The 'Fence': Failed predictions (12 Feb 04)
AMIRA HASS
Haaretz
"The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians," National Security Advisor Giora Eiland told a high-level diplomatic-security forum in Germany this week (Haaretz, February 9). Like Eiland, other Israeli representatives are now trying to convince the western countries and the United States in particular that the route of the separation fence is a human, localized and almost chance error that can be corrected to minimize the damage.
We have a new sentry to blame for what has gone wrong: the rather anonymous planners of the separation fence. Some sort of personal, individual limitation caused them to fail and not to predict the extent to which "the lives of innocent people would be affected" by the construction of the fortifications, which has destroyed and is destroying wells that are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees and other trees and is wiping out hundreds of greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested the savings of years.
One really does need special analytical powers to predict that caging thousands of people behind iron gates and stationing 19-year-old soldiers to open them, if they feel like it, two or three times a day - would have a deleterious affect on studies at schools and universities, sabotage medical treatment for cancer and kidney patients and split up families. After all, only especially creative minds could have guessed that it would be very hard for 260,000 people to maintain "a normal fabric of life" in the 81 enclaves of various sorts that the fence creates. Eighty-one enclaves that separate them from neighboring villages, from the provincial towns and from the rest of the West Bank, shutting them in behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and excavations and double fences and bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and out of the enclaves that are needed by garbage collectors and doctors, family members and teachers.
The truth is that what was hard to predict was the international shock at the fence. United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not pleased (and not only the United nations General Assembly) and Western diplomats are saying things in inner conclaves, especially when it turns out that development projects that had been funded by their countries have been destroyed under the fence's bulldozers.
Posted by P6 at February 13, 2004 02:06 AM
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Comments
The development projects -- along with the well, the olive trees, and the greenhouses -- were destroyed by suicide bombers. Innocent Palestinians are hurt? Innocent Israelis are being killed. If the Palestinians really want a state, they need to show that they can manage it by cleaning house.
Posted by Phelps at February 13, 2004 10:24 AMThis Israeli newspaper says the development projects were destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, Phelps.
Innocent Palestinians and innocentr Israelis are being killed, and you can't blame Paletinian decisions more than Israeli ones? Well, you can, but you'd be full of shit.
Posted by P6 at February 13, 2004 11:00 AMPhelps, the argument you put forward is old and tired. The Israeli war machine has raped the palestinians' rights, liberties, dignity, pride, respect, livelyhood and that rape is what gave birth to the suicide bomber. The suicide bomber exists because Israel is an occupying military power that kills and destroys and only knows violence because occupation is violent. Before the occupation there were no suicide bombers.
Posted by Wallah at February 14, 2004 09:45 PM