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A concrete chasm

QALQILYA, West Bank - For years, Shraim Automotive Parts enjoyed a thriving business in this Palestinian city of 40,000. Among its many customers were residents of nearby Jewish settlements, drawn by cheaper prices than they could get in Israel.

In fact, business was so good that by 1998 owner Nabil Shraim could afford to build his dream house - a two-story garden villa with a sweeping view of "all of Israel" and, on a clear day, the Mediterranean sparkling in the distance.

But nine months ago, bulldozers suddenly appeared on the street outside. Then came construction crews, erecting a massive barricade just a hundred feet from the Shraims' front door.

Now when Nuhaylah Shraim sits on her veranda in late afternoon, she sees not a magnificent sunset but a solid wall of concrete 25 feet high.

"I always like this time of day," she says, "but when you open the gate and see this concrete wall it's very depressing."

It has also been disastrous for the auto parts store and hundreds of other businesses in Qalqilya. Today the city is dying economically, shut off from the outside world by concrete barriers and electronic fences erected by Israel to keep suicide bombers from leaving the West Bank.

The only ways in and out of Qalqilya are through two gates, open for brief periods so farmers can reach their fields, and an Israeli checkpoint at the only road into town. Residents have to pass on foot; They are forbidden to drive their cars in or out of the city.

"It looks like a prison," says Abdul Latif, a civil engineer. "People are caged on all sides."

Expected to cost at least $1-billion, Israel's "separation" fence has been hugely controversial since work began in mid 2002. And the furor only increased last weekend after a young Palestinian woman managed to get past the barricade and blow up herself and 19 others in a popular Haifa restaurant.

The attack "exposed the flaws of the fence, even where its construction has been completed," columnist Amos Harel wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz. "With professional planning and the help of an Israeli Arab waiting on the western side, the way to a suicide bombing in Israel is still open."

The Israel Defense Forces, which mans the fence, says it is still unclear whether the bomber breached the fence or simply slipped unnoticed through an open gate. But while conceding no security measure can be "100 percent effective," the IDF says the completed fence will be a valuable deterrent.

"Part of the reason we believe in the fence's potential is because of the situation in Gaza," says Capt. Jacob Dallal.

"There's a fence there and, thank God, there have been no terror attacks by people trying to infiltrate out into Israel or across the fence. The thing that's stopping them isn't motivation, it's the fence."

The first stage of the new separation fence, completed this summer, runs 87 miles from the northern part of the West Bank to a point south of Qalqilya, not far from Israel's crowded coastal cities. An additional 12 miles of fence is under construction around Jerusalem.

Eventually the fence is to stretch almost 400 miles and surround the heart of the West Bank, ensuring Israel's total control over Palestinian movement.

Even some Palestinians say they wouldn't object to a fence built along the Green Line, the boundary between Israeli and Arab land before the 1967 Mideast War. But instead of following the line, the fence in places veers miles into the West Bank, slicing through Palestinian towns and cutting off hundreds of farmers from their groves and vegetable fields.

Israel's goal, Palestinians charge, is to grab the West Bank's richest farmland and water resources, and make it impossible for Palestinians to ever have a viable state of their own.

"If Israel needs to do something for security, why not do it on the '67 border?" asks Fayez Salem, mayor of the village of Jayyous. "It would be no problem because we know this area is for Israel and this area is for us.

"Okay, so why don't they do it? It's because they want to steal our land."

The director of the fence project acknowledges that 85 percent of the land taken so far came from Palestinians and just 15 percent from Jewish communities. The government, though, insists that the Palestinian land is being used only for "military needs" until the end of 2005 and that the owners retain title.

But "over the decades, Palestinian land "temporarily' seized by Israel has been used to build permanent structures, including settlements and roads, and has never been returned to its owners," says the human rights group Amnesty International.

The fence also is causing tension between Israel and Washington, which fears it will complicate efforts to negotiate a permanent border. "It's difficult to build confidence between Israelis and Palestinians with a fence snaking through the West Bank," President Bush said.

The administration is particularly concerned about the recent decision to extend the fence even farther into the West Bank around several Jewish settlements, including Ariel, a city of 20,000. Thus far, however, Washington is holding off on a threat to reduce loan guarantees to Israel if the fence cuts too deeply into Palestinian territory.

