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Building wall { June 17 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Monday, June 17, 2002
Israel Formally Begins Building West Bank Fence
SALEM CHECKPOINT, West Bank (Reuters) - Bulldozers were clearing the way on Sunday to build a security fence along Israel's porous West Bank frontier, which Palestinians said effectively cancelled out peace deals with the Jewish state.
In the northern West Bank, Israel said bulldozers had been at work for several days near the army's Salem checkpoint, levelling the ground for the first section of the 110-km (70-mile) fence aimed at stopping Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Palestinian violence must end as a prerequisite for talks on Palestinian statehood, a matter U.S. President George W. Bush is considering.
Sharon reiterated his position on Sunday in his first cabinet meeting since returning from Washington talks with Bush, saying Israel would not return to the 1967 borders.
"The prime minister said that in his meetings in the United States he had made clear the following...regarding the matter of a 'Palestinian state', conditions are not ripe for that discussion," a statement said.
Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan al-Khatib called Sharon's remarks "another destructive position," indicating Israel had no intention of returning to negotiations, and contradicted the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict.
Israel's work on the security fence has angered Palestinians. Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said it effectively cancelled Israeli-Palestinian peace accords that established limited or full Palestinian control in some West Bank areas.
Speaking on Sky News, he accused Israel of seeking to divide Palestinian areas into cantons and "start a new apartheid system worse than what happened in South Africa."
Israel said the fence was not for demarcation.
"The aim is to separate only from a security point of view -- security separation, not political separation," Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told reporters.
Ben-Eliezer toured the site in what was billed by the government as the official launch of the $220 million project.
LAND CONFISCATED
The fence threatens the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinians who slip across the border to work illegally in Israel.
Some Palestinians in the area also said parts of their ancestral land had been confiscated so the fence could be built.
"I inherited the land from my father and grandfather decades ago, and every year we have our supply of olive oil and almonds and other crops," Salah Abu Zein, 74, said at his home in Rumanah village near the Salem checkpoint.
"My land is lost. This is an oppressive world that is immoral, where the strong consume the weak," he said.
Israeli rightwingers were also unhappy, fearing the fence would set a border and weaken their claims to occupied land.
But in a display of Israel's military reach, an armoured column rolled through Jenin -- just south of Salem junction -- and exchanged fire with local gunmen before withdrawing.
The army described the move as a "routine patrol," but many Palestinians view these forays as a preamble to Israel's reoccupation of Palestinian areas.
In a separate incident on Sunday, Israeli soldiers shot dead one of three Palestinians who tried to circumvent an army roadblock near Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.
Two of the Palestinians were arrested, and the third, carrying a large suspicious bag, was shot after ignoring warning shots and shouts, an army spokesman said.
As violence continued, Israel and the Palestinian Authority awaited word from Washington on a new path for Middle East peace, based on a two-state solution, which Bush is preparing after consultations with regional leaders.
A "POLITICAL FENCE"
Amos Yaron, director-general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, said the security barrier, expected to be an electrified chainlink fence with motion detectors and adjacent patrol roads, would cost $1 million per kilometer to build.
But cabinet minister Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, a right-wing champion of Jewish settlement on land Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, called the barrier "a political fence" which could set a de facto border.
The map inspected by Ben-Eliezer at the construction site showed the fence as a red line abutting the so-called Green Line, or pre-1967 border. Yaron denied there was any linkage, saying the fence would be part of a five to 15 km (three to nine mile) wide "seam" straddling the frontier.
"It will provide a defensive answer to the...infiltration of terrorists from Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) into communities in Israel," he told Israel Radio.
Some 200,000 Jewish settlers living inside the West Bank who claim a biblical right to the territory will be little affected.
The fence is part of a plan for some 350 km (210 miles) in buffer zones, barricades, surveillance equipment and obstacle courses to divide Israel from the West Bank after the worst wave of Palestinian bombings the country has ever experienced.
The overall plan would eventually separate the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of an independent state.
Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet security service, recently said militants in the Gaza Strip, where a fence is in place, had not succeeded in carrying out suicide bombings in Israel.
Hamas official Mahmoud a-Zahar vowed the fence would not stop the group's fighters in the West Bank reaching Israel.
At least 1,398 Palestinians and 511 Israelis have been killed since a Palestinian uprising for independence began after peace talks stalled.
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