Israel's West Bank Barrier: An Impediment to Peace?

American Geographical Society

Israel's West Bank Barrier: An Impediment to Peace?Author(s): Shaul E. CohenSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct., 2006), pp. 682-695Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30034143 .

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GEOGRAPHICAL RECORD

ISRAEL'S WEST BANK BARRIER: AN IMPEDIMENT TO PEACE?

SHAUL E. COHEN

If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere.

-Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

The construction of walls has long been a tool in regulating--or attempting to regulate-human passage and the defense of territory. Walls encircling cities or bi- secting open spaces are generally built to keep "others" out, the most famous case being the Great Wall of China. Walls are also used to keep people in, as with the Berlin Wall, which remains notorious even after it was dismantled. A new and infa- mous wall is the barrier that Israel is erecting to keep people in and out simulta- neously. It is intended to protect Israelis from the plague of West Bank suicide bombers by keeping them out of Israel and by containing them in parts of the West Bank. From the Palestinian perspective the wall is a land grab, intended to create a de facto annexation of land to Israel. Inasmuch as Israel's current policy of "re- alignment" calls for unilateral territorial adjustment by 2008 should negotiations fail, this perspective is understandable.

For the international community, what is seemingly at issue is the precise location of the wall, and there has been enormous attention to, and condemnation of, its current and future course. Of the various walls currently deployed in international ethnoterritorial conflicts, among them those in the western Sahara, or Jammu and Kashmir, Israel's appears to be the only one on the map of public interest. Several questions immediately arise. What is so controversial about Israel's wall? What are its significance and likely impacts in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why does the attention given to it dwarf the concern expressed about the other walls that are scattered across the globe? Can Israel's wall make a positive contribution to the pursuit of peace? Although these questions may involve a mea- sure of speculation, they invite examination of issues that make up the context of the dispute and that also relate to other ethnoterritorial conflicts. Why are walls built, whom do they serve, and, perhaps most important, how do they become obsolete?

The list of famous defensive walls includes structures both large and small, both recent and ancient. Among them, China's Great Wall is preeminent in notoriety, size, and age, although Hadrian's wall, separating what today is Scotland from En- gland, has greater proximity to Western tourists and history. One message of these

DR. COHEN is an associate professor of geography at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403.

The Geographical Review 96 (4): 682-695, October 2006 Copyright @ 2007 by the American Geographical Society of New York



GEOGRAPHICAL RECORD 683

Pyramid shaped stacks of barbed wire

West Bank A ditch

Patrol road 3 m

mension qontaking Dirt Mad Patrol road

Intrusion tracking dirt road

Observration System

lntinsionA Deticction fence FIG. i-This image appears at the Web site of the Israel Ministry of Defence (MOD 2003), making the

barrier unlike the defensive apparatus on Israel's other boundaries, where photography is forbidden. The image is intended to show that the barrier is not always a wall and does not always run through populated areas.

relic walls is that, long ago, enormous efforts were made to protect against invasion on battlefields that are now wholly within territories that the walls used to separate. Such walls, like those who built and fought over them, exist as (sometimes) visible ghosts in the landscape, reminders of another time and of battles that have faded into history.

Two other walls that have recently come and gone provide more immediate metaphorical value. The first, the Maginot Line, was built in the 1930s to deflect a German attack on France, but early in World War II the Germans simply went around it and through Belgium on their way into France. Although popular history may judge it a failure, the line-actually a series of linked fortresses-served its purpose and shielded parts of France from German attack. Ultimately the German army's advance through Belgium made the Maginot Line irrelevant. The second, the Ber- lin Wall, encircled West Berlin and divided it from the eastern part of the city for 45 kilometers. It was first a symbol of the cold war and then a marker of its denoue- ment. In both its rise and its fall, the Berlin Wall became an emblem for repression, denial of human rights, and state violence. Indeed, the wall acted as a lightening rod for the accumulated tension and hostility that characterized the bipolar world of the Soviet era.

