FENCING ISRAEL IN
by Meyrav Wurmser
New York Post
May 14, 2006

Barrier: The Seam of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Isabel Kershner
Palgrave Macmillan, 232 pages, $24.95

ISABEL Kershner, a senior editor at the Jerusalem Report, is a re porter. She is not a policy analyst, a government official or a military strategist, and her book on Israel's security fence reflects just that. It is a simple book and a compassionate one, full of colorful anecdotes, empathic vignettes and sad interviews with Palestinians adversely affected by the barrier currently under construction