The Security Charade
The Sleight-of-Hand of Israel’s Separation Wall
The Wall, is “discontinuous line of fences, ditches, concrete walls and high-tech sensors” that separates the West Bank from Israel. Referred to as the separation fence by the Israeli public, the seam-line obstacle by the Israeli government, and the Appartheid Wall by Palestinians and Israelis who oppose it, its ostensible purpose is to to protect innocent Israelis from their dangerous neighbors in West Bank.
Ask the average Israeli about The Wall and they will quickly tell you, “Once we put up the wall, the suicide attacks stopped.” And for most, this simple correlation is enough to justify its existence.
The problem is, of course, that the wall had nothing to do with this.
Part I — Security Theater
As anyone who has ever conducted research knows, correlation does not equal causation. In the case of the wall, there are several other factors that are responsible for the decline in violence is easily demonstrable.
First, the wall could not possibly have stopped terrorist bombers. It is currently only 60% complete and was only about 20% complete when significant decline in bombings occurred. Today 40% of the planned barrier is as yet un-built. The seams between constructed portions are up to 30km wide in some places. The idea that terrorists motivated and willing enough to build kilometer long tunnels under the Israeli border from Gaza but could not easily find their way across the porous borders along the West Bank is absurd on its face. Freelance journalist Ben White noted that, “the security fence is no longer mentioned as the major factor in preventing suicide bombings, mainly because the terrorists have found ways to bypass it.”
The IDF itself has assessed that about 6,000 Palestinians illegally cross the border to work in Israel each month. In 2007, a year where only one suicide bombing occurred, the Israeli Border Guard was still arresting approximately 1,200 Palestinians who had crossed the border for work each week.
These statistics are highlighted by a story recounted to the author, in which an American woman was visiting an Israeli friend who lived inside Israel, near the wall. The American woman was parked by the wall on the phone with her friend confirming directions and was being watched suspiciously by a solitary man a few meters ahead of her car. As soon as she hung up her phone, the man placed a call on his own phone and approximately 30 Palestinians dropped from the top of the wall and they, along with the man who was clearly a lookout, ran off into Israel. The woman noticed an obvious hole in the barbed wire that topped the wall and a well-used knotted rope hanging down from the gap. She also noted that an Israeli patrol had literally just passed her a few minutes before and must have been aware of the obvious breach of the wall.
There are, by the IDF’s own admission, many areas of the wall like this.
In September 2007, the Israeli Channel 2 news concluded, “The wall, siege, security cordon, police patrols and border guards have not prevented tens of thousands of [Palestinian] workers from reaching Tel Aviv every month.” And yet there was only one suicide bombing that year.
Even Israelis that advocate for the wall understand the ridiculousness of the idea that it provides any security. Ilan Tsi’on, a co-founder of ‘A Fence for Life’, a pro-Separation Wall non-government organization has stated that, “There’s no problem crossing the gaps in the fence and tens of thousands of illegal workers cross it back and forth every day, and there should be no problem getting suicide bombers through with them…So why don’t they? Because that’s the Palestinians’ choice…our security is really an illusion.”
This idea was echoed by Israel’s internal security agency, Shabak, which has acknowledged that the real reason for the drop in attacks was the truce with Palestinians.
Nowhere is there more damning testimony of the faulty idea of the security the wall provides than the ‘Audit Report on the Seam Area’, published by the Israel State Comptroller’s Office, which found that, “IDF documents indicate that most of the suicide terrorists and the car bombs crossed the seam area into Israel through the checkpoints, where they underwent faulty and even shoddy checks.”
At a cost to date of over $2.6 billion and an annual cost of $260 million, if the wall’s purpose was to provide security then its failure is negligence at best and fraud more realistically.
But…the wall is very cost-effective in accomplishing its true purposes.
Despite doing nothing to protect the citizens of Israel, the wall provides the comforting illusion of safety. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls this propensity to spend money on the appearance of safety versus actual safety Security Theater, and he notes that it is often much cheaper to provide the feeling of security rather than actual security. This then is the wall — a reminder to all Israelis that their paternal government is protecting them…even if the physical presence of the wall and the consequences of it only engenders more hatred from those being walled off, even if the wall contributes to making the country less safe in actuality.