Though still in the implementation phase, Israel's wall has already been the subject of considerable judgment and fury. It has been contested in the streets and fields of the West Bank, in the media in capitals around the world, in Israel's High Court in Jerusalem, in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and in the



684 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

FIG. 2-Israelis and Palestinians join in a protest against the wall as it slices through the town of Abu Dis, which abuts Jerusalem to the southeast. (Photograph by Noga Kadman, spring 2005; reproduced courtesy of the photographer).

United Nations (Falk 2005; Lynk 2005; Williams 2006). What can be made of this wall that is being built in seemingly unparalleled infamy?

DIMENSIONS

Like many other famous barriers, the wall is actually a pastiche of forms that sprawl across and through a variety of landscapes. Its path is torturous, for it wends its way according to topography, location of roads, and patterns of Israeli and Palestinian settlement. Although it basically outlines the West Bank, its route diverges in order to create a separation between a number of Israeli settlements and the surrounding Palestinian population. In so doing, it also separates some Palestinians from other Palestinians and from the West Bank itself. This has led to "subfences" that isolate both Israeli and Palestinian communities and has complicated the system of gates that allow passage from one side of the wall to the other. The Israeli government points out that most of the wall is, in fact, a structure of fences and other obstacles, which it calls a "barrier" (Figure 1); only a minor portion of it-roughly 6 percent, according to the Israel Ministry of Defence (MOD 2003)-is a solid wall. Be that as it may, Palestinians' mobility is severely curtailed by the barrier, and few of them be- lieve that the gates will significantly ameliorate the situation. One reason for the




intensity of opposition is that many of the portions of the wall that comprise im- posing concrete slabs are located in the heart of Palestinian communities, splitting towns, villages, streets, and even extended families (Usher 2006). In other places the fence portions separate Palestinian farmers from their fields, jobs, or schools, creat- ing visible and acute disruption of normal life (Figure 2).

Protests on humanitarian grounds are part of a broader, legal objection: The wall is constructed on occupied land, and Israel has no right to act in this manner outside its sovereign territory (Figure 3). Put another way, the wall does not follow the Green Line, which now officially delimits Israel from the West Bank.' Many voices within Israel, while supporting the construction of a defensive barrier, call for it to be located along the Green Line rather than on its current course, which dips into the West Bank in various places to incorporate Israeli settlements as well as nearly all of Jerusalem municipality.2

In fact, the wall itself is being fragmented and now comprises a number of non- contiguous segments, subsections, separate enclaves and exclaves, portions that have been constructed but will be moved, and sections yet to be built. Although at this point it is impossible to know precisely, the final length of the barrier(s) will be almost 650o kilometers. Whatever its length, the wall is sure to play a role in the tangled process of territorial negotiation related to resolution of the conflict as a whole. To date the barrier system seems to have reduced the number of suicide attacks within Israel. In addition, the wall has allowed Israelis to feel that they are protecting themselves from contact with Palestinians, a much broader desire than the specific matter of suicide attacks. But will it contribute to, or detract from, the ability to resolve the conflict, or will the harm it is causing to Palestinians ensure its perpetuation?

IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

In order to better understand the power of the wall for Israelis in both practical and symbolic terms, it is necessary to explore the historical roots of Israel's form of territoriality. Despite the overwhelming support within Israel for some sort of barrier, little consensus exists as to where it should be located. It is this question that leads Israel's premier newspaper to call the fence "unequivocally political" (Ha'aretz 2003). Although Israelis across the spectrum are in favor of greater security, the current route of the wall makes it, or, at least, a significant portion of it, a political project of the territorial agenda that has mired Israel in the West Bank since shortly after the war of 1967. The roots of the political factions and the worldview of Israel's right wing have created a tension about the construction of the barrier and its ultimate placement. The very notion of territorial compromise in the West Bank is anathema to Israel's ultrahawks, who have opposed the fence precisely because it bisects the West Bank and lends support to Israeli withdrawal from significant parts of it.

