As W. C. Fields once said, "It’s time to take the bull by the tail and face the situation." If the so-called "separation" or "security" fence that the Likud government is building--not just around--but well into the West Bank was only being built for mutually benign purposes with respect to 1) the resolution of territorial issues and 2) to achieve a kind of pervasive security for both Israelis and Palestinians, then best wishes to its builders. But, of course, that never was, has not been, and is not the case today.
With respect to the issue of security, the intent is one sided to say the least. And with respect to the issue of territorial integrity, again the intent is, to say the very least, defiant.
To begin with the fence is not a fence as in "a rose is a rose is a rose." In many places along its astonishing route it is an approximately 25 foot high concrete barrier/wall.
However, beware!
If one gets swept up into debating the issue from that specific unfragrant context—is it a fence or a wall?—a much more grave and even more foul smelling discrepancy is likely to be the result: the diversion of international attention from the fence/wall’s serious, sinister, and clearly malign political context. (I began to report that effect at just about this time last year. "[A] process of defacto annexation of this part of Palestine into Israel proper is already underway." [From The Inside Looking Out Report-12: Supposing Everything West Of The Mississippi Was Palestine, January 6, 2003.])
That context, sad to say, more now than even back then, needs to be emphasized--Demosthenes-like--over and over again in every kind of communication connected with this issue. In those terms the context is "Beware of Sharon of Israel!"
Why? Because notwithstanding President Bush’s near toothless critical description last summer of Israel’s unilateral land expropriation process, which is being pushed deeper and deeper and at flank speed into the heart of the West Bank ("Snaking" the President called it.), the annexation process has proceeded at such a voracious pace that original estimates of the enormity of the theft of land have been wildly exceeded. A viewing of even Israel’s latest official public map of the "annexation" fence/wall’s route (www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/Pages/ENG/route.htm) reveals that almost 15% (about 210,000 acres) of Palestinian land lying east of the Green Line is being swallowed up without benefit of negotiation. Last year at this time, the estimate was 10%.
Clearly the Israeli land confiscation snake after shedding its post Camp David II skin has emerged bigger, more venomous, and with wider more powerful jaws than ever before. In some places the eastward penetration is twenty-two kilometers.
According to a UN report issued in December (United Nations Office For The Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: Occupied Palestinian Territory 15 December 2003), 400,000 Palestinians living on the West Bank side of the wall will need to cross through a limited number of checkpoints and gates to get to their farms, jobs, and services. Those who have stood in line with Palestinians trying to move from say Bethlehem to Jerusalem or into and out of Nablus these days through similar Israeli checkpoints—and often in the rain—know what an often futile, terribly slow, and utterly humiliating time consuming ordeal that can be.
True to form and past practice, getting through the "annexation" fence/wall delineating these newly expropriated regions will be the result of unpredictable official whim, which, more than any other characteristic seems to govern the Israeli’s Army control over and operation of the openings in the “annexation” fence/wall. Each day thirty percent of the total West Bank Palestinian population is being adversely affected by the predictability of this uncertainty.
Conversely 113,000 Palestinians who previously lived in Palestine and who now find themselves residing in Palestinian land newly annexed by the fence/wall into Israel proper are now saddled with restrictions affecting travel, economic, and physical survival, which are even more onerous than before. Moreover entire Palestinian villages, which find themselves lying totally inside the newly annexed Israeli territory, are being encircled by second walls with limited access, much like those surrounding gated communities in a number of western nations.
The significant difference however is that in the free west, as opposed to unfree Palestine, gated communities are designed by their well off residents to keep rascals and riff raff out, whereas these gated communities built by (dare I say it?) rascals and riffraff have been built to lock the not so well off Palestinians in. At one time such fenced in, walled in enclaves were universally known as ghettos.
So what we have here today is not a mutually ingenuous and mutually acceptable "separation fence/wall" being built to ensure pervasive security for two separate and equally viable states--Israel and Palestinian--whose limits were delineated by the internationally sanctioned and multi-laterally agreed upon 1949 border known as the "Green Line." What we have here instead--with respect to multilateralism and so-called peace processing--is a disingenuous Israeli Road Map-be-damned, Taba Talks-be-damned, Camp-David-II-be-damned, Oslo-be-damned, UN-Security-Council-Resolution-242-(among others)-be-damned "annexation" fence/wall-building process audaciously and unilaterally being laid out to enhance what was once described even by Thomas Friedman as Israel’s "insane land grab."
The effect of this nightmarish end-run around diplomatic conflict resolution with respect to political finality is likely to be the same as the result of Israel’s unilateral annexation just after the 1967 war of many square miles of Palestinian land bordering Jerusalem on the north, east, and south. This enlarged Jerusalem became the nucleus of the several miles wide Israeli-only corridor that quite effectively cut the West Bank in two and became the genesis of the issue of discontiguity, newly inflamed these days by the "annexation" fence/wall: a significant issue which has been haunting the question of viability with respect to Palestinian statehood ever since.
Of course, since the "annexation" fence/wall began moving eastward into Palestine rather than south along the "Green Line" two summers ago--uprooting Palestinian Olive trees and other produce in its path, as well as confiscating Palestinian farm land, and cutting off Palestinian villages and larger towns and cities from their water supply and surrounding fields--the pace of the discontiguous "snaking" has increased so radically that now Palestine has been divided de facto into several unconnected sections instead of the original two.
And by the way, this current state of affairs with respect to discontiguity was one of the fundamental building blocks of former Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s famous (notorious?) so-called "generous offer" at Camp David II in the summer of 2000: the Barak so-called 98 percent of the West Bank generous offer-that-never-was. Despite the craftiness of that aspect of the Labor Party former leader’s "generosity," another overlooked element with respect to the Barak proposals had to do with Zone C: the sixty plus percent Palestinian areas in the West Bank that according to the Oslo agreements have remained totally under indefinite Israeli military control and rule. Although on paper this Zone C sixty plus percent Palestinian land was supposedly to be the subject of future post Camp David negotiations, the talks, of course, have not taken place. So the indefinite and absolute Israeli military rule continues: a despotic rule characterized by 1) continued confiscation of ominously larger and larger tracts of prime farmland and wells in the areas surrounding most settlements, 2) the unrelenting pace of home demolitions, and 3) preventative harassment of Palestinian farmers vainly but gamely trying to work their shrinking acreage.
That being the case, no wonder Arafat (his well-publicized faults in much of the Israel-mostly-right-and-hardly-wrong indulgent international press notwithstanding) walked away from Camp David. But stop for a moment and imagine what would have happened to George Washington. if after the battle of Yorktown, he had accepted from King George the same kind of "generous" offer Barak--seconded incredibly by President Clinton--is endlessly reported to have pushed on Arafat. Imagine a royal proposal depicted on a royal map, which, while supposedly embracing the notion of peaceful "separation" from Britain and viable statehood for the colonies, actually divided them into three discontiguous zones for--according to the King--"security" reasons.
Imagine King George’s map showing 1) the New England states "separated" from the Middle Atlantic States by a few miles’ wide "security" corridor to be controlled indefinitely by the Red Coats, and 2) the Middle Atlantic States "separated" from the Southern States by a similar England controlled corridor. Can you imagine what would have happened to Washington, if he had taken such an offer for ratification to the Continental Congress?
Probably the same thing that would have happened to Arafat if he had taken the so-called Barak generous offer Camp David II map to the Palestinian National Authority.