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.