Part II — The Veil of Ignorance
If the first purpose of the wall is to placate, to calm, to comfort Israeli citizens then the second purpose of the wall is to maintain fear, to threaten them. While creating a feeling of safety internally, the wall creates a feeling of danger externally. If a wall must be constructed, it must be because what is on the other side is dangerous. This is emphasized at any access points that cross the border, where foreboding signs warn citizens of this danger that they are being protected from. The message is simple: The enemy is at the gates and if not for their concrete protector Israeli society would be overrun.
The wall serves as a physical reminder of who is the “in group” and who is the “out group” — who is friend and who is foe. By restricting movement and communication the wall also precludes challenges to its representation as a bulwark against destruction. It is much easier to dislike, to fear, to hate human beings whom one has never met, interacted with, or lived alongside. On both sides of the wall, people are raised and indoctrinated with a narrative that dehumanizes those on the other side to the extent that they are thought of as dangerous animals roaming outside the perimeter. This attitude can be easily witnessed — simply ask the average young Israeli in Tel Aviv about Jerusalem, a city inside the wall yet split between Arabs and Jews. He or she will will describe it as if it were Baghdad.
For most Israelis living in areas without a significant Arab popluation, the separation provided by the wall precludes any honest empathy and understanding. The segregation prevents the average Israeli from seeing the absurdity of the popular narrative that, “If the Arabs put down their guns there would be no more fighting. If the Israelis put down theirs there would be no more Israel.” Likewise, this hindrance to understanding and empathy also affects the Palestinians, doing nothing to change their negative perceptions of Israelis.
The wall reinforces the idea of a people under siege and the government and its associated security apparatus as their only savior. It leverages fear to control the population and it enables the implementation of policies that negatively affect Palestinians, and this in turn perpetuate hostility. This then I cited incidents which seem to validate the need for the wall, in a self-sustaining cycle.
Part II I—
The primary policy facilitated by the wall is, of course, its use as a tool of Israeli expansion. As discussed previously, Israel doesn’t use the wall to keep people out — rather it uses it to close land in. The construction of the wall or the fractal sub-components of it around settlements, is the modern equivalent of the colonial ritual of planting a flag.
This is precisely why the wall 85% of the wall’s planned route runs not along the Green Line, the official division between Israel and the West Bank, but encroaches continuously within the West Bank itself.
The wall was never actually a defensive barrier, it is an offensive one. In the finest Roman tradition, it is a wall of circumvallation. Despite how it is advertised, it is not oriented inward but outward — it exists to surround and isolate the population of the West Bank. The wall frequently reroutes, expands and extends itself into the West Bank, reaching out to “protect” Israeli settlements, be they legal or otherwise. These settlements themselves have emerged between Palestinian population centers in order to divide and isolate them from each other, fulfilling the intent of Moshe Dayan’s settlement plan, which called for “‘fists of Jewish settlements’ that would ‘dismember [Palestinian] territorial continuity.’”
As the wall extends itself and surrounds not only settlements but access to them, it stretches like tentacles further into Palestinian areas, occupying more and more of the West Bank while at the same time further dividing Palestinian areas from each other.
Of course, none of this is new. In 2005 a report by BIMKOM and B’TSELEM concluded that, “Although Israel’s principal contention has been that the barrier is intended to prevent the entry of terrorists into Israel, one of the main considerations in determining the route of several sections of the barrier has been the desire to perpetuate the settlements and enable the implementation of existing expansion plans.”
These extensions and de facto annexation of land are obviously illegal under international law. Even Israel’s own Supreme Court has found portions of the wall illegal, though not the wall in concept itself. These legal challenges to the wall are the primary obstacle to construction. But Israel, supported by the United States, has avoided removing any part of the wall, and is still maintaining and attempting to expand it.
And so, in a backwards way, the Wall turns out to be about security after all — a fractured, isolated, shrinking West Bank being preferably to having to occupy the territory of a hostile population.
But as a tool to defend against terrorism, it is most likely counter-productive. It’s encroachments take Palestinian land, forcibly relocate populations and cause the illuminate a policy to slowly being constrict, isolate, and envelope or absorb Palestinian areas. As Shakespeare noted, “The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on…” The Wall and the policy it reflects probably do far more to cause attacks in Israel than they could ever do to prevent them. The wall is therefore not just a security illusion, it is a security liability. But this risk is one Israel is willing to accept in order to advance its settlement strategy, and as such it is worth every penny to the powers that are currently in control in their slow, deliberate re-conquest of land they have always, and will always, view as part of Israel.
-FD
