Israel is erecting a 345-kilometre fence separating itself and the West Bank in the hope that it will offer security against attacks by Palestinians. David Horovitz writes from Jerusalem
Last Sunday, in the presence of the Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Israel formally announced the start of work on a high-tech security fence intended to protect sovereign Israeli territory from the relentless influx of Palestinian suicide-bombers.
Its architects in the Israeli military establishment would like to think that the barrier is impenetrable.
Costing about a million dollars per kilometre, it comprises electrified metal fencing, trenches, patrol roads and motion sensors, backed up by cameras, radar and unmanned observation drones.
In these days of profound crisis - with close to 70 Israelis killed by Palestinian assailants this month alone, and the retaliating Israeli army again decamped deep inside Palestinian cities, imposing curfews and making mass arrests - it sounds, superficially, like a panacea: enforced separation between two warring peoples.
What its planners evidently had not anticipated, however, was the vulnerability of those constructing it. Three days after the inauguration ceremony, the bulldozers screeched to a halt and the workers were forced to take refuge in their on-site caravans after a bomb was detonated alongside them and gunshots were fired at them from inside the West Bank.
Improved security precautions for the workers may well prevent a recurrence of that particular kind of attack, but the incident underlines the numerous deeper flaws in this latest Israeli preventative effort.
While defence ministry officials overseeing its construction champion it as a veritable anti-terror guarantee, Israeli rightists are condemning it as a capitulation which will leave 200,000 Jewish settlers abandoned in the West Bank.
Israeli leftists and the Palestinian leadership are condemning it because it will encompass chunks of occupied territory, and the Israeli government has actually yet to make up its mind over where precisely it will run.
Meanwhile, for outside critics - including First Lady Laura Bush, in an unguarded moment last week - the notion of building a massive new barrier is the antithesis of urgently-needed progress towards reconciliation.
"I don't think a fence will be some long-lasting sign of peace," she remarked. "Right now, there's a huge barrier of hate and distrust between all the parties in the Middle East. I hope they can start to at least tear that barrier down."
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, has taken great pains to stress that the fence, ultimately intended to run along the entire 345-kilometre perimeter of the West Bank, should not be seen as a border or a "political line".
It's easy to understand why. Mr Sharon is one of the figureheads of the settlement movement, which has seen some 200,000 Israelis encouraged to build homes in the West Bank in the years since that territory was captured in the 1967 war. His hardline political constituency would desert him if he were deemed to be abandoning them to the Palestinians on the far side of a new defensive barrier.
To emphasise that this is no de facto acknowledgment of the Israel-West Bank border, Mr Sharon this week toured along part of the intended route of the fence, stopping at the settlement of Alfei Menashe, literally a three-minute drive into the West Bank, south of the Palestinian city of Qalkilya.
Asked by a plainly perturbed, finger-pointing resident whether the barrier would sever the settlement from Israel or encompass it, Mr Sharon was all reassurance.
The fence, he pledged, would run "to the east".
Mr Sharon, however, did not tour settlements deeper inside the West Bank because he would not have been able to issue similar assurances.
Informally, the planners indicate that the barrier will be constructed along a "seam" a few miles wide, precisely tracing the old Israel-West Bank border in some areas but winding eastwards into the occupied territory in others, such as the detour around Alfei Menashe. That leaves Mr Sharon pleasing hardly anyone. Not those settlers whose homes fall outside the fence. And not the Palestinians, who are describing the barrier as a new Israeli land-grab, chewing up more of the territory on which they seek to declare independent statehood.
The confusion and uncertainty over the route of the barrier is greatest when it comes to Jerusalem. After a week which saw 26 Israelis killed in the city in two Palestinian suicide-bombings on successive days, Jewish Jerusalemites are clamouring ever more loudly for protection. But while the Israeli defence establishment claims that construction work is imminent, officials privately acknowledge that there is no agreement on where to send the bulldozers.
While Israel does not claim sovereignty in the West Bank, it does throughout Jerusalem, and Mr Sharon is adamant that the city "will never again be divided". That mindset requires that the barrier be built to the east of the city, a move which would infuriate Palestinians, who seek to site their capital in east Jerusalem, and much of the international community.
It would also leave some 200,000 Palestinians on the "safe" side of the fence - in Arab neighbourhoods from which bombers and gunmen have emerged - thus undermining the whole enterprise.
But building the barrier through the heart of the city, where the border ran until 1967, would be anathema to Mr Sharon, and perhaps most Israelis, since it would sever Israel from the Western Wall and the Temple Mount and leave close to 200,000 Jewish Jerusalemites in neighbourhoods constructed over the past 35 years on the "wrong" side.
The fence idea is fairly popular in Israel, where a terrorised populace welcomes any idea that appears to offer the prospect of greater security.
Indeed, it is probably a measure of the sense of despair that few Israeli commentators have dwelt much on the project's glaring deficiencies.
But beyond Palestinian and other Arab leaders, the loudest criticisms of the barrier have come from Israel's staunchest allies in the US.
"We remind the Israelis that offering hope to Palestinians - an end to the barriers - is an important part of achieving security and peace," said a State Department spokesman this week.
Neither Mrs Bush nor that State Department spokesman evidently recognised the irony in their criticisms. For only the US has the power and the leverage to first chart a path and then push Palestinians and Israelis back towards the negotiation table, and thus to offer the prospect of, one day, obviating the need for recourse to electrified barriers.
Instead of doing that, as the bombers struck, the army deployed and the fence-planners bent over their maps, Mr Bush this week shelved a planned landmark address on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, declaring that this was not the "appropriate time" for such an initiative.