QALQILYA (West Bank): Six of Hassan Kharouf’s greenhouses lie buried under a new wall rupturing his land, part of a mushrooming Israeli security barrier that Palestinians fear could foil their dream of a viable state.
The first 150 kms of electronic fences and concrete walls nearing completion protect about a dozen Jewish settlements on occupied territory, while detaching around 50,000 Palestinian inhabitants from the rest of the West Bank.
A World Bank study has found the economic and humanitarian fallout of the fence most glaring in Qalqilya, a once-thriving market town drawn into a noose by walls on three sides with one outlet to the east, restricted by an Israeli army checkpoint.
“Qalqilya is a big open-air jail now. We feel free only looking up at the sky but have no wings,” said Kharouf, his back to the 10-metre wall. “The Israelis have decimated my business but I refused their compensation offer, on principle.”
Israel says the barrier’s sole aim is to stop infiltrations by Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen in a 33-month-old uprising and does not preconfigure borders in any final accord.
But construction goes on despite a ceasefire declared by militant factions in June. Diplomats say the route, often diverging east of the boundary with Israel, could effectively annex terrain and prejudice the outcome of a US-backed “roadmap” peace plan entailing an independent Palestinian state.
Top US security adviser Condoleezza Rice pressed Israel to halt the fence during talks in June after Palestinian leaders contended that it would fragment a future Palestine into weak cantons, embittering Palestinians and prolonging bloodshed.
NO POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS?: “Washington does not object to this barrier in principle but is questioning the Israeli assertion that it is only for security and has no political or border implications, judging by the barrier’s path,” said a senior Western diplomat.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rebuffed Rice. “He told her that if he had to choose between funerals and the fence, he’d choose the fence,” a Sharon confidant said.
“Our feeling is that prospects for this ceasefire to stick are not great, and a Palestinian return to violence would give us justification to continue with the separation fence.”
Israeli leaders have repeatedly said the fence is a stopgap defensive barricade that could be moved or dismantled once peace with recognized borders is forged with Palestinians.
But Israeli analysts say the fence’s path, and a proposal that its next segment veer into the central West Bank to enclose some strategic settlements, resemble Sharon’s vision of a limited Palestinian state on 42 per cent of the territory.
Sharon has long believed that high ground in the centre-west rising above Israel’s slender coastal strip, the Jordan Valley in the east and a wedge of large settlements that buffer Jerusalem — and virtually cut the West Bank in two — must remain under Israeli control for the nation’s defence.
An Israeli security source said the root of US dismay was the mooted loop of the fence into the central West Bank — which could slice up Palestinian-populated territory into two sections — and a decision had been put off as a result.
The mayor of Ariel, a large central settlement built in the 1970s when Sharon was Israeli minister in charge of populating the West Bank with Jews, said defence officials had assured him Ariel would wind up within the fence.
“The security map shown to us back then by Sharon reminds me very much of the one emerging today. His strategic concept has never changed,” Ron Nachman said.
SLASHING THROUGH ANCESTRAL ORCHARDS: A 3.5-metre high electronic fence with touch and motion sensors anchors an obstacle course of barriers 100 metres wide slicing through landscape covered by Palestinian orchards between Jenin in the north and Qalqilya in the west.
About 12,000 Palestinians have found themselves on the west side of the fence facing Israel, but barred by army roadblocks from going there. Hundreds of farm plots have been isolated on either side of the barrier, and tens of thousands of olive and citrus trees felled to make way for it.
Walls have been erected where defence strategists believed Israelis could be exposed to snipers, like Qalqilya, a rambling dusty town of 40,000 people overlooking Israel’s coastal plain.
Israeli shoppers once flocked to Qalqilya’s cheap markets. Many Qalqilyans worked in a booming Israel. But the good times ended with Israeli army raids and blockades after several suicide attacks launched by militants based in the city.
The wall could be Qalqilya’s coup de grace, Mayor Marouf Zahran said. The deepening quarantine had killed more than 600 businesses, sent the unemployment rate up to 69 per cent and driven 3,000 people to move abroad in search of work.—Reuters