RE: [Futurework] Sharon's Wall

[Karen Watters Cole]

Except gated real estate communities in the West are not reinforced by the IDF and contingent upon foreign investment subsidies.  I thought they made the point that this is not an ideal solution for Israel, much less Palestine.  The investment may be wasted if a moderate regime in Jordan does not exist, if the monarchy is replaced.  The risk factors do not bode well for a progressive stabilization in the Middle East, especially if the people living there come to believe it will make them safer and it does not. Last year I argued for a fence, a wall, to temporarily block the kind of violence we have continued to witness.  It must never be seen as a permanent solution to this problem.  It saddens me that like the Iron curtain wall it must be contingent upon a whole peoples not traveling or trading commerce with each other.  Remember it was Reagan who said to Gorby, take down this wall.  Now we are assisting in raising another one because military solutions have failed.  It is my hope this will defuse the tinderbox there but it is nothing to celebrate.   Shalom. KWC   AC wrote: Sounds like a "gated community"....fashionable these days in many parts of the US.   THE STRATFOR WEEKLY:  4 August 2003 at Stratfor.com by Dr. George Friedman The Wall of Sharon   Summary: Seeking to end the risk of Palestinian attacks, Israel is building a barrier to separate Palestinians and Israelis. For the wall to work, it must be more like an iron curtain than the U.S.-Mexican border. It must be relatively impermeable: If there are significant crossing points, militants will exploit them. Therefore, the only meaningful strategy is to isolate Israelis and Palestinians. That would lead to a Palestinian dependency on Jordan that might, paradoxically, topple the Hashemite regime in Amman. If that happens, Israel will have solved a painful nuisance by creating the potential for a strategic nightmare.   Analysis: Israel, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is in the process of building a wall that ultimately will separate Israelis and Palestinians along a line roughly -- but not at all precisely -- identical to the cease-fire lines that held from 1948 until 1967. The wall is far from complete, but the logic for it is self-evident: It represents Israel's attempt to impose a reality that will both satisfy the Jewish state's fundamental security needs and the minimal political demands of the Palestinians without requiring Palestinian agreement or acquiescence. It is an extraordinary attempt at applied geopolitics. The question is whether it will work.   … Hence, the fence. It should be noted that the creation of a fixed barrier violates all Israeli military thinking. The state's military doctrine is built around the concept of mobile warfare. Israel's concern is with having sufficient strategic depth to engage an enemy attack and destroy it, rather than depending on a fixed barrier. From a purely military standpoint, Israel would view this barrier as an accident waiting to happen. The view of barriers (such as the Suez Canal) is that they can all be breached using appropriate, massed military force.   This is the critical point. From the Israeli standpoint, the wall is not a military solution. It is not a Maginot Line designed to protect against enemy main force; it is designed to achieve a very particular, very limited and very important paramilitary goal. It is designed to stop the infiltration of Palestinian paramilitaries into Israel without requiring either the direct occupation of Palestinian territory -- something that has not worked anyway -- nor precluding the creation of a Palestinian state. It is not the Maginot Line, it is an Iron Curtain. And this is where the conceptual problems start to crop up.   … For the Israeli security model to work, economic relations between Israel and Palestine will have to be ruptured. The idea of controlled movement of large numbers of workers, trucks and so on across the border is incompatible with the idea of the fence as a security barrier. Once movement is permitted, movement is permitted. Along with that movement will come guerrillas, weapons and whatever anyone wants to send across. You cannot be a little bit pregnant on this: Either Israel seals its frontier, or the fence is a waste of steel and manpower. If the wall is not continual and impermeable, it may as well not be there.   The geopolitical idea underlying the fence is that that it will not be permeable. If this goal is achieved, regardless of where the final line of the fence will be, then economic and social relations between Israel and Palestine will cease to exist except through third-party transit. Forgetting the question of Jerusalem -- for if Jerusalem is an open city, the fence may as well not be built -- this poses a huge strategic challenge.   Palestinians historically have depended on Israel economically. If Israel closes off its frontiers, the only contiguous economic relationship will be with Jordan. In effect, Palestine would become a Jordanian dependency. However, it will not be clear over time which is the dog and which is the tail. Jordan already has a large Palestinian population that has, in the past, threatened the survival of the Hashemite Bedouin regime. By sealing off Palestinian and Israeli territories, the Israelis would slam Palestine and Jordan together. Over the not-so-long term, this could mean the end of Hashemite Jordan and the creation of a single Palestinian state on both sides of the Jordan River.