Given the Haifa attack, even many Israelis doubt the fence will stop a determined terrorist. And they too are angry at the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, though the reasons vary.

Those who claim Israel has a historic right to the entire West Bank - the Biblical land of Judea and Samaria - fear that many Jewish settlements will end up on the Palestinian side of the fence where it will be harder to protect them.

"And so we see that in building the fence which supposedly is not a border, the government is building Israel's border. And 200,000 Israelis live on the other side of the border," wrote Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post.

Liberals, on the other hand, charge that Sharon is using the fence as a way to strengthen Israel's grip over land it occupied in the '67 war.

"Eighteen months from now, we will be awakening to an entirely different reality," Yigal Bronner, a Tel Aviv University professor, said in Haaretz. "Ours will be a brutal land of pens stretching between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that will make South African apartheid pale. The outcome is too terrible even to imagine."

In Abu Dis, an Arab suburb of Jerusalem, a temporary fence blocks what used to be the main highway to Jordan. Yousif Al-Khatib, who owns a gas station on the Israeli side, has to climb over the fence to get to his house on the Arab side.

In Jayyous, where the fence separates dozens of farmers from their land, Sharif Omar never knows when Israeli soldiers will open the gate and let him through. So Omar and other farmers sleep in their fields.

But perhaps no place has been as drastically affected as the city of Qalqilya.

Until a few years ago, residents had good relations with their Jewish neighbors in Kfar Sava and other settlements. Every weekend, hundreds of Jews came to shop in Qalqilya's bargain-priced stores and dine on hummus and other Arab dishes in the city's many restaurants.

"On Saturdays, you'd sometimes see more Jews in the market than Palestinians," says Latif, the engineer.

But when the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, began in 2000, Qalqilya's proximity to the settlements and Israel made it a convenient launch pad for terrorists. In the past two years, six suicide bombers left from Qalqilya and killed a dozen Israelis.

Last fall, work began on the fence that now surrounds the city. For most of its length, the fence is just that - a wire fence, albeit heavily fortified with watch towers and electronic eyes.

In a few places, like outside the Shraims' villa, the barrier is a towering concrete wall. That is to keep snipers from firing at cars on nearby Highway 6, the new trans-Israel toll road.

But fence or wall, the separation barrier is strangling the city, residents say.

Fifteen years ago, Jalal Ahmad Zid invested $1-million to start what would become the biggest chicken farm in the West Bank. Each day, his hens laid thousands of eggs, most of which went to supermarkets in Israel.

But this summer, Zid found himself cut off from his hen houses by a 10-foot barbed-wire fence with this warning:

"MORTAL DANGER - MILITARY ZONE. Any person who damages the fence endangers his life."

The only way Zid could get to his hens was through a gate that Israeli soldiers were to open at specific times - early morning, noon and evening. But the actual openings varied constantly, Zid says, forcing farmers to sometimes wait for hours.

Last month, after a pair of suicide bombings killed 15 people, Israel closed the gate for three days. While Zid was stuck on the other side of the fence, the watering system in the hen houses failed and 8,000 birds died of thirst. Some 18,000 eggs spoiled and had to be destroyed.

Since then, the Israel Defense Forces has set a new schedule. But soldiers still don't open the gates when they're supposed to, Zid says: "This is a false timetable, it has nothing to do with reality."

Dallal, the IDF spokesman, says soldiers are "trying to meet the needs" of local residents.

But, he acknowledged, the gate system "obviously needs some fine-tuning."

Since the fence went up, the Israeli egg broker who used to buy from Zid has stopped doing business with him because it's so hard to get to Qalqilya. Israel now imports eggs from Turkey and Holland, and Zid's sales have dropped 30 percent.

And if Qalqilya continues in a virtual lock-down state, the chicken farm will close and 50 people will be out of work, he says.

By shutting off Qalqilya, one of the region's biggest cities, the fence also affects many smaller Palestinian villages whose residents work in the city, teach in its schools or rely on its hospital.

