This fence makes for nervous neighbours; Some worry Israel is using wall to redraw the West Bank's borders

JERUSALEM -- The paved lot outside Anata Secondary School for Boys was never the world's greatest soccer pitch.

It was an uninviting place for a game, where a fall on the hard ground likely meant a scraped knee, or worse, and where kids had to dribble around the trash as well as opposing players.

The one thing it had going for it was space.

With almost an acre of land stretching behind the school, the 750 boys who study here would spread out during recess and organize several games at once.
That ended in September when the boys returned from a weekend home to find an eight-metre-high concrete wall cutting through their schoolyard, reducing their soccer space to a 10 m by 10 m enclosed box.

Israel's “separation barrier,” built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities, has separated the students of Anata Secondary School from most of their schoolyard.

“We still play but we get nothing out of it,” said 18-year-old Hamzeh Hamdan, kicking sand disdainfully at the graffiti-covered wall.

“Look at it. It's too small a place. We're all crammed in.”

As he spoke, a class of Grade 7 students behind him organized into teams on what remains of their pitch.

On the other side of the cement blocks, an Israeli military jeep patrolled what was once the other half of the field.

Security is the stated reason why Israel is building the 685-kilometre barrier in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and many Israelis will argue that it has succeeded in returning a semblance of normalcy to life on their side of the wall.
There has been a dramatic drop in the number of suicide bombings and other attacks since construction of the barrier began in the summer of 2003. Opinion polls show that as much as 60 per cent of the Israeli public, traumatized by years of bloodshed, supports the project.

The same polls show that the majority of Israelis also believe the barrier will help strengthen Israel's hold over Jerusalem. The barrier's route, its critics charge, seems to have been drawn up to secure Israel's claim to key parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The shrinking of the Anata schoolyard sticks out as a particularly pointed example of the damage done by the barrier as it cuts and swerves along its controversial route.

To some, it's also a metaphor for what the barrier does to any future Palestinian state: it detaches a vital chunk, leaving something behind that's barely feasible on its own.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says the barrier is a temporary measure, put in place purely to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israeli population centres.

In theory, the wall will come down as soon as Palestinian violence stops and Israelis feel they can trust their neighbours.

But Palestinians say the route, which deviates from the pre-1967 Green Line and in some places cleaves deep into the West Bank, is a cynical land grab.
They're worried that Mr. Sharon — who is now running for a third term as prime minister — doesn't see this as temporary at all, but as the future border between an expanded Israel and a future Palestinian state.

More and more Israelis, including some of those closest to Mr. Sharon, say the Palestinians have it right and that “the wall,” as it's colloquially known here (Israeli officials call it a “security fence”) is central to the ex-general's plan for ending the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli standoff.

“One does not have to be a genius to see that the fence will have implications for the future border. This is not the reason it was built, but it could have political implications,” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said this month in what was the most overt and official declaration of what many Israelis and Palestinians have long suspected.
Ms. Livni is a close Sharon ally and followed the Prime Minister when he recently quit the right-wing Likud Party and started a new centrist movement called Kadima, which has made reaching a final deal with the Palestinians a central plank of its electoral platform.

Eyal Arad, a member of Mr. Sharon's policy-making inner circle, has also advocated “unilaterally determining the permanent borders of the state of Israel.”
The coming year could therefore be a critical one in the Middle East. The barrier, nearly 75 per cent of which is either built or under construction, is expected to be completed some time in 2006.
Mr. Sharon asked engineers to speed its construction after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip this summer, and Mr. Sharon's vision of a final settlement is likely to be put to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas soon afterwards.

Of course, as Mr. Sharon showed by unilaterally pulling soldiers and settlers from Gaza, he doesn't necessarily need the acquiescence of the Palestinian Authority to pull off what he calls Israel's “disengagement” from the occupied territories.
“Sharon has so far executed his scheme to the letter. . . . I think he will now move to a Palestinian state with interim borders” that will be based on the route of the West Bank barrier, said Ziad Abu Amr, an independent Palestinian legislator who lives in Gaza.
He says he was disgusted by how the Palestinian Authority was outplayed and left reacting to events by Mr. Sharon during the withdrawal, and worries that it will again be a spectator as Mr. Sharon moves to unilaterally impose a border.
In the words of Amos Oz, one of Israel's greatest living writers, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not so much about religion, ideology or ethnicity as it is “a dispute over real estate.”

If the wall were to become the frontier, it would leave Palestinians with less land — especially around Jerusalem, the city that both Israelis and Palestinians consider to be their capital — than they would have received under either the 1994 Oslo process that collapsed or the 2000 Camp David deal that was rejected by Mr. Abbas's predecessor, Yasser Arafat. Not including Jerusalem, 8 per cent of the West Bank is on the western, Israeli side of the barrier's route.

There are enormous questions that are still unanswered as Mr. Sharon prepares to push ahead. Can peace be imposed by one side of a conflict without the other side's acquiescence? Will Palestinians (the people, not just the politicians) ever accept a settlement that gives up their claim to East Jerusalem, particularly the holy sites of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque?

In a 2004 decision, the International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled the barrier was illegal and called for Israel to tear it down and compensate those whose lives were adversely affected by it.

The ruling, however, generated sparse international reaction beyond the Arab world. With the backing of Israel's own Supreme Court, construction continues apace. The only wrangling now is over the final route.

The barrier is in parts a Berlin-style concrete wall, as in the Anata schoolyard, and in others a metal fence supplemented by a system of trenches, motion sensors and security roads.

