Israel's vision: an unbreachable wall against terror
NICOLE GAOUETTE
Christian Science Monitor, 5 September 2003
Jerusalem and Ariel -- Zvi Weiss was returning from one last night of prayer at the Western Wall before his trip home to Brooklyn.
He remembers seeing three tired children sitting beside him, their mother squeezing her way to the back of the bus, then the light-obliterating roar.
The young American rode Jerusalem's Bus No. 2 the night a Palestinian, disguised as a fellow worshiper, detonated 11 pounds of explosives packed with bolts and ball bearings. Mr. Weiss survived, but 21 men, women, and children riding the bus home did not.
The Aug. 19 attack was profoundly troubling - and persuasive. Along with two other bombings the week before, it cemented public support for the security barrier Israel is building to separate itself from the Palestinians. Builders completed the first 87-mile section in July, but Palestinian and other analysts say the barrier could stretch as far as 400 miles in its final form, divvying up the West Bank and any future Palestinian state.
Through time, ramparts and fortifications have captured the imagination as symbols of might, accomplishment, repression, and division. For Jews, walls echo with the memory of European ghettos. Palestinians see Israel's "fence" as an attempt to steal their land and curtail their national hopes. Yet for the vast majority of Israelis today, the barrier rising around the West Bank evokes only one overriding preoccupation: security.
"The only thing people want is to keep them out and keep us safe," says Judith Baumel, a professor of modern Jewish history at Haifa University. "Even on the [political] left, most people say give the Palestinians some territories, but we want a cordon sanitaire, a wall a mile high, a moat with sharks in it, just keep them and us separate."
A daily threat
The violence that followed the 2000 failure of the Oslo peace process, killing more than 860 Israelis and 2,400 Palestinians, has reinforced a feeling many Israelis have of everpresent threat. More than 80 percent of them now say one answer lies in the razor wire, concrete dividers, and electrified fences that make up the barrier.
"Such a fence has a political impact on the reality," says Uzi Dayan, former national security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and chairman of Security Fence for Israel, an umbrella organization for Israeli groups in favor of the barrier. "But what is more important than everything and what should be the dominant issue is that we need to provide security to our people."
There is widespread recognition, though, that the barrier is not a real remedy for the underlying conflict between the two peoples or for short-term Israeli security.
"Even over the Berlin Wall, people jumped," says Vladimir Syrnev, a Russian