Barrier shields scarred town
 

AFULA, ISRAEL -- Yehuda Tovi is not a politically correct man. He doesn't buy the idea that good fences make good neighbours.

He believes that Israel has incorrigibly bad neighbours, and he's glad that there's finally some kind of barrier between his family and what he sees as the hostile Palestinian population across the hills.

Mr. Tovi's deep distrust grew out of watching the horror of a suicide bombing unfold in May, 2003, while the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was still in full roar. Such attacks were all too common in this northern Israeli town before a security barrier was built separating it from the nearby West Bank town of Jenin. Now they've largely stopped.

As the manager of the Ha'amakim Mall, in the commercial heart of Afula, he had long known that the three-floor shopping centre was a potential target. Just days before the attack, after watching a news report about a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, he ordered that two guards be placed at each of the mall's entrances, instead of one.

On May 19, Mr. Tovi looked on from one floor above as a 19-year-old English literature student named Hiba Azzam Darajme blew herself up at the mall's entrance after being prevented by the guards from entering. One of the guards and two shoppers were killed. “There was this big flash of fire, and then there were people lying all over the ground,” the burly Mr. Tovi, 54, said. “I was in the army, so I've seen a lot in my life, but this was a shock.”

The attack on Ha'amakim Mall took place at the tail end of a nightmarish span for Afula and the surrounding area in which 53 people were killed in a string of attacks by Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers between 2001 and 2003.
Afula, a working-class town of about 40,000 that sits 15 kilometres north of the West Bank, was an easily accessible target for Palestinian militant groups, and as the attacks multiplied, it became a deeply traumatized place. Cafés and restaurants were seen by residents as no-go areas, and the central bus station — after being targeted twice by gunmen and once by a suicide bomber — was given a wide berth by those who didn't absolutely have to pass through it.

Two-and-a-half years later, the thick fear is finally starting to lift. There hasn't been a fatal attack in Afula since the mall bombing, and residents — many of them poor immigrants from the former Soviet Union — are starting to feel comfortable walking the streets of their city again.

“Before, no one went anywhere. But now the situation has changed,” said Arkady Wasserman, a 57-year-old security guard at a French-themed café in Afula that was packed in midafternoon one day last week. In a holdover from the bad old days, Mr. Wasserman was wearing a pistol on his hip and gave each diner a once-over with a handheld metal detector before allowing entry.

It's a phenomenon that can be seen all over Israel: life returning to something approaching normal as the frequency of suicide bombings and other attacks has slowed from the heights of the intifada. According to the Israeli army, 73 major Palestinian attacks occurred between September of 2000, when hostilities were renewed, and July of 2003, when the wall around Afula was completed. Since then, there have been 11.

Palestinians argue that the moderate policies of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Yasser Arafat after his death in November of 2004, should get much of the credit for that drop. But most residents of Afula give a two-word answer when asked what's changed their lives and restored a sense of security: “the fence.”

In other parts of Israel, and in the international community, the 685-kilometre barrier system Israel is building in the West Bank that will seal it off from much of the Palestinian population is the subject of controversy. But here residents speak of it with something approaching affection.

The northern section, which runs between Afula and the militant hotbed of Jenin, was the first major chunk of the barrier's twisting route to be completed, in part because here it largely follows the route of the so-called Green Line that divided Israel and the West Bank before the 1967 war.

It therefore provoked few of the legal challenges that have snarled construction in other parts, where the barrier juts deep into the West Bank to protect Israeli settlements that were illegally built in the occupied territories.

The barrier, which is a network of fences, concrete walls, motion sensors and security roads, has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The non-binding ruling called for Israel to dismantle the barrier and compensate those affected by it.

Instead, Israel has pushed ahead with construction, and many now believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sees it as the eventual border between an expanded Israel and a future Palestinian state.

Those high-level politics mean little here, where residents care only that the terrorism has stopped. After construction of the barrier began, the attacks on Afula came to an almost immediate halt, and residents express little concern about the impact it may or may not have on the Palestinians who live on the other side.
“If before the fence there was one or two security alerts a day, today it's once a month,” a relieved Mr. Tovi said.

“For my security, for my family's security, that's what is important. I'm less interested in what the effect is on someone who comes from [Jenin] and wants to do us harm.”

Suicide bombers like the one who struck his mall could never succeed without the support of their community, Mr. Tovi said, so he considers the residents of Jenin collectively guilty and deserving of any collective punishment they receive.
“The opposite situation would never happen,” he said. “My son would never attack a shopping mall in Jenin.”

Some are less convinced that the barrier needs to be permanent and hope that in the future it can be removed to facilitate trade with the Palestinians. Right now, that day seems a long way off.

“Since the fence was built, our sense of security is higher. But I personally want to see real peace, and the fence is a wall that separates us from the Palestinians,” said Afula's mayor, Avi Elkabetz.

“Look at Germany. It was only after years that they were able to remove [the Berlin Wall]. It will be good when we're able to destroy this some day, but today, because of the situation, it's essential for us.”

The Globe and Mail; 3 January 2006