A Fence in the Sand: From the Israelis, a last, near-desperate measure.(fence to be built along West Bank in efforts to curb suicide bombings)(Brief Article)

The Israelis are building a fence between themselves and the Palestinians on the West Bank. It is a last and almost desperate measure in the war they are currently fighting against terror. Trying out the gamut of possible approaches, they have offered concessions, they have coaxed and cajoled; and alternatively they have sent in the tanks and threatened yet more extreme retaliation, for instance exiling Yasser Arafat and closing down the Palestinian Authority. Thanks to operational intelligence of a high order, they identify and capture something like four in every five potential suicide bombers before they set out. But the one who gets through is deadly. In the past 18 months, some 70 bombings have killed 547 Israelis, which in proportional terms is the equivalent of about 26,000 Americans, or over eight times the number of victims of September 11. Several thousand more have been maimed, blinded, and wounded. According to the Israeli Finance Ministry, the period has seen the loss of 75,000 jobs and output worth $5 billion. The Israelis may not be losing to terror but they are not winning either.

The fence is designed to run for 225 miles more or less along the old Green Line demarcating Israel from the West Bank. This is not an international border, but simply the line thrown up by the armistice after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. There will be watchtowers, trenches, patrol roads, electronic sensors, and the rest of it, gradually erected in the course of the coming twelve months in a local version of the Iron Curtain. Such a fence already surrounds the Gaza Strip, and it is effective. Israelis have been killed within Gaza, but to date no suicide bombers have managed to break out of that territory and attack Israel proper.

The West Bank is not a geographic entity so easily contained. The first stage of the fence is in the north, cutting off the town of Jenin, which affords close and quite camouflaged access over the hills towards Tel Aviv, Hadera, and Netanya, all cities that have been hard hit. No suicide bombers are known to have set off from Hebron in the southern part of the West Bank, and perhaps the fence need not extend to cover that. Even if interrupted in some areas, the fence might still serve to funnel would-be suicide bombers into paths where they could more predictably be intercepted.

Until the war of 1967, Jerusalem was divided by its imitation of the Berlin Wall, with a crossing-point at the Mandelbaum Gate, so called after the owner of what was then a crucially located house. But now about 200,000 Arab Jerusalemites have been incorporated into Israel, and the populations are too inextricable for the Mandelbaum Gate to be reinstated. Israeli spokesmen speak of some special six- or seven-mile section of reinforced concrete segments running within the city's limits, but this will necessarily incorporate Arabs on the Israeli side of the fence.

Critics of the whole concept of a fence are many, and vociferous. Disquietingly, the implication is that Jews are safe only among themselves, that, in other words, they are ...