At the northern edge of Jerusalem, on the main road to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, three towering concrete walls are converging around a rapidly built maze of cages, turnstiles and bomb-proof rooms.
When construction at Qalandiya is completed in the coming weeks, the remaining gaps in the 8m-high walls will close and those still permitted to travel between the two cities will be channelled through a warren of identity and security checks reminiscent of an international frontier.
The Israeli military built the crossing without fanfare over recent months, along with other similar posts along the length of the vast new ”security barrier” that is enveloping Jerusalem, while the world’s attention was focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.
But these de facto border posts are just one element in a web of construction evidently intended to redraw Israel’s borders deep inside the Palestinian territories and secure all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and to do it fast in order to put the whole issue beyond negotiation.
As foreign leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, praised Sharon for his ”courage” in pulling out of Gaza last month, Israel was accelerating construction of the West Bank barrier, expropriating more land in the West Bank than it was surrendering in Gaza, and building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements.
”It’s a trade-off: the Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders,” said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organisation Settlement Watch. ”They don’t know how long they’ve got. That’s why they’re building like maniacs.”
At the core of the strategy is the 672km West Bank barrier that many Israeli politicians regard as marking out a future border. Its route carves out large areas for expansion of the main Jewish settlements of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, and expropriates swaths of Palestinian land by separating it from its owners.
In parallel, new building on Jewish settlements during the first quarter of this year rose by 83% on the same period in 2004. About 4 000 homes are under construction in Israel’s West Bank colonies, with thousands more homes approved in the Ariel and Maale Adumim blocks that penetrate deep into the occupied territories. The total number of settlers has risen again this year with an estimated 14 000 moving to the West Bank, compared with 8 500 forced to leave Gaza.
Israel is also continuing to expand the amount of territory it intends to retain. In July alone, it seized more land in the West Bank than it surrendered in Gaza: it withdrew from about 49 square kilometres of territory while sealing off 60 square kilometres of the West Bank around Maale Adumim.
‘No need to talk’
Israel’s strategy is to ”strengthen the control over areas which will constitute an inseparable part of the state of Israel”, the prime minister said after the Gaza pull-out.
Last month, he told a meeting of his Likud party allies that it was important to expand the settlements without drawing the world’s attention.
”There’s no need to talk. We need to build, and we’re building without talking,” he said.
A few days later, one of the prime minister’s senior advisers, Eyal Arad, publicly advocated ”a strategy of unilaterally determining the permanent borders of the state of Israel”.
The greatest impact of recent Israeli actions has been in and around Jerusalem, as Israel stepped up construction of the wall along the most controversial part of its route.
”What we are seeing is an acceleration of construction of the barrier,” said David Shearer, head of the United Nations’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem.
”Because of the barrier, Jerusalem is being sealed off from the rest of the West Bank. Movement in Jerusalem will be with a magnetic card and a sophisticated system of gates. The access the Palestinians have enjoyed to their places of worship, to some of the best schools, to hospitals, is now going to be severely restricted.”
The concrete wall through Jerusalem carves out Arab enclaves in the city, restricts the growth of non-Jewish neighbourhoods and separates about 200 000 Palestinian residents from the occupied territories.
East Jerusalem will be further isolated from the rest of the West Bank by moves to link the city with Maale Adumim settlement using the barrier to mark out a boundary. The effect will be to surround the Arab areas of Jerusalem entirely with large Jewish neighbourhoods and to push Israel’s frontier almost halfway across the West Bank, virtually severing the north and south of the Palestinian territory at its narrowest point.
Explosive consequences
Organisations such as the International Crisis Group say it could have potentially explosive consequences.
”Current policies in and around the city will vastly complicate, and perhaps doom, future attempts to resolve the conflict by both preventing the establishment of a viable Palestinian capital in Arab East Jerusalem and obstructing the territorial contiguity of a Palestinian state,” it said in a recent report.
”The measures currently being implemented are at war with any viable two-state solution and will not bolster Israel’s safety; in fact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinian pragmatists, incorporating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on the Israeli side of the fence, and sowing the seeds of growing radicalisation.”
In recent years, both sides have generally accepted that a negotiated agreement would leave the main settlement blocks close to Jerusalem in Israeli hands. Last year, United States President George Bush wrote to Sharon, assuring him that Israel would not be expected to return to the 1967 borders ”in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres”.
But Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting legal cases over the barrier, said the government has worked to make those realities on the ground as extensive as possible while foreign governments shied away from criticism of Sharon for fear of jeopardising the Gaza pull-out.
”It’s clear what’s happening. It’s clear the wall is used to designate the border that Sharon thinks he can get with the Americans,” he said.
Sharon appears to be counting on continued silence from US and European capitals because he faces a general election next year that Washington would like to see him win over his main challenger on the far right, Binyamin Netanyahu.
The Palestinian leadership believes Sharon has little incentive to negotiate because the Palestinians will not agree to surrender their claim to East Jerusalem or the large areas of land he wants to annex.
But Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli Cabinet minister and a peace negotiator, said that a lack of pressure from Washington and other members of the Quartet overseeing the ”road map” peace plan leaves Sharon free to redraw Israel’s borders.
”The commitment to the road map is a big joke. It’s hot air all the time,” Beilin said. ”I’m very pessimistic. I see the big gap between the speeches — how high the road map is on the agenda and how foreign governments say they have to deal with it — and nothing is happening on the ground. Nothing. Sharon just does what he wants.” — Guardian Unlimited Â