- "The 'little plan' of disengagement from Gaza, accompanied
by the screams of the settlers, is meant to win America's heart so that
it will stop complaining about the fence and allow Sharon to complete 'the
grand plan' of annexing territory in the West Bank."
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- This is not the first time the High Court of Justice
has heard petitions from human rights organizations and by West Bank residents
on the separation fence. They claim it separates Palestinians from their
centers of production and sources of water. And now, as in the hundreds
of previous petitions relating to the territories that named state agencies
as respondents, this time too the magic words "security needs"
star in the state's responses.
-
- In the past, this magic phrase left petitioners with
no chance. In a previous petition relating to the fence, an affidavit by
the army's GOC Central Command stated that "the route was chosen following
accelerated staff work, including an examination of alternatives."
This was good enough for the court to permit the army to seize lands, uproot
plantations, and embitter the lives of residents of A-Ras and Kafr Zur,
two villages in the northern West Bank.
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- On August 20, 2002, a week after the cabinet discussed
the route of the fence in that region, the GOC Central Command signed a
new expropriation order that showed a different route. Various other changes
in the route, sometimes in response to pressure from the settlers and sometimes
in response to pressure from the Americans, ought to remind the public
- including those members of it who sit on the Supreme Court - that security
is much more closely related to politics than to mathematics.
-
- Colonel (reserve) Shaul Arieli, who headed the peace
administration in the days of Ehud Barak's government and coordinated preparation
of the maps, drafted an alternative to the route of the fence approved
by the cabinet. His route, based on pure security considerations, puts
the same number of Israelis in the protected area west of the fence as
does the current route.
-
- But instead of biting 900 square kilometers out of the
West Bank, it seizes less than 300 sq.km. - and this includes putting Ma'aleh
Adumim, with its 30,000 residents, west of the fence.
-
- This route also reduces the number of Palestinians who
are imprisoned between the fence, including the "Jerusalem envelope,
and Israel, the Green Line, and therefore distanced from their service
providers in the territories, from 400,000 to 56,000. Arieli's route does
not separate Palestinian farmers from their lands and wells, nor does it
divide students from their schools.
-
- Anyone who was truly worried about the security of Israel's
citizens would not leave tens of thousands of hostile Palestinians hungry
for vengeance west of the fence. Only a plot to turn security into a tool
to undermine itself in order to annex territory de facto could explain
why a fence that devours time, money and diplomatic assets is preferable
to a shorter, cheaper fence that does not arouse hatred.
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- The politics of the fence do not revolve around security,
nor even around the moral and legal issues that arise from Israeli control
over additional square kilometers of territory along the Green Line. The
concept of the fence, just like the disengagement plan, conceals a much
deeper political agenda.
-
- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon discovered that the fear
of terror attacks gave him a magical tool that would enable him to draw
the country's permanent borders unilaterally. The public is so eager for
a defensive wall that would once and for all distance it from the terrorists
and suicide bombers that it has paid no attention to the fact that unilateral
solutions distance it from the strategic goal of an end to the conflict.
-
- The only solution with the power to put the parties on
the long road to reconciliation was and remains an agreement that enjoys
international legitimacy - meaning one based on UN Resolution 242 and the
1967 lines.
-
- The "little plan" of disengagement from Gaza,
accompanied by the screams of the settlers, is meant to win America's heart
so that it will stop complaining about the fence and allow Sharon to complete
"the grand plan" of annexing territory in the West Bank. If,
along with enabling this annexation, disengagement also frees the Israel
Defense Forces of the burden of controlling 1.5 million residents of the
Gaza Strip, that is merely a bonus for the government.
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-
- After three years of a hope-destroying stalemate, the
disengagement plan is so tempting that it has blinded the eyes of members
of the Israeli "peace camp." Many have become too bleary-eyed
to see the enormous political slogan inscribed on both sides of the fence.
It says that there is no partner for an agreement, and that we have been
sentenced to live with fences and swords for all eternity.
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