster bulldozers the Israeli army used to crush the Jenin refugee camp.
The fence - generally about three metres (10ft) tall, fitted with electronic motion detectors and topped with barbed wire - runs as a fine line down the middle of the scar. On the West Bank side is a second roll of barbed wire and, where topography permits, a trench to prevent vehicles crashing through. On the Israeli side, a wide "trace zone" of fine sand or earth runs parallel to the fence to pick up footprints. Parts of the trace zone will be mined. Next to that is a Tarmac road for Israeli army patrol vehicles and another roll of barbed wire.
Around Salem, the fence follows the green line. This is what the scheme's originators had in mind when it was genuinely intended for security. The project was a vision of the left and was vigorously opposed by Sharon, religious Jewish settlers and other rightwingers for years. The idea had been kicking around for nearly a decade when a few Labour party politicians picked it up four years ago as an alternative to the failing peace process. Among them was Haim Ramon, a cabinet minister in several governments. "My concept was we would withdraw from the territories and build the fence, and all the settlements that are behind the fence will be demolished," he says.
Initially there was little support from the public or the then Labour government, but the intifada re-ignited a year later, and a few months after that the suicide bombers began their onslaught. To most Israelis, the best route to security was separation from the Palestinians. Suddenly the fence looked like an attractive proposition. "The fence cemented the idea of separation and it gave a feeling of security which Labour thought would help it electorally when it was being blamed for mishandling the peace process," says Jeff Halper, an Israeli campaigner against the growing infrastructure of control in the West Bank. "The idea was that the wall would run along the green line as a future border. It was portrayed as a peace project which would get Israel out of the occupation."
But Labour lost the election and Sharon came to power vehemently opposed to the fence that threatened to undo his years of creeping colonisation. Many of the 220,000 Jewish settlers who live on the West Bank, outside East Jerusalem, were equally adamant that they wanted no part of a fence that would separate them from Israel. But Labour joined the coalition government and kept pressing the issue, while the Shin Bet security service and military intelligence also backed the idea. Sharon reluctantly acceded, on condition the fence meandered inside the green line so that nobody could call it a border. In April 2002, the cabinet approved a barrier to "improve and reinforce the readiness and operational capability in coping with terrorism".
The settlers were furious with Sharon, accusing him of ghettoising them. The army took charge of construction. It fell back on a favoured legal tool by using an order of "requisition for military needs" to "borrow" the land for the fence. The first most Palestinian villagers knew that the fence was coming was when one of these orders was pinned to a tree and, a few days later, bulldozers began cutting and grinding their way across a neighbouring hilltop.
After a short drive south from Salem, the fence veers into the West Bank and remains there for well over 30 kilometres, winding its way around Arab villages and Jewish settlements. Along the way it slices through the olive groves of Qaffin. The bulk ofits land was seized when the Israeli border was drawn in 1948. Now it has lost most of what remained to the security fence in the valley below. The mayor, Taisir Harashi, says his village has been cut off from 70 per cent of its olive trees, which are almost the sole source of income.
As construction began, Qaffin found unlikely allies in a neighbouring kibbutz just across the green line. Kibbutz Metzer was founded by Marxist Jews from Argentina 50 years ago. "People here were fiercely against the fence on principle," says Dov Avital, the kibbutz's economist. Some settlers promised to lie in front of the bulldozers but a few weeks later a Palestinian man broke into Metzer and murdered a woman and her two young sons. "After the killings, people said the fence has to be built," says Avital.
No one from the kibbutz turned out to stop the bulldozers, or to prevent the building contractor from illegally carting off lorryloads of Qaffin's valuable olive trees. And no one from Metzer protested when the government failed to provide the promised gate to permit Palestinians to reach their land. "There is supposed to be a gate," says Harashi. "It's on the plan, but it's not there. The olive harvest is due soon and we don't know how we will get to the trees."