In the controversy over the wall, the historical underpinnings of the current policy have not been adequately examined. At issue for Israel is the prevention of




terrorist attacks, but, at the same time, the path of the wall is a testimony to the ideology that links territory with both national legitimacy and physical security. Although security has always been linked with territory and settlement in the Zion- ist movement, the idea of permanently incorporating West Bank land is an expres- sion of the brand of Zionism that traces itself back to the ideologue Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880-1940).

In an article originally published in Russian and entitled "The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)," Jabotinsky ([19231 1937) laid the foundation for today's security fence. He observed that the Palestinian Arabs "look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile." Explaining his certainty that there would be a fight for the land, he noted that "Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of 'Palestine' into the 'Land of Israel.' " The implications of this ethnoterritorial competition had obvious ramifications for Jabotinsky, who noted that Jewish state building could "continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population-an iron wall which the native population cannot break through."

At the time he wrote "The Iron Wall" Jabotinsky was committed to a strong military force, which, he was convinced, was essential to the viability of a state and the protection of the Jewish people. His thinking was directed toward an imbalance of power, for he believed that a strong military, rather than an actual physical barrier, would convince the Arab world to accept Israel's existence. Today Israel clearly has superior power in the conflict and its existence seems to have become a fait accompli in the region (although many Arabs still wish it were otherwise). Yet Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and others in the Israeli center-right government are con- structing a physical barrier as they advance their goal of incorporating at least parts of the West Bank, in tandem with and under the guise of the security issue that continues to carry enormous weight across the political spectrum.

The barrier is intended to separate the two populations and create distinct territories (that is, to alter the demarcation of what is Israel and what is not). Given the history of both settlement policy and political ideology in the Zionist movement, it is fair to ask whether a primary function of the barrier may in fact be to offer security rather than to serve as a means to an end. Due to the interwoven geography of the West Bank, with Palestinians and Israeli settlers "living together separately" (Romann and Weingrod 1991) alongside Israel, the barrier may well fragment both communities, further complicating the process of territorial negotiation and conflict resolution. The separation of populations via the barrier, with its disruption of Palestinian life and encroachment on additional Palestinian land, may inhibit a




Routes of the

SWest Bank Barrier

Revised (April 2006)

Previous

West Bank Jordan

Jerusalem

0 10 Miles

Dead

Sea LEBANON

SYRIA

WesS Eank,

Dead Sea Gaza

Serie ISRAEL

JORDAN

EGYPT

FIG. 3-This revised barrier route, based on a government map from the spring of 20o6, was current according to the Israeli government, but by the time the map was issued the barrier had already grown and shifted in a number of places. Its final course is still unknown. (Cartography by the author)

broader resolution of the conflict, one that would lead to the formal separation of the two nations with internationally recognized boundaries. Alternatively, the en- hanced security that accrues to Israel in the short term may inspire the confidence needed to move toward a resolution of the conflict, including adjustments of one sort or another to the barrier itself.




THE PRAGMATICS OF SECURING TERRITORY

Without delving too far into a complicated though interesting past, an important fact to note is the close correlation in Israeli history between ideological goals and the practical actions that advance them. When the Zionist movement began to promote Jewish resettlement of Palestine in the late nineteenth century, every tangible deed that furthered the establishment of a robust Jewish community was, by defini- tion, political. Even then, when land was being purchased from local and absentee Arab landholders, the creation of new Jewish communities-often rudimentary and quite small-was sometimes challenged by Palestinians who resided in the area. The tower-and-stockade form of settlement became something of a model, in that in the span of one night, under the cover of darkness, a tower surrounded by a fence could be constructed. Before dawn a partial-if not always sturdy-fait accompli, a fact, was on the ground. From this initially minimal defensible foothold the settlement grew as homes were built, land was brought into cultivation, and community infrastructures were created. With an eye to independence, the settlement policy had three primary goals: the establishment of contiguous areas of settlement, the purchase of prime agricultural land, and the expansion of the territory that would help define, or at least claim, the future boundaries of the state. The existence of a settlement became the basis of control of that space, expanding the (future) sovereign envelope.

