This Obscene Wall Will End All Hope of Peace

The Independent (UK)

October 2, 2003

This Obscene Wall Will End All Hope of Peace

By Adrian Hamilton

Call it "a wall", "a fence", "a boundary" or even just
"a barrier" if you want, but however you describe it,
the "security fence" the Israelis are erecting around
Palestinian territory marks the end of hopes of a
negotiated Middle East settlement.

It is difficult for anyone outside the region to
understand just how malevolent and humiliating the wall
is to the Palestinians, and indeed is meant to be. To
the Israelis it is a logical reaction to violence, a
security barrier intended to keep the bombers and the
Palestinians out of Israel, and to separate the two
people, ensuring that the Arab population within the
fence always remains a minority.

To the Palestinians, however, it is both a symbol of
Israeli military domination and a "fact on the ground"
which will ensure that Israel keeps control of the water
resources of the region, protects its illegal
settlements and guarantees that the Palestinians can
never achieve a viable state.

Hence the sensitivity over whether the extension agreed
by the Israeli cabinet yesterday would include a 20-
kilometre curve into Palestinian territory to protect
"Ariel" and other adjoining Israeli settlements. Sharon
and his cabinet want the loop. The Americans, who are
threatening to withhold aid from Israel if the wall does
annex Palestinian territory, are opposing it. The result
yesterday was a compromise in which the wall will be
extended but the sensitive bulge separately fenced and
patrolled.

It’s a compromise that should fool nobody. Ariel Sharon
wants a wall that ensures, in his own terms, a secure
and unassailable Israel, able to control the movement of
its neighbours in and out of its territory, limiting the
number of potentially hostile Arabs within its borders
and in doing so making certain (incidentally or
deliberately) that a Palestinian state would be
incapable of thriving as a separate entity.

There is no great secret in this. Ariel Sharon has never
denied his objective to integrate the settlements into
Israeli territory or to remove as many Palestinians as
possible from its wider boundaries. Even if he did deny
it now (which he doesn’t), enough has been leaked in the
Israeli press of the proposed course of the wall to make
it clear that its intention to incorporate as much as 40
per cent of Palestinian territory.

You can defend this if you so wish as essential to
Israel’s security - although the planned route of the
wall would indicate wider territorial ambitions. You can
even argue that it is something brought upon the
Palestinians by their own actions in sending over
suicide bombers. But what you cannot do is to pretend
that it is compatible with any desire for a peace
settlement or willingness to see a viable Palestinian
state. To all, intents and purposes the wall means the
end of the road-map to peace, and it is dishonest of the
Israeli government to pretend otherwise.

The road-map was probably doomed in any case. It was
never built on any degree of trust between the parties.
Instead it was entirely dependent on the commitment of
the Bush administration’s willingness to put the squeeze
on Jerusalem. Now even that has gone.
Condoleezza Rice, the woman in charge of US policy on
the road-map, and her master, George Bush, are none too
happy with the wall. But the talk in Washington is now
all of "disengagement." Bush won’t even discuss the
issue as long as Arafat is there, and re-election
politics don’t encourage him to do so. The failure of
the road-map can be easily blamed on the Palestinians,
despite the provocations of Israel’s assassination
policy (and the Palestinians are their own worst enemy
on this score).

As for the other members of the quartet that brought the
plan into being - Russia, the UN and Europe - they could
not even produce a statement after their last meeting in
Washington while, to all outward appearance, the UK has
simply gone to ground on the issue.
It shouldn’t. For without the road-map the Middle East
is embarked on a road of bitterness and despair among
the Palestinians that can only end in another cycle of
terrorism which keeps the whole of the Arab world on
edge.

In the short term, of course, the wall may increase
Israel’s security. But each day it exists and each
kilometre it extends, it creates new resentments on the
ground of communities divided from each other, of
workers who cannot get to work and farmers whose olive
groves have been uprooted. And as the Palestinian dream
becomes more unattainable, so the educated leadership
will drift abroad leaving behind a simmering cauldron of
young unemployed men and women ready for martyrdom.
There’s not a great deal that the outside world can do
about this. Ariel Sharon is the elected leader of the
Israelis just as Yasser Arafat is the elected leader of
the Palestinians. Peace will only come when there is a
groundswell on both sides wanting it.

But the wall is an obscenity, an act not only deeply
destructive in its own terms but also contradictory to
any effort to produce some lasting settlement between
Arab and Israeli. Europe, and with it Britain, has every
right - the duty indeed - to say to the Israelis that it
cannot progress trade relations with Israel, let alone
EU membership, so long as it exists. Nor indeed will it
recognise it as forming any kind of frontier for the
future.

http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/adrian_hamilton/story.jsp?story=448990