The fence idea is gaining support in Israel in the run-up to elections early next year. Exhausted from 26 months of fighting and devoid of hope for a peace deal, more than 70 percent of Israelis tell pollsters they want “unilateral separation.” Some experts say a fence along the old Green Line that separated Israel from the West Bank could prevent Palestinian suicide attacks like the one on a Jerusalem bus last week that killed 11 people. So popular is the idea of a partition that even politicians on the right like Benjamin Netanyahu, who prefers to leave Israel’s borders undefined and who, unlike Mitzna, champions settlement expansion, have hopped on the bandwagon.
But political questions disguised as geographic ones–where the fence would run and what would be the fate of settlements on the other side–have so far scuttled broad plans for separation. “When you build a fence, you create a reality,” says Uzi Dayan, a retired general who served until recently as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s national-security adviser. “It involves tough decisions, and Israeli politicians don’t like making –tough decisions.” Mitzna says he’s willing to do just that, but he probably won’t get the chance. Polls show his Labor Party losing the election slated for Jan. 28.
The opposite is true of Sharon. As the front runner, he’s likely to form the next government, but analysts say he continues to balk at real separation. Sharon has actually authorized construction of a 12-foot-high fence along some parts of the West Bank’s 300-mile perimeter. That’s drawn objections from Palestinians who complain of being hemmed in, and who say Israel will use the fence to expropriate more of their land. “The continued construction of this… wall is sealing the fate of thousands of Palestinians, leaving them stranded in open-air prison, isolated from their land and livelihoods,” says Palestinian human-rights activist Mustapha Barghouti. The current section of the fence doesn’t enclose settlements because it’s being built only around sections of the West Bank, not the entire area. But it does leave settlements in places east of the fence on disputed land.
Construction has gone slowly. Teams started working along a parched strip of land between Jenin and Megiddo four months ago, but their machines have often been idle. “First we had to wait for negotiations with the [Israeli-Arab] owners of the olive trees here that blocked our path,” says one crew member, Eli Goldenberg. “Then the Antiquities Authority held us up for six weeks because diggers stumbled on some old relics.” The section they have managed to build runs less than a mile. Some mornings, Goldenberg watches Palestinians hungry for work sneak around that section into Israel from Jenin, despite tight closures and an Army siege.
Pro-separation groups, which have mushroomed in recent months, say Sharon has deliberately chosen border areas that are far from Israeli settlements in order to avoid tough decisions. “If he wants to build the entire fence, eventually he’ll have to decide whether to incorporate some [West Bank] settlements into Israel,” says Yehiam Prior, a –physicist and one of the early advocates of parting company with the Palestinians. Settlers left out of the plan would surely protest. Prior believes the peace plan put forward two years ago by former president Bill Clinton should serve as the blueprint for separation. Clinton’s plan allowed Israel to annex about 5 percent of the West Bank where many of the 200,000 Jewish settlers live. Prior says that would leave the Israeli government with the job of evacuating about 50,000 settlers from their homes. If a fence is built without dismantling settlements, he says, Israeli soldiers would have the peculiar task of patrolling both sides of the partition.
David Wilder, a New Jersey-born settler who lives in the heart of Hebron’s Palestinian population, believes the evacuation scenario is unlikely. Under Mitzna, Hebron could be among the first Jewish settlements slated for dismantling. But Wilder, crossing a valley where Palestinian gunmen killed 12 soldiers and settlers this month, cites the scuffling that went on for days at settler outposts evacuated by soldiers in October and raises the specter of a mass rebellion. “Imagine a scene like that involving not dozens of people but hundreds or thousands,” he says. Wilder points to a new encampment settlers established at the site of this month’s ambush. Seminary students sit in a large tent studying Jewish scriptures. Others piece together a dwelling from corrugated tin. Far from being taken down, he says, settlements are expanding.
Not all settlers are against separation. In the far northern settlement of Hermesh, where Israelis have come to live more for the standard of living than for ideology, some residents say the government should already be offering compensation to Israelis wishing to move back to the other side of the Green Line. “If they build a fence and I’m left out, I should have the option to leave here and get money for my home,” said one Hermesh settler who asked not to be named. She said her family wanted to leave the settlement more than a year ago but couldn’t afford to buy a house in Israel until they sold their home in the settlement. “Nobody wants to buy a house here now,” she says. Mitzna hopes to capitalize on just this kind of intifada fatigue in order to draw voters from the right side of the political map to his camp. In a newspaper interview after his victory in Labor this week, Mitzna listed three things he plans to accomplish during his first year in office. “If I cannot reach an agreement I will carry out unilateral separation, recognize a Palestinian state and set the borders of the state of Israel unilaterally,” he said. First, though, he needs to get elected.
