Four days earlier at the same venue, Bush had hosted the new Palestinian prime minister, Abu Mazen. The Bush administration hoped that Abu Mazen would use his newly created position to wrest power from the Palestinian Authority’s President Yasser Arafat, who was discredited in US eyes as an obstacle to peace. Abu Mazen was also crucial to the success of the Road Map, the recently launched peace initiative. Bush was thus uncharacteristically attentive to Palestinian concerns. At their meeting Abu Mazen raised the issue of the wall. His concern was somewhat belated as the first phase of construction, some 125 kilometres through the northern West Bank, was due for completion in less than a week. Local farmers, human rights organisations and international solidarity groups had been warning of the wall’s negative political and humanitarian impact since the first olive tree had been felled almost a year earlier. The Palestinian Authority had been laggard in its response, but grassroots pressure was such that Abu Mazen could not afford to ignore the issue if he was to maintain credibility with the Palestinian public.

Abu Mazen expressed the hope that Bush would demand a complete halt to construction of the wall. At the very least, he urged, the president should use his influence to have the wall rerouted towards the ‘Green Line’ – the internationally recognised border between Israel and the West Bank – and stem its intrusion into Palestinian territory. The president listened attentively and appeared to take Abu Mazen’s considerations on board, especially his account of the suffering the wall was inflicting on ordinary Palestinians. At their joint press conference afterwards, Bush described the wall as ‘a problem’, declaring that it was ‘very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank’.

Such publicly expressed reservations were unwelcome to Sharon, as was Bush’s referring to the ‘wall’ with its connotations of a permanent border: Israel preferred the more homely term ‘fence’. Before his encounter with Bush, Sharon had scheduled a separate meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice at which he requested that the president stop using the expression ‘wall’. Rice explained that Bush used the terms ‘fence’ and ‘wall’ interchangeably and that no political inference should be drawn. At this point, Sharon reached for his photos:

At their joint press conference afterwards, Sharon praised Bush as a world leader in the fight against terrorism and vowed that Israel, like the United States, would never surrender to terror and evil. For his part, Bush referred to the ‘fence’ rather than the ‘wall’, which was downgraded from a ‘problem’ to a ‘sensitive issue’. Following the Washington meetings, construction of the wall was not halted or reversed as Abu Mazen had requested, and as the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) would later demand. Five weeks later, Abu Mazen resigned as Palestinian prime minister, undermined both by Sharon and by Arafat who had their different reasons for wanting his downfall. However, he would be back at the White House in May 2005, this time as Palestinian Authority President, successor to the deceased Arafat. Again, the wall would be one of the main issues raised, but by then it had become another Israeli ‘fact on the ground’, snaking through the West Bank with an air of permanency, with the Palestinian rural population – now trapped in enclaves and ‘closed areas’ – still paying the price.

The ‘smart’ fence is augmented by a number of static security features. On at least one and usually both sides of the fence are paved roads for patrol vehicles. Smoothed strips of sand on either side of the patrol road will show the footprints of any intruders. On the ‘Palestinian side’ there is a ditch or trench ‘or other means intended to prevent motor vehicles from crashing into and through the fence’. This is flanked by a pyramid-shaped stack of coiled razor wire, some two metres tall. An additional razor wire barrier lies on the ‘Israeli side’. The complete obstacle is generally between 30 and 70 metres wide, although it spans 100 metres in certain areas. Signs are placed on the razor wire on the Palestinian side with warnings in Arabic, Hebrew and English which read: ‘Mortal danger: military zone. Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.’

The major part of the barrier is composed of this multilayered system. The remainder is made up of precast concrete sections, generally eight metres high. According to the Israeli authorities, these concrete sections are built ‘in areas where the threat of sniper fire is real and immediate or in areas where it was impossible to build a fence for topographical reasons.’⁵ In practice, such sections are erected alongside Palestinian population centres close to the Green Line, such as the towns of Qalqilya and Tulkarm, where the wall is capped with surveillance towers and cameras. Concrete slabs also dominate much of the ‘Jerusalem Envelope’, the term employed by the Israeli authorities for the wall around the greater Jerusalem area, including large sections of the adjoining Ramallah and Bethlehem districts. The concrete wall appears more formidable and oppressive, especially as it predominates in built-up urban areas. It should be borne in mind, however, that the more extensive ‘fence’ segment takes up more Palestinian land for its ‘footprint’ than the wall segments, and that it is equally effective – and destructive – in terms of its security and humanitarian impact.

It is disingenuous to describe such a formidable construction as a ‘fence’, a term which cannot convey the magnitude of a structure that carves a 670-kilometre path through the West Bank landscape. The undertaking is the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history: as one Israeli commentator observed, ‘even the national water carrier or the draining of the Hula swamps look like an exercise in sandcastles compared to this colossal project’.⁶ Nor does it appear temporary, for all the Israeli claims to the contrary: as the same commentator observed, ‘You have to be almost insane to think that somebody uprooted mountains, levelled hills and poured billions here in order to build some temporary security barrier “until the permanent borders are decided”.’ Its permanent nature is borne out by the cost, which doubled from an initial estimate of 8 million shekels ($US 1.75 million) per kilometre when the project started in 2002 to 15 million shekels per kilometre by February 2004.⁸ Sums of between $US1 and 3.4 billion have been cited for the overall cost. By 2005, the estimate was 5.6 billion shekels ($US 1.3 billion)⁹ and the high cost of construction was cited by the State of Israel in the High Court as a reason not to alter the route, ‘as it would be very expensive to move’.¹⁰ Although the term ‘barrier’ is often employed to describe the structure, this implies that the main purpose is the stated one of providing a security obstacle to prevent the infiltration of Palestinians into Israel. While accepting that it also fulfils this function, ‘wall’ more accurately conveys its true purpose, even if most of the structure does not constitute a wall in the strict sense of the word. However, as the International Court of Justice observed, the term wall ‘cannot be understood in a limited physical sense,’¹¹ and the term ‘wall’ best conveys the main purpose and significance of the project, which is to obliterate the internationally-recognised Green Line and to create a new border deeper within West Bank territory, in the process annexing major settlements, territory and water resources to Israel.

Israel’s policy since 1967 of colonising the West Bank through Jewish settlement and of attracting Palestinian day labourers into Israel militated against a reinstatement of a physical barrier along the old Green Line. The porous boundary between Israel and the West Bank survived the first intifada of the late 1980s, the suicide bombings in Israeli cities of the mid-1990s and the years of the Oslo Accords, although the number of Palestinian labourers commuting daily into Israel dropped sharply due to the imposition of a ‘closure policy’, which severely restricted Palestinian internal and external movement. This changed with the devastating wave of West Bank-originated suicide attacks in the second intifada. The apparent effectiveness of the Gaza fence in preventing suicide bombers from the Gaza Strip from infiltrating into Israel led to demands from the Israeli public for a similar structure along the West Bank.

However, the differences between the two remnants of ...