Victor Davis Hanson: The security fence: how it can be "clarifying"
August 05, 2003

Here’s another article, back by popular demand, from Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson is a military historian and classicist at Cal State Fresno and a UC Santa Cruz graduate, who began publishing articles online after September 11th and has since made a name for himself because of his penetrating insight, lucid writing style and incomparable military and historical background knowledge. This article was written over a year ago, and Hanson, as a testament to his foresight, claims that the fence will in fact be effective, and that it will be opposed by Palestinians.

The security fence, as we’ve concluded, is a last-resort measure. Should this most recent initiative fail -- the hudna (Arabic for “strategic ceasefire”) of the terrorist groups, that is -- or even the larger road map itself, the fence will be there to prevent another flurry of suicide bombings and infiltrations that would be sure to follow. Everyone is “cautiously optimistic,” as they should be, but while keeping in mind that behind us lay Madrid conferences, Oslo processes, Mitchell and Tenet plans and Zinni missions, and a Saudi initiative...oh, right, and five decades of Arab rejectionism.

Hanson’s best point is how walls and fences can be clarifying: “they reveal exactly who wants to broach them and in what direction.” Just like the daily escape attempts from North Korea suggest that the happy proletariat would rather leave their workers’ paradise for a land of plunderous capitalist exploitation, the security fence in Israel will reveal who exactly wants to cross, and into which country.

Now the fence is being built, and who’s upset about it? Lo and behold, it’s the Palestinians! To nonsense-peddlers like spokesman Hassan Abdel Rahman who rant about “Isra-eli aggression! Isra-eli aggression!” the question can now be posed: so, why not build a fence, Mr. Rahman? That way, no wicked Israelis can go aggress anyone in the West Bank!

But they don’t want that, no sir, and the excuse that it’s all a land grab is specious: Arafat labeled it an “act of racism” and a “fascist apartheid measure” more than a year ago, when the route was hardly mapped out.
So then, why are they opposed to it? First, as the Safire article suggested, the PA derives it’s a) bargaining power, b) big-money checks from abroad, and c) legitimacy in the eyes of the Israelis and Americans for their capacity to stop terrorism. The fence will be devastatingly effective in doing this on its own, so less need for them.

Second, a fence would separate Palestinians from Israelis, and despite all the talk of Israeli racist colonialist imperialist apartheid of the most fascist sort, they want to be integrated with Israel. As if usually the case when you live next to a wealthy and productive neighbor, Palestinians want to come work in Israel like Mexicans want to work in the US, as well as have Israeli capital come build hospitals and factories, have Israeli tourists spend money there and Israeli businessmen seek local partners. Before Arafat started the Camp David war, a full third of the Palestinian economy depended on work in Israel.

In fact, World Bank research has revealed that in 1999, the living standard of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza strip was markedly higher than most Arab countries: Palestinian per capita income was twice that of Syria, four times that of Yemen, and 10% higher that neighboring Jordan, trailing only the oil-rich Gulf States and Lebanon. In 1999, Palestinians also had one of region’s highest life expectancies and the lowest female illiteracy rate.

And third, maybe, just maybe, Arafat and terrorists don’t want a wall because they might mean they can’t terrorize Israel anymore, whether as an attempt to win concessions or to destroy Israel.

Read Victor Davis Hanson's "Fortress Israel?" from National Review Online, June 25, 2002.