Habla, with 5,000 people, is less than a half mile south of Qalqilya as the crow flies. Because of the fence, the only way to reach Qalqilya now is by a roundabout, 19-mile journey.

If the fence proceeds as planned, the West Bank will soon be split into numerous other cantons - hardly the contiguous state sought by Palestinians.

"Most of the productive land and water resources will be outside those areas where people are living," Latif says. "What is left then for the future development of these communities? For there to be a sustainable peace, there must be a strong Palestinian state - not strong with tanks or armies - but a strong economy and a strong society to ensure stability with your neighbor.

"If Israel insists on building a wall with force and we have no choice, then build it on the 1967 border. But for the future, building barriers is not a solution between neighbors."

Last month, Kibbutz Metzer should have held a gala celebration of its 50th anniversary. Politicians, speeches, singing and dancing - a joyous salute to a close-knit community of Jews.

But a year of mourning is not yet up.

On Nov. 10, a Palestinian from the West Bank slipped into the kibbutz shortly before midnight and killed five people, including Revital Ohion and her two little boys. A divorced schoolteacher, Ohion had recently moved to the kibbutz, thinking it would be a safe place to raise her children.

The gunman disappeared into the night, leaving survivors to wonder: How could this have happened here?

"We are a community that invested a lot of effort in good relations with our Arab neighbors," says Dov Avital, who took over as general secretary after his predecessor died in the attack. "It was very shocking because we are in favor of coexistence. But we realized that those who are against any kind of dialogue or coexistence will attack any symbol of that."

If any Israelis have reason to support the separation fence, it is those in Kibbutz Metzer. The community of 500 sits next to the Green Line - metzer means border in Hebrew - and thousands of Palestinians live within sight.

Yet even here, feelings about the fence are ambivalent.

"Maybe we will be safe for now," says Shlomit Glasser, a single mother raising a year-old daughter. "But for the future, I don't know."

Yoav Ben Naphtali manages a kibbutz factory that makes irrigation pipes. A parachutist in the '67 war, he says he fought to defend Israel, not to take land from the Palestinians.

"I think what we are doing in the occupied territories is a terrible thing. It's terrible to think Jewish people are building ghettos for human beings."

Since its founding as a farming commune in 1953, just five years after Israel became a state, the kibbutz has been close to its Palestinian and Israeli-Arab neighbors. In 1967, when the men of the kibbutz went off to fight, Arabs from nearby towns harvested the crops. Jews and Arabs held soccer matches, and Arab mothers brought their children to the kibbutz to play.

And both Jews and Arabs honored the Green Line. Farmers from Kibbutz Metzer and the Palestinian village of Qafin marked the boundary with stones and were careful "not to take a meter of the other's land," Avital says.

When plans for the fence were announced, the kibbutz and the village agreed to give up equal amounts of land along the Green Line. So Avital and others were dismayed to find the fence cutting well into Palestinian territory.

They were also dismayed that several Palestinian villages had wound up on the Israeli side of the fence - a problem that has occurred in several other places.

"After they built the fence, somebody discovered that they had put 10,000 or 15,000 Palestinians inside the fence, and if even one is a terrorist you can imagine what could happen," Avital says. "So now they're building a second fence along the Green Line so basically they'll be engulfed by barbed wire. You can call it a concentration camp or what you want because nobody cares about this population. It's a big mess."

Avital thinks the main separation fence could serve two useful purposes, neither of which planners apparently intended. By isolating the Palestinians, it would give them a chance to develop their society without meddling from the outside, he says.

Even more important, the fence might give Israelis enough sense of security to "think rationally" about dismantling Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"The problem is not the fence, the problem is the settlements - once you remove those, everything will fall into place very easily. As long as they're there, there's no chance of peace. But it is impossible to speak to the Israeli people about this when they are terrified to get on a bus or go to a market. It is impossible to be rational when you are terrified."

Avital, father of three, acknowledges that some kibbutz members sleep better knowing the separation fence is in place. Not him - he lies awake thinking about his Palestinian neighbors cut off from their schools, their fields, their jobs.

"If they can't feed their children, these are the conditions to create more terrorism. If they cannot go through the fence, it will be like Gaza where they are firing over the fence - and we are the closest target."

- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com