The Israeli government views it as an unqualified success, pointing to a sharp decline in the number of suicide bombers who have reached Israeli cities since the barrier began to go up.

The Israeli army says there were 73 suicide bombings or car bombings, killing 293 Israelis, between the start of the intifada in the fall of 2000 and the commencement of the barrier's construction in July, 2003.

Since that time, the drop-off has indeed been dramatic: There were only 11 bombings and 54 dead over the 28 months that followed.

“The fence provides us with the ultimate protection from this [mass bombings] threat, being both an effective physical and an operational obstacle, and a psychological deterrent to terrorist operations,” said Corporal Ariel Medina, an army spokesman.

Palestinians attribute the same drop-off to the change in the political situation since the moderate Mr. Abbas was elected a year ago. He and Mr. Sharon agreed to a ceasefire last January, which theoretically remains in place despite periodic breaches.

Whatever its usefulness as a security measure, it's the details of the wall's route rather than its physical makeup that's causing most of the controversy and consternation among Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The barrier solidifies Israel's hold on Jerusalem — it annexed the east side in 1967 and claims the entire city as its indivisible capital — and when completed it will stretch out to enclose the key Jewish settlement blocks of Maale Adumim to the east, Pisgat Ze'ev to the north and Gush Etzion to the southwest of the city centre.

All of those places are east of the Green Line, the border between Israel and the West Bank until the Six-Day War in 1967.

Keeping them inside the barrier will help to make Jerusalem more Jewish, a goal embraced by both Mr. Sharon and the municipal authorities.

The expansion of all three settlement blocks, as well as others included on the Israeli side of the barrier, has continued and in some places accelerated even as Mr. Sharon was being lauded internationally for leaving Gaza.

Palestinians complain the route would also cripple the economic prospects of any future state built on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Extending the barrier to enclose Maale Adumim would sever the main transportation corridor that connects Ramallah and Nablus in the north to Bethlehem and Hebron in the south.

The barrier's zigzag through Jerusalem also carves out large Palestinian neighbourhoods such as Abu Dis, Bethany and the Shuafat refugee camp, strengthening the Jewish majority in the city by reducing the Arab population by 55,000.

West Bank residents, long used to viewing East Jerusalem as the metropolitan centre of the West Bank, are now banned from entering the city unless they have an Israeli-issued special permit for the trip.

“In Jerusalem, it's very clear, the border has been defined. This is now an international border,” said Jad Isaac, director-general of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, a respected Palestinian think tank.

“Unilateralism is replacing negotiations. Sharon will not go back to negotiations.”
It's at the local level that the harm done by the plan is most apparent. Even ardent Israeli nationalists acknowledge that running a wall through the Anata school playground — or putting a physical barrier between Arab neighbourhoods such as Abu Dis and adjoining Ras al-Amud, which have become interdependent after existing cheek-by-jowl for generations — will only create hostilities in an area that was reasonably peaceful, even through the intifada.

At a breach between Abu Dis and Ras al-Amud where construction of the barrier remains unfinished, long rows of Palestinians recently made a short but precarious walk along a garden wall before squeezing themselves past an eight-metre-high concrete chunk that blocked normal passage on the road.
Some were young men in search of work. Some were students who will soon be completely separated from the schools they attend. Others were simply trying to see family before the passage is closed for good.

A trio of Israeli soldiers toting M-16 assault rifles waiting on the other side of the barrier turned back people who didn't have papers showing they had Jerusalem residence. Those turned away included a man who said he was recovering from surgery and was clutching an expired permit allowing him to visit a Jerusalem hospital.

The wall in Abu Dis recently had to be topped with coiled razor wire, since Palestinians desperate to cross were somehow finding a way to scale it.
“The wall is in between my family's apartments. I must see my children,” shrugged 54-year-old Abdel Rahim Ayyad, a former municipal worker, when asked why he was so intent on crossing the barrier that day. He was carrying a black plastic bag stuffed with pita bread for a family lunch.

“There's no such thing as a good route of the wall. Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem are akin to Siamese twins, sharing vital organs,” said Daniel Seidemann, who is handling several legal challenges to the barrier's route in this ancient city. “We're trying to achieve, through physical means, what can't be achieved.”

A Jewish human-rights lawyer who lives in West Jerusalem, Mr. Seidemann has devoted much of his life to the study of what he calls the “living organism” of Jerusalem. Lately, he's taken on a second career: giving unofficial tours of the barrier's route to journalists, foreign diplomats and even, he says, unnamed members of the Israeli cabinet, highlighting what he sees as the folly of the barrier's route.

Like many Israelis, Mr. Seidemann lived through enough violence and fear during the last intifada to appreciate the need for some sort of a barricade to keep out those who would blow themselves up inside restaurants and buses.
He believes, however, the wall's route was conceived with goals other than security in mind, inflicts unnecessary harm and humiliation on Palestinians, and as a result will end up making Israelis less, not more, safe.
Animosity toward Israel is clearly on the rise at the Anata school, where throwing rocks at the Israeli police who patrol their former schoolyard has become a common way to pass the lunch hour.

Yusef I'layyan, the school's headmaster, keeps under his desk a box full of spent tear-gas canisters and stun grenades with Hebrew writing on them that he says Israeli police have fired back into the schoolyard and even the main lobby of the building.

Mr. I'layyan makes it clear that he isn't about to start punishing his students for acts of rebellion that he clearly supports.

“The students are incapable of studying in such an environment. The Israelis should expect to have rocks thrown at them,” he said.

“They've instilled in the children a love of the resistance that wasn't there before.”

The Globe and Mail; 2 January 2006