For decades there has been a fence along the border between Israel and Lebanon. Not once has this fence prevented missile attacks against northern Israeli communities. Any terrorist who wanted to invade Israel and commit acts of war has not been deterred by a few electronic devices or barbed wire. The fence never removed the need for the IDF to spend 20 years in Lebanon ensuring the security of the Israeli north, and in the last two years since Israel pulled out of South Lebanon, even a UN recognized border has not stopped Hizbullah from attacking the north at whim.
In the Gaza Strip, a fence exists along the 1967 line. This fence also has not prevented mortar attacks or other terrorist outrages emanating from there. On the Lebanese border and along the Gaza line, the fences have served more as a target for attacks than as a preventive, and have necessitated increased IDF activity rather than its reduction.
Like its two predecessors, the new fence will not prevent terrorism. If an Arab is prepared to die in order to kill Jews, nothing as flimsy as an electronic wall will stop him. Terrorists will find ways around, over, under, or through this obstacle just as they find ways to evade IDF and police patrols.
The proponents of the new fence have only one thing in mind. Not the security of Israel, but the divestment of territory. Given that the territory won in 1967 is the best tool Israel has to bolster the security of pre-1967 Israeli areas, the drive to remove Israeli control from this territory is in itself damaging to Israel's security. Hiding behind a wall will not replace the security offered by Israeli presence throughout the Land of Israel.
The new fence is the realization of the anti-Zionist left's plan for unilateral separation. After nine years, Yasser Arafat has proved that Oslo was a failure from the outset. He was never interested in cooperation with Israel, in peaceful relations, in the establishment of a Palestinian State, or in the cessation of terrorism.
The Israeli left sacrificed itself on the altar of the Oslo pagan god, and Arafat made sure that it paid with its life. The Israeli left is moribund. Its ideology has been shown to be bankrupt, and those who still cling with ferocious tenacity to that ideology have been marginalized politically.
The last straw for the left to cling to is unilateral separation. What they could not achieve through international agreement at Oslo, they will achieve by self-implementation. The first step in unilateral separation is the new wall, whose construction began over the weekend.
Yesterday, Cabinet Minister Effi Eitam declared in a television interview that the fence is a political move by the left to divide Israel. There is no security benefit to be derived from its construction. Eitam is a former general in the IDF, and knows a thing or two about fences and security. He served as the commander of forces in Lebanon for years, and even lives in the north.
But there was another general on the television program debating him. Brig-Gen (ret.) Giora Inbar is a member of the National Security Council, and part of the team that dreamed up this security cop-out. He appeared on the screen in the button-down shirt and slacks of a bureaucrat, and could barely keep the smile off his face as he said that "having Israelis live behind a fence will increase their security."
This doublespeak sounds hauntingly familiar. The unconcealed jeer on his face complemented the sentiment. Putting Jews behind a fence does nothing to increase security. What it does accomplish is that it more clearly defines the boundaries beyond which Jews may not tread. It serves as a confinement of Jews in their own land, and an invitation to greater acts of terrorism against them. And most ominously, it reminds our nation of another time, not so long ago, when we were forced to live behind fences.
The Holocaust is not the only example of this kind of policy, ostensibly meant to "protect" Jews. For hundreds of years before, the Jews of central and eastern Europe were confined to a geographically specified area, beyond which they could not live. Within that Pale of Settlement, many communities forced Jews to live in ghettos within larger cities.
The Israeli left, long the champion of a Jewish return to the Diaspora in its own land, lost its bet at Oslo. Its new alternative not only rewards Palestinian terrorism by granting it its own state without negotiations, it also continues the drive toward divesting the Jewish State of its nationhood.
The best insurance there is for Israeli security is the political and military will to fight the war being forced upon it. The proof of this is the military actions the IDF undertook in April, which resulted in an immediate and drastic decrease in the level of terrorism directed at Israel. What remains is for the Sharon government to finish the job, not to retreat behind the left's newest false messiah. This is not what Israel was meant to be.
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
