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CAIRO, June 17: Arab League chief Amr Moussa on Monday slammed a security fence that Israel began building this week to seal off Palestinian areas as “racism against a defenceless people” under occupation.
“Instead of exerting efforts on peace, ending military occupation and dismantling settlements, Israel builds a wall and practices terrorism and racism against a defenceless people,” Moussa told reporters at the 22-member League in Cairo.
“(It) reminds us of practices that the world never accepted before and aims to consecrate the occupation and separate communities,” Moussa added.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat also condemned the fence on Monday as an “act of racism and apartheid”.
The $220 million network of barriers is expected to cover a total of 350 km, roughly along the line of Israel’s eastern border before it seized the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East war.
Along with Israeli military checkpoints, the fence carves up the West Bank and isolates Palestinian cities and towns. Israel maintains a series of Jewish settlements of some 200,000 people throughout the West Bank, home to over two million Palestinians.
The work has angered Palestinians. Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat accused Israel on Sky News of seeking to divide Palestinian areas into cantons and “start a new apartheid system”.
But Israel says it has defence, not demarcation, in mind.
“The aim is to separate only from a security point of view — security separation, not political separation,” Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told reporters on Sunday.
“The prime minister said that in his meetings in the United States he had made clear the following...regarding the matter of a ‘Palestinian state’, conditions are not ripe for that discussion,” a cabinet statement said.
Palestinian Labour Minister Ghassan al-Khatib called Sharon’s cabinet remarks “another destructive position”, indicating Israel had no intention of returning to negotiations, and contradicted the idea of a two-state solution.
LIVELIHOOD UNDER THREAT: The West Bank fence threatens the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinians who slip across the border to work illegally in Israel. Some Palestinians in the area also said parts of their ancestral land had been confiscated so the fence could be built.
There was also anger among Israeli ultra-nationalists, who fear the fence would set a border and weaken their claims to occupied land and endanger some 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
“This is the beginning of...the cantonisation of the land of Israel,” Israeli minister Effi Eitam, a darling of the settler bloc, told Israel’s Channel One television.
Another minister, Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, said the “political fence” could set a de facto border.
An Israeli Defence Ministry map showed the fence as a red line abutting the so-called Green Line, or pre-1967 border, but the ministry director-general denied there was any linkage.
The overall plan would eventually separate the West Bank from the eastern sector of occupied Al Quds, which Palestinians want as the capital of an independent state.—Reuters
