I watched TV with horror as Hamas fighters bombed holes in the Israeli high tech wall around Gaza and blasted openings for the terrorists to pour through. It took me back to Israel mid April, 2001. I and twenty fellow United States Representatives gathered in the Israeli Department of Defense with new Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his political advisor Ari Gold, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Bill Brown, U.S. Ambassador to Jordan Bill Burns who is currently the Director of the CIA and sundry Israeli military and staffers. We were there for a briefing on the Second Intifada bombings and terrorist attacks on Israelis that had been on going since September 2000--when General Sharon had led a military group to the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount.
The meeting had a contentious start. Our Congressional delegation traveled to Ramalla that morning for a meeting with chief of the PLA, Yassar Arafat. As the meeting was winding down, Arafat invited us to lunch and we accepted as it would have been discourteous to refuse. When Sharon found out we had dined with Arafat he was furious and personally attacked Rep. Nita Lowey, a Jewish Democrat from New York who was ranking member of the Appropriations Committee with jurisdiction over USAID. Ms Lowey was a staunch supporter of Israel. Sharon called her naive in worse words for having accepted the lunch invite.
Our ambassadors were mortified and we colleagues of Ms. Lowey, among whom were future Speaker Pelosi and Senators Cardin and Wicker, were angered at the insult. The meeting then proceeded with a brief talk from Sharon. We were each were allotted one question.
Israelis were being kidnapped from restaurants and shot to death, killed by gunfire while driving, stoned to death, and suicide bomberswere blowing up buses filled with children. I wanted to know how the Israeli government was going to stop this. When my turn came I asked a simple question. “Why didn’t Israel build a wall separating the two populations?” I knew U.S. policy was against Israel building a barrier but I wanted to hear what Prime Minister Sharon would say, for or against. Sharon glanced at his adviser Ari Gold with an inscrutable look, avoided eye contact with the ambassadors and only said, “
The Israeli government cites a decreased number of suicide bombings carried out from the West Bank as evidence of the barrier’s effectiveness. Attacks fell from 73 between 2000 and July 2003 when the first segment was built to 12 from 2003 to 2006. About 65% of the 450 mile structure has been completed. 85% of the unfinished barrier is inside the West Bank which is Palestinian territory. Israel is currently replacing a security fence built twenty years ago in the northern West Bank with a new concrete barrier that will be twenty feet high. Where the multilayered fence system is used, the exclusion area is about 200 feet wide on average and in some paces over 100 meters. Twenty some years after asking Sharon about a barrier, on a recent trip to Israel just before the Hamas Gaza attack I saw concrete walls snaking through Jerusalem, Bethlehem and other urban areas. The wire barrier part with wide bare spaces on each side meanders across the hills.
Had Israel built the barrier closer to the 1949 Jordanian-Israel armistice line (“Green Line”) there would be less conflict. It is thought that Israel included more Palestinian territory in hopes initially of using it as a pawn in negotiations for a comprehensive settlement. However, now more than a decade after the collapse of any serious peace talks, I sense that Israel is not that interested in building a more permanent wall in some areas because many West Bank Israeli settlers don’t want to be cut off from Israel. Israel actively encourages Jewish citizens to settle on both sides of the barrier and is expanding fingers of settlements deep into occupied West Bank.
Before his incapacitating stroke, Sharon wanted to stop new settlements and even close down older ones. Sharon was a gambling military commander and made made a gamble on withdrawing Israel from occupation of Gaza, which one can argue has enabled this terrible uprising. I wonder how he would now approach a bigger “barrier” and reoccup
The Israeli wall reduced small scale terrorist activity but it can’t stop bulldozers and a well equipped Hamas army of thousands. It is clear that Robert Frost’s poem of walls making good neighbors has caveats in the Mideast.
Greg Ganske, MD, Member of Congress (ret.-IA) is a retired plastic surgeon who served in Congress from 1995-2003. He then returned to his medical practice of treating women with breast cancer, trauma patients, and children with birth defects.