Occasionally, it is possible to slip on to the army's patrol road as the barrier advances south from Tulkarm, but usually the only way to reach the fence is with laborious detours along dirt tracks: they have become the main route to the homes of people such as Khadija Bdarat and her family, who have been cut off from their villages by the wire. It used to take her 10 minutes to walk into Ras. Now she faces a 22-kilometre round-trip because the fence runs up against her back garden and the village is the other side. Her older sons and daughters now need an army permit to visit their parents, and the family is subjected to a nightly curfew. "We could leave," she says. "But that's what the Israelis want. That's what this whole fence is about, making our lives hell to get us off our land."
As the bulldozers were carving through the area late last year, the restraints on Sharon were lifted when the Labour party walked out of his government and he forged a coalition with the far right. Since then, the route of the bulldozers has been a closely guarded secret largely decided by a small group of officials led by Sharon, his Defence Minister and the army colonel in charge of construction, Danny Tirza.
Israel's Ministry of Defence met with the Yesha council representing Jewish settlements. The council was furious about the fence, saying it cut the settlers adrift in hostile territory. Then, in February, with the rest of the world focused on Iraq, Sharon announced that the fence would be rerouted to bring more settlements on to the Israeli side. A month later, Sharon revealed an even more controversial plan: he would almost double the length of the fence to about 600 kilometres (370 miles) by extending it back up the Jordan Valley, entirely encircling the bulk of the Palestinian population.
The proposed route would take the fence about 15 kilometres into the West Bank from the Jordanian border, running between a string of Jewish settlements and the main Palestinian cities, such as Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem. Only Jericho would remain outside. If the plan was carried through, it would confine most of the Palestinian population to about half of the West Bank.
Sharon continued to insist that the fence would not define the borders of a Palestinian state. But Palestinian fears were reinforced by the undeniable similarity between the proposed path of the barrier and Sharon's stated intention to confine the Palestinians to 42 per cent of the occupied territories focused around three or four cantons.
"As they built the first stage of the fence, Sharon realised that security demands could be made to fit his view of the future," says Ramon. By the time Sharon revealed his true intent, the fence already stretched past Tulkarm, which it will eventually encircle, and linked up with the concrete slabs that confined the 43,000 residents of Qalqilya to their city with just a single exit under the control of Israeli soldiers.
Qalqilya more resembles a prison than anywhere else on the West Bank. Walking a path inside the slabs, there are two gates for Palestinians to reach their olive groves beyond the city. Just 13 people out of the entire population have passes allowing them through.
Come toward Qalqilya from the other side of the wall, and instead of the rutted track the Palestinians use, there is a fine new highway. But this road is "sterile"; Palestinians are banned from it. Turn east, skirt around the outside of the wall and near the petrol station is the sign for Alfei Menashe. For a while, its 5,000 Jewish settlers thought they were going to be on the same side of the barrier as Qalqilya. Near panic set in, until the army came up with a new route that put the settlement comfortably inside the Israeli side of the fence. But while the settlers have far-right ministers in Sharon's cabinet to argue their case, the Palestinians are denied even the basic protection of the courts. Israeli judges have refused to block construction of the fence or order it rerouted, on the grounds that it is a security issue and therefore the military can do as it pleases.
Yet Sharon's plans have run into their own obstruction. The Palestinians have persuaded George Bush that looping the fence around Ariel was a land grab that could finally scupper the already battered US-led "road map" to peace. Bush forced Sharon to put the Ariel section on hold. Ramon thinks US opposition will spell the death of Sharon's plan. "The fence Sharon wants to build he can't because the Americans won't let him. The fence he can build he doesn't want to because that would mark a border he doesn't want," he says.
Now another confrontation looms, over Jerusalem. Israel claims the entire city and much beyond as its own. But it has spent years trying to contain growth of the Palestinian population while encouraging Jews to move to what the Israelis call their eternal and undivided capital. "If the fence as planned over the next three months is carried out in Jerusalem, I'm convinced that will be the end of the peace process," says Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting a legal action against the fence and wall in Jerusalem. "What we will end up with is the detachment of East Jerusalem from the West Bank. That is, without doubt, the greatest change in Jerusalem and the way it will function since Israel seized the east of the city in 1967."
"Ironically, the higher this wall goes, the closer East Jerusalem becomes to Ramallah. If Israel treats the residents of East Jerusalem like the residents of Ramallah, the problem will not be car bombs being smuggled into Jerusalem; they will be built here."
- Guardian Service