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Fact Number 6:  The Virtual Security Fence

For the last several years, the concept of construction of a security fence separating "little Israel" from the areas presently not under Israeli sovereignty (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) has become popular. The media and a significant number of politicians have been claiming that such a fence will separate Israel from the Palestinian Arabs and significantly reduce the instances of terror. The Israeli government has already invested millions of dollars in the first stages of construction. This is a dangerous illusion intended to provide the population with a feeling of security. The only justification for such a wall would be basing Israel's security policy upon some kind of New Age therapy to make the public think that it is being protected against terrorism.  The security fence solution to Israel's problems with the hostile Palestinian Arabs is a perfect example of H. L. Mencken's pithy remark, "There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."  The following paragraphs describe what is entailed in the simple term "security fence."

There is presently no agreement as to the length of fence required to provide security for the optimal number of persons. Estimates range from 320 to more than 700 kilometers. The following analysis is conservatively based on a length of 320 kilometers.  The basic cost of the fence (not including sophisticated and necessary supplementary items such as radars, TV cameras, Infrared, UV and other sensors) would be approximately one million shekels per kilometer. Maintenance of the fence, including personnel and equipment, is estimated to be one billion shekels per year.
 
The fence itself is not sufficient to provide the proposed protection against terrorism. It will require sensing devices and warning systems, mined areas, patrol roads, and lookout towers. In the areas close to Jewish population centers, concrete walls will be required to prevent shooting by weapons of flat trajectories (rifles, machine guns, antitank missiles). There will be no protection against high trajectory weaponry (mortars and rockets).  Camps will have to be set up along the fence to provide lodging for manpower (soldiers, technicians) and storage of equipment required to maintain the fence and for daily military operations such as patrolling, manning lookout towers, etc. Logistics and administrative personnel will be required to supply food, fuel, ammunition, health and sanitary services.

The fence will extend through the areas of three military command zones - north, central and southern. In order to ensure efficiency and unified control, the IDF will have to set up another military command - the security fence command - which will command and control all the activities and personnel associated with the fence. These include the IDF, Border Patrol, police and other security agencies as well as the ancillary civilian services.
The more sophisticated the fence is made, the higher the probability that terrorists will turn their attention to the Jewish communities outside the fence and will also attempt to overcome the difficulties presented by the fence by high trajectory weaponry. This means that the IDF will have to increase its presence outside the fence to prevent such activities. This will result in additional investment of funds and manpower. Colonel (ret.) Moshe Leshem estimates that a large part of the standing army and the reserves will be required just for the activities associated solely with the fence. The ongoing cost of the fence will be astronomical.

In addition to cost in manpower and financial resources, there are other, more subtle but very real, aspects that have not been considered by proponents of the fence - the rules of operation and their implications. For example, what will be the open-fire orders that ensure preventing terrorists from crossing the fence but not result in killing innocent Arabs trying to sneak into Israel to search for employment?  Will the government information systems know how to deal with and explain photographs of innocent people riddled with bullets because they tried to sneak across the fence. And if the orders require the defense forces to wait until they are sure that those who cross the fence are not terrorists, what will be the cost in Israeli lives because of those critical moments of hesitation when the response should be trained and almost automatic?

Further, the Jewish communities outside the fence will, for all practical purposes, be in "enemy territory." Roads will be unsafe and the communities will require reinforced defenses. Just going to work, school, and shopping and returning safely will become a semi-military operation requiring moving in convoys, often with military support. At present, most communities have a security arrangement that includes a voluntary rapid response team to handle emergencies until the IDF arrives. These will have to be increased and better equipped. The burden on the regular army and reserves, together with those required by the fence and normal operational and training needs of the army, will turn Israel into a virtual Sparta.

Bitter experience has shown that the real and psychological burdens imposed by the security fence will embolden the radical left organizations in Israel, supported by the European Union and other anti-Israel and antisemitic sources, to pressure and frighten the government into taking impulsive steps (such as hastily retreating from Lebanon with the consequence that the northern border is under continuous threat from Hizballah), and lobby and demonstrate for abandonment of the communities outside the fence and transfer of Jews from their homes.

It is also of interest to take note of another, perhaps curious, result of analysis of the security fence concept. Analysts from the Rand Corporation were asked to rate the top ten underattended international problems in the world today. Topping the list was Israel's security fence, which, according to the Rand experts "will profoundly change the geographical and political landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….The wall could also deepen Palestinian rage and enmity, of course, prompting escalated mortar and ground-to-ground missile attacks against targets inside Israel…The wall could also prompt further attacks on Israelis overseas, like the suicide bombing last November of a Mombasa hotel filled with Israeli tourists and the accompanying attempt to shoot down an Israeli chartered plane." Thus, the Rand Corporation think-tank analysts are predicting that the fence itself will provoke more attacks. I put this on the record here for completeness although I am not sure that it makes sense; in a worst case scenario it must be assumed that it is conceivable. That the experts believe the security wall would intensify Arab desire and motivation to destroy Israel and kill Jews beyond the present level impresses me as an indication of the expert's ignorance of the Middle East and the Arab attitude toward Jews.
In addition to all of the above, the proposed security fence will retain within Israel close to a million increasingly hostile Arabs and their radical leadership who, although Israeli citizens, identify actively or passively with the enemies of the Jewish state.