In the enormous range of opinion among Zionists-and non-Zionist Jews- about the character and prospects of a Jewish state, the two main political currents were the Labor Zionists and the Revisionists. Both advocated independence for the Jews in their ancestral home, but what the character of the state would be, its pur- poses, and how to achieve them was in contention. From the outset, both factions were committed to defending the Jews in Palestine, but they differed as to the tactics that were to be employed to advance the cause politically and, ultimately, militarily. The resistance and hostility of Palestinian Arabs, and the less-than-stalwart support and sometimes outright opposition of the British Mandatory authorities after World War I, made these pressing issues. As the Jewish community in Palestine grew, it became clear that self-defense was going to be a critical challenge. It was in this milieu that Jabotinsky, the chief ideologue of Revisionist Zionism-and the Likud party to which that movement later gave birth-articulated his vision of coexistence with the Arabs of Palestine.

POLITICS AND SECURITY

If it was Jabotinsky who anticipated long-term conflict (in the absence of complete victory), it was Labor Zionism that guided the state in the decades that followed Israeli independence in 1948. Under the Labor Party, Israel signed the armistice treaties with its Arab neighbors, including the 1949 agreement with Jordan that created the Green Line. That armistice led to an eighteen-year period during which Jordan denied Israelis access to the holy sites in Jerusalem-in contravention of the agreement-and the communities-destroyed during and after the fighting-that




Jews had established in East Jerusalem and the West Bank prior to 1948. The victory in the 1967 war was thus seen by many Israelis as a return to territory that had belonged to them before the 1949 armistice.3 Within the Labor Party, opinions about the disposition of the territory acquired in the war varied. Some leaders saw the outcome as the realization of Zionist aspirations; others saw the West Bank and Gaza Strip as cards to be traded for peace with the Arab states. Given the lack of trust that dominated the region and the conflicting agendas of the antagonists, peace was not an especially likely outcome.

As the Israeli government awaited development on the political front, it began to administer the Occupied Territories according to an amalgam of strategies and political-legal perspectives. Despite the resounding military victory of 1967, security remained a paramount concern in government actions, particularly in the West Bank. For Israelis, harking back to the tactics of the pre-state years, security went hand in hand with the establishment of communities that could dominate and monitor the surroundings. That gave rise, under the Labor Party, to the settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Although Jewish settlement in the territories was initially justified in the dis- course of national security (as it still is, in the face of increasing challenge to this assertion within Israel), a messianic religious impetus led many of the early settlers to move to the biblical lands known to them as "Judea" and "Samaria." When the Likud Party came into power in 1977, the settlement process shifted into a far more aggressive mode and reinforced the blend of nationalism and religious aspiration. Revisionist Zionism had long been outspoken in its desire for Jewish control of the "complete Land of Israel,"' and former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a key sup- porter of the new settlement agenda when he served in earlier ministerial portfolios such as agriculture and housing. He, like others in his party, saw the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel as a key Zionist goal. The tool for achieving this objec- tive was the construction and expansion of Jewish settlements and a simultaneous frustration of Palestinian efforts to promote a nationalist agenda. Whereas pre-state Jewish settlements served as markers to border claims at the margins of the country-to-be, the current West Bank settlements are evidence of a claim for the West Bank as a whole. The winding route of the security barrier weaves around some of these settlements rather than following the Green Line.

In the years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, rather than yielding a peace dividend, has become even more desperate as economic and political fortunes have plunged. The new security barrier is but the latest iteration of Israeli policies that increasingly circumscribe Palestinians' lives. The transitional period of the Oslo accords in the mid-199os created a patchwork of territories and statuses that nominally in- creased Palestinians' control over their own affairs-under the never-distant gaze of the Israeli military. For a number of years the peace process buoyed the mood in Israel, but, as its progress slowed, the daily lives of Palestinians again faded from view. This allowed a certain complacency, one that exploded with the onset of the




second intifada (sparked by Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in September 2000) and the suicide bombings that mark it. Since that time Israel has reasserted much of its territorial presence, particularly in the West Bank, eroding many of the symbolic gains that the Palestinians had achieved, while terrorist attacks inside Israel have caused the peace dividend, and any sense of security, to evaporate.

