About three weeks ago, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced
that physical barriers would be placed at key spots along the
“Green Line” — separating pre-1967 Israel from Judea and Samaria.
The implementation of the “separation” plan began last month, with
Israel Defense Forces engineering corps setting obstacles in place
and digging trenches between PA-controlled Tul Karem and the
heavily populated, and often targeted, Netanya region. The second
stage of construction includes the erection of an electric fence on
the borders of population centers in Israel. More ambitiously, on
April 29, 2002, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said
that within two years a fence will be erected along the entire
length of the country. Often referred to as the “wall” and
supported by much of the Israeli Left and some of the Right, along
with some prominent members of the defense establishment, the
fences and barriers between Israel and Judea, Samaria and Gaza are
meant to provide (some) Israelis with a greater measure of security
from terrorist infiltrators. The “wall,” however, is a false
panacea, much like the Oslo Accords were before it, for both
tactical and strategic reasons.
“There is nothing more foolish than to build walls of this
nature, as history has shown us time and again,” according to Dr.
Aryeh Stav, director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research. “The
Maginot Line, the Great Wall of China, and others were truly
impenetrable by the standards of the times in which they were built
— yet collapsed totally at the moment that they were really
needed.” He called the idea that a fence will stop terrorism “total
self-delusion.” Stav, and others, have pointed out the painfully
obvious fact that the fences along Israel’s border with Egypt have
been notoriously porous when it comes to preventing the smuggling
of weapons and ammunition to the Palestinian Authority. Similarly,
the fence along Israel’s northern border failed to prevent the
kidnapping of three soldiers patrolling the perimeter, nor did it
prevent the fatal March 12th terrorist attack that took place near
Kibbutz Metzubah in the Galilee, carried out by Lebanese
infiltrators. It also failed to shield Israel from more than 1,000
rockets fired by the Hezbollah in the month of April.
Arab thinkers themselves have made it clear that the wall is
merely another challenge to be overcome in their struggle against
the Jewish State. The Egyptian Al-Wafd newspaper
proclaimed, “Here is another Berlin Wall being established, not in
Germany but in Palestine.” Calling the wall a “public inauguration
of the apartheid regime that is to be established in Palestine,”
Knesset member Azmi Bishara, writing in the Lebanese
as-Safir, openly advocated the adoption of a strategy by
the PLO that “makes the occupation costly for the occupier, while
allowing the population under occupation to sustain that resistance
in the long term.” In other words, if the Arab world adopts
Bishara’s line of thinking, the Israeli implementation of passive
defense against terrorist attacks will only precipitate redoubled
efforts to perpetrate such attacks. The Hezbollah may well serve as
the model in such a scenario, as occurred after Israel’s withdrawal
from southern Lebanon.
The comments of Knesset member Bishara and Al-Wafd
actually point to another, deeper problem with the planned Israeli
defenses. Both the Berlin Wall and apartheid created artificial
separation where there was no natural one and both ultimately
crumbled. Similarly, the 1967 “Green Line” is not a natural
boundary, it merely delineates the armistice lines of the 1948 War
of Independence. A fence along an almost arbitrary line down the
middle of one natural geographic unit will not hold up over time,
as the two sides of the line are naturally interdependent. This can
be seen most acutely in the organic unification of the Arab
municipalities of Baka al-Gharabiya in pre-‘67 Israel and Baka
al-Sharakiya in the administered territories. Many Arab villages
along the “Green Line” are dependent on Jewish communities on the
other side of the line for much of their income, and many Arabs
throughout Palestinian Authority areas work in pre-‘67 Israel.
In implementing the “wall” Israel is also backpedaling away from
its own policy in facing and defeating Arab aggression. It has
returned to the age of the “Wall and Tower” settlements (homa
umigdal), established to defend Jews from the violence of the
1936-39 nationwide Arab riots. The founders of Kibbutz Hanita in
the western Galilee, one of 57 such Jewish settlements, “proposed
they defend themselves by setting up a protective wall all around
the settlement, by digging trenches and erecting towers for
look-out posts.” While that may have been appropriate when the Jews
were not in a position to exercise authority as a sovereign state,
that period was to have ended a long time ago. Indeed, the Israeli
military doctrine, until the implementation of the Oslo Accords,
was quite different from the “Wall and Tower” mentality. Not
dependent on passive defensive measures, the IDF took the battle to
the enemy’s territory as quickly as possible, exacting a heavy
price on the aggressor’s home turf.
David Raziel, commander in chief of the Irgun from 1937-1941,
said it best 60 years ago, “If the objective of the war is to break
the will of the enemy…we clearly cannot be content with
defensive action.…Such a method of defense, which enables the
enemy to attack as he sees fit and to retreat at will, to
reorganize and to attack again — such defense is known as ‘passive
defense’ and ends in defeat and ruin… he who does not wish to
be defeated must attack.” The lack of a decisive, swift and
overwhelming military response to PLO-backed terrorist attacks,
from the very beginning of the “Oslo process,” along with the
current construction of a “Great Wall of Israel,” indicate to the
Arabs that the Jews are in retreat, locking the gates of the ghetto
at night for fear of marauding pogromchiks. Unless that impression
is quickly reversed, renewed and novel Arab attacks may turn the
latest Israeli defensive measure into another “Wailing Wall.”