Thus, the security fence - now being hastily built by the government - could be one of the most potentially destructive enterprises undertaken by the state. The collapse of the much vaunted and expensive Bar Lev Line at the Suez Canal in the first hours of the Yom Kippur War is the perfect example of the substitution of wishful thinking and public relations for long term strategic planning.

Fact Number 7:  The False Conflict

The Jewish - Arab conflict is perceived by the international community (not including the antisemites who need no particular excuse for their anti-Israel position) is that there is "a conflict of two people over one land" that can be resolved by the creation of a Palestinian state. According to this view, since Jews and Arabs both lay claim to the same territory of Israel-Palestine, some division of the territory between will bring about a peaceful resolution. Unfortunately, the Arab war against Israel is no more a territorial conflict than was al Qaeda's strike against America.

The British government that was granted a mandate from the League of Nations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was the first to delude itself into thinking that there was a territorial conflict between the Arabs and Jews. The British government misjudged not merely the depth but also the nature of Arab opposition. In the aftermath of World War I, the Middle East was partitioned according to the wishes of the victorious allies (primarily France and Great Britain). Churchill, the Colonial Secretary, and his colleagues, who were responsible for the Mandate and for British policy in the Middle East treated the land issue as if it were valid rather than the fraud that it was. The Arab opposition to Jewish settlement had nothing to do with land; indeed, the Palestinian Arab leadership was deeply implicated in land sales that they publicly denounced. At least a quarter of the elected leadership of the Arab Palestinian community sold land to Jewish settlers between 1920 and 1928. In the early 1920's the Arabs offered so much land to Jews that the only limiting factor on purchases was money; the Jewish settlers did not have enough money to buy all the land that the Arabs offered to them. In truth, the Arab opposition to Jewish settlement was rooted in emotion, xenophobia, and particularly religion

There was violent and bloody Arab opposition to Jewish settlement throughout the period of the Mandate (1921-1948) before Israel was established (1948) and before Judea, Samaria and Gaza fell under Israeli jurisdiction (1967). In 1947 when Jewish leaders accepted and Arab rulers rejected the U.N. partition plan of Palestine, the Arab-Israeli conflict bore no likeness whatsoever to more conventional territorial struggles. Arab rulers defy the U.N. charter by denying the legitimacy of a member state. Arab countries refuse to acknowledge the existence of a single Jewish land. Arab rulers did not object to Israel because it rendered the Palestinians homeless. Rather, they ensured that the Palestinians should remain homeless so that they could organize their politics around opposition to Israel.

At any point since the creation of Israel, the Arab governments, that were primarily responsible for the creation of Palestinian Arab refugees, could have helped the Palestinian Arabs settle down to a decent life. They could have created the infrastructure of an autonomous Palestine state in Judea and Samaria, which were controlled by Jordan, and the Gaza territory that Egypt controlled until 1967, or encouraged the resettlement of Palestinians in Jordan, which constitutes the lion's share of the original mandate of Palestine. Rather than fund the Palestine Liberation Organization to foment terror against Israel they could have endowed Palestinian schools of architecture, engineering, medicine and law. What Israel did for its refugees from Arab lands, Arabs could have done much more sumptuously for the Palestinians displaced by the same conflict. Instead, Arab rulers cultivated generations of refugees in order to justify their ongoing campaign against Israel.

Ruth Wisse has noted that the anti-Israel and anti-Israel posturing of the Arab nations has served an additional political purpose. The autocrats who govern Arab societies have used the "Zionist entity" to deflect attention from the worst aspects of their rule. The unwanted presence of the Jews became the rallying point for internal dissatisfaction with the mounting problems of Arab regimes. The drumbeat against Israel invited the world to debate the iniquities of the Jews rather than question the legitimacy of the attacks against them. Without question, Arab rulers successfully deflected attention from their offenses by their decades of war and propaganda against Israel. Even the liberal Western media that might have been expected to support a besieged fellow democracy have long since focused on alleged Israeli abuses instead of on the abuses of their Arab accusers.

Dividing the Holy Land into two states, Israel and Palestine, would be the perfect solution to a territorial problem. Unfortunately, the Arab opposition to Israel has no relation to territory. It has to do with the existence of Jewish sovereignty, something that the Arabs cannot accept under any circumstances.

>>> Continued in Part 5