In the midst of a wave of suicide bombings, the idea for building a separating fence or wall between the two populations surfaced. The concept was politically sensitive for the Likud Party, for it proposed a demarcation of some sort between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, territory that was wholly within the "complete Land of Israel." Although the new Kadima Party, a blend of center right and center left, has debated the possibility of a Palestinian state within this area (their words are beginning to say yes; their actions are much more equivocal), the Green Line as a final status boundary remains quite remote. Whatever the outcome of the peace process may be, Kadima continues to defend the right of some of the settlements to exist in the West Bank. This position is practical, for no Israeli politi- cian can imagine ordering a complete evacuation of all of Israel's communities in the West Bank. It is also ideological in a nationalist sense and, for some Israelis tied to the religious form of Zionism, which operates on the premise of a divine promise for the Holy Land. The desire to redeem that promise on the part of those moti- vated by a divine mandate and the territorial imperative of Revisionist Zionism is what led successive governments to embed settlements in the heart of densely populated Palestinian areas, on the heights overlooking roads and towns, along major transportation routes, and at sites of symbolic importance. After nearly a century of ideological pressure for the incorporation of this territory into a Jewish state, it is clearly extremely difficult for many Israelis to move toward a pragmatic solution that would place such areas under Palestinian control. The evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip-a peripheral area in biblical history and far smaller in area than the West Bank (Judea and Samaria)-is not viewed as an indicator that further withdrawals will run as smoothly.4

TERRITORIAL FENCING

To the uninitiated, the Green Line is increasingly invisible in the landscape, due to Israeli settlement and infrastructure development on both sides of the boundary, but the dividing line remains an obvious choice for separating Israelis and Palestin- ians. After all, people who live within Israel-whether Arab or Jewish-have Israeli citizenship, participate in Israeli elections, and are subject to Israeli law. Those within the West Bank who are not Israeli citizens-that is, all of the territory's residents

except the settlers-are beyond Israeli civil law, subject instead to the military occupation and/or to the nascent and limited Palestinian administration. Yet, rather than bundling the Palestinians together as a whole and separating them from Israelis inside the Green Line, the barrier weaves its way in, around, and through many Palestinian communities in the West Bank as it seeks to bracket some of the Jewish




settlements and keep them contiguous with Israel. This creates a multitude of territories and statuses for both Israelis and Palestinians-and a confounding map for both sides to navigate.

The primary stated justification for the wall's location is that, to date, nearly all of the suicide attacks in Israel have originated in the unfenced West Bank, whereas the totally enclosed Gaza Strip has posed an almost negligible threat. The particular course of the barrier is said to be an attempt to include as many Israelis as feasible in a territory that is inaccessible to Palestinians, thus lessening the risk of attack. Why this requires that it run through the streets of towns and neighborhoods, separate farmers from their fields, and include many thousands of Palestinians within the secured sector is unclear. This has pushed Israel to offer a second layer of response to criticism.

When confronted with the damage and disruption that the barrier is causing in Palestinians' lives, the Israeli government responds with two assertions. The first is that responsibility for the effects of the barrier lies with the Palestinians; the basic slogan is "No terror, no fence." The second-and more interesting, in geographical terms-rationale is that the barrier is temporary and will come down when it is no longer needed. To bolster this claim, the construction and constituent elements of the West Bank barrier are publicized in an effort to show that what is being built is indeed a fence and not a wall. This speaks to the presumed (im)permanence of the barrier, which critics have called a "land grab:'." The Israeli government contends that the wall's route in no way presages territorial negotiations and suggests that it is re- sponding to criticism and making various adjustments to lessen the human impact.

