In two meetings with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice expressed the Bush administration’s concern that the security fence being constructed by Israel is “creating facts on the ground that would prejudge a final settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians.
Rice reportedly also indicated that the United States would like to see construction stopped as “a confidence-building measure.”
Though the issue probably had been on her agenda anyway, one may assume that it was also raised by the Palestinians in Rice’s earlier meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, perhaps at the instigation of his Hamas and Islamic Jihad cease-fire partners. The terror groups are understandably unenthusiastic about any physical obstacle being put in their way should they decide to renew suicide bombings against Israel.
The need for the security fence had been hotly debated in Israel for a long time, including by security experts, though public opinion has always been strongly in favor.
While on the one hand there were those who reminded us that even the Great Wall of China didn’t prevent the Mongol invasion, others elevated the fence as a panacea of a magnitude that would solve the terror threat.
But practical security considerations were at the time not the only ingredients in the debate — politics also played a not inconsiderable role on both sides of Israel’s political spectrum. The right sternly opposed it, and, ironically, it was the left, including some of Abbas’ former Oslo partners, who, in the absence of a credible political or security program of their own to counter the policies of the Sharon government, embraced the idea of the fence as their political platform.
But surprise, surprise. As long as the proposed fence was going to be erected strictly along the Green Line, the left hotly denied it had any political implications or that it was meant to predetermine the future border. All they cared about was security. But when the fence was planned to be where it was most needed in order to save lives — partly along the Green Line and partly around Israeli population centers in the territories — it all of a sudden became “political.”
In the meantime, however, especially since the wave of suicide bombings, the fence has shed most of its partisan aspects and it is now generally seen as a vital component in Israel’s ability to fend off terrorism.
To no one’s surprise, the European Union, apparently not overly concerned about the risk to Jewish lives, lost no time in jumping on the anti-fence bandwagon, as did the World Bank — in the past one of the principal financial supporters of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.
The international community’s solicitude was for the Palestinians who would find themselves on the western, Israeli side of the fence, though no similar worry was expressed concerning the fate of Israelis who might wake up one day to find themselves abandoned to their fate to the east.
Actually, the only worry regarding those “isolated” Palestinians was that it would now become more difficult for terrorists to use their villages — often against the will of the people living there — as convenient launching sites for terrorist attacks against Israel.
Nor is it a matter of prejudging the outcome of a future settlement. As all Israeli governments — and all U.S. administrations — have held, negotiations, not “facts on the ground,” will be the determining factor with regard to the future borders.
One hopes that this artificial political issue will not obfuscate the really important issues of the “road map,” the most important and urgent of which is putting an absolute end to Palestinian terror and violence.
Nor should there be any reason why the fence should create disagreements between Israel and the United States — both being committed to President Bush’s vision of peace.