These adjustments have come in the wake of a 2004 decision by the Israeli High Court of Justice in Beit Sourik Village Council v. The Government of Israel, HCJ 2056/ 04, rather than as a move generated in the Ministry of Defence or the Prime Minister's office. The court issued its decision following an appeal from eight West Bank Pales- tinian villages on the northern margins of Jerusalem. The villagers contended that the barrier could cause irreparable harm, disrupting transportation, commerce, agriculture, and the ability of the villages to expand, to access water, and to reach easily all the services and amenities in Jerusalem to which they were accustomed. They also contended that the wall would deprive them of land and trees and that its construction was illegal under the Geneva Convention. The villagers were supported in their case by a number of Israeli peace, civil rights, and environmental organizations, by neighboring Israeli towns, and by testimony given on behalf of the petitioners by a coalition of former high-ranking military and intelligence officers in the Council for Peace and Security, a group that proposed an alternate route for the barrier.

In its decision, the court reaffirmed principles that it has enlisted to guide the policies carried out under the terms of the Geneva Convention. It noted that, "The law of belligerent occupation recognizes the authority of the military commander to maintain security in the area and to protect the security of his country and her citizens.... This authority must be properly balanced against the rights, needs, and interests of the local population" (p. 34). The court determined that the need for




FIG. 4-The barrier, visible in the center of the photograph, separates Abu Dis, designated as an administrative center for the Palestine National Authority, from the Jerusalem municipality. (Photo- graph by the author, June 200oo6)

the barrier was, in fact, legitimate but that the benefit of its specific route should be measured against the harm; it asked, "Is it possible to satisfy the central security considerations while establishing a fence route whose injury to the local inhabitants is lesser?" (p. 49).

The answer to that question was that, in a number of places, "the route undermines the delicate balance between the obligation of the military commander to preserve security and his obligation to provide for the needs of the local inhabitants" (p. 60); and, in a point-by-point analysis of the route, the court ordered it changed according to its dictates. In a final observation, the court noted that "there is no security without law. Satisfying the provisions of the law is an aspect of national security" (p. 86). Particular points along the existing and proposed route of the barrier continue to be contested in the High Court of Justice, and the political element of its path has become a consistent part of those deliberations and deci- sions against the government.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE WALL/FENCE/BARRIER

Although it is difficult to predict the barrier's final path and impact, it is already possible to place it in geographical context. Walls have long been built to protect populations and demarcate territories; some have been more successful than oth-




ers. For Israel, sophisticated security fences have played an enormous, though not infallible, role in preventing incursions from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip. This gives weight to the argument that terrorist attacks from the West Bank-an area remarkably adjacent to many large population concentrations and small towns just minutes away inside Israel-would be lessened by the construction of a similar barrier. Yet regular rocket attacks on Israel from the post-withdrawal Gaza Strip, as well as the construction of tunnels into Israeli territory and sporadic breeches of the fence, in addition to the massive rocket attacks on northern Israel from Leba- non in the summer of 2006, show that even an effective barrier is an incomplete solution.

The endgame of the conflict, to the degree it can be ascertained, seems to lie in a separate, sovereign Palestinian state. The Israeli government, in formal treaties, has acknowledged as much over the course of several administrations from each of the major political parties. For the Palestinians, the world community, and many Israelis, the Green Line, give or take a little, is the logical place to separate the two peoples within their contested space, Israel and Palestine. To put a security barrier on the Green Line would not stop all attacks against Israel, for it is clear that, for the foreseeable future, a sizable faction in the Palestinian camp will continue to pursue a zero-sum territorial strategy: the destruction of Israel. Yet the only way to have an agreed settlement is to enlist a majority of the Palestinian population and create the conditions under which its leadership can make a credible deal with Israel. As long as the barrier deviates significantly from the Green Line ("significance" will, of course, be the subject of fierce political debate), it undermines the credibility of Palestinian leadership and erodes the sense that there is much to negotiate.

Some opponents of the barrier have called it an "apartheid wall" (see, for ex- ample, Halper 2006, 29). This charge is related not to security but to territory. It is a response to the parsing of the West Bank into ever-smaller pockets of territory in which Palestinians can operate on a contiguous basis. It reflects concern that the barrier is part of an effort by Israeli hawks to prevent a negotiated settlement. By undermining the viability of a Palestinian state and provoking Palestinian extrem- ists, the barrier undermines any chance of an independent Palestinian state, or at least bites off more of the West Bank for de facto inclusion within Israel. Such an outcome would contribute to the perpetuation of conflict and bloodshed.

In the meantime, Israel has seemingly pursued a dual agenda: It has sought to protect its citizens through the construction of the barrier, and it has placed the wall/fence in such a way as to promote a particular territorial strategy and political ideology (Figure 4). This should not come as a surprise, for violence and politics often exist in a dialectic, as Gen. Carl von Clausewitz ([1832] 1909) noted: "War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means." War and walls take an obvious toll on surrounding populations. Today walls divide combatants, civil- ians, and their territories in Nicosia, Jammu and Kashmir, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the western Sahara, among others places, each part of a broader constellation




of pain, suffering, and contention. Those walls, it is safe to say, are dwarfed in the global public imagination by the one being built by Israel.

In the context of linking settlement, security, and ideology, what was logical for Israel in the past, and the subject of broad consensus, no longer carries such un- equivocal support or logic. If the fence, in its current aggressive route, harms the peace process and stimulates terrorism-even as it makes it more difficult for bombers to reach their targets-then that linkage may no longer make sense. When settlement and ideology serve to undermine security or drive its price too high, Israel faces an important choice. Sharon made that argument in relation to the Gaza Strip but denied it in relation to significant portions of the West Bank. Yet the difference between the two territories, and the balance between cost and benefit, are clearly narrowing. The West Bank may have greater biblical and strategic significance for Israel, but the occupation is contributing to an ongoing state of war.

Survey data suggest that most Israelis are prepared to give up the West Bank for real peace, to disavow the territorial ideology of the Israeli hawks. Although the settlements hark back to a significant component of the early national ethos, the halcyon days of tower and stockade may have passed. The International Court of Justice and the Israeli High Court of Justice agree that the route of the barrier is flawed and harms Palestinians to a disproportionate degree. The global reaction to the barrier seems disproportionate as well, when measured against the costs of other wars and walls around the world. The key, it seems, is to provide for the defense of Israel's population while not encroaching on the rights of the Palestinians, a goal that might be achieved by moving the barrier so that it follows the Green Line. Perhaps then, in the context of a negotiated settlement between Israelis and Pales- tinians, it can join other famous walls in becoming obsolete.

NOTES

i. The Green Line is the boundary demarcation that resulted from a 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan. Between 1948 and 1967 Jordan occupied what is now called the "West Bank," and in fact declared it Jordanian territory. Although Jordan granted citizenship to Palestinians living in the West Bank, few nations recognized its annexation. At the conclusion of the "Six-Day" or "June" war of 1967, the West Bank was under Israeli control, and the Green Line, though maintaining legal significance and serving as an administrative division for Israel, ceased to be an international boundary.

2. What constitutes the Jerusalem municipality is itself disputed. In 1967 Israel greatly expanded the municipality, but the route of the barrier as it is presently planned divides some Palestinian communities that are inside the current municipal boundary.

3. One of the key points of contention within Israel is the fate of those areas of West Bank settlement that had been owned and inhabited by Israelis prior to 1948. For some Israelis, these settlements are legitimate in a way that post-1967 settlements cannot be; for others, these settlements too must be evacuated. Hard-liners argue that the entire West Bank should remain in Israeli hands.

4. There are many more settlers in the West Bank, and a greater number of settlements, than was the case in Gaza, complicating in practical terms any withdrawal-whether contested or unopposed. Moreover, the ideological and religious associations of the West Bank territory, biblical Judea and Samaria, make ideological resistance to a pullout much more complex than was the case in the Gaza Strip.




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Israel's West Bank Barrier: An Impediment to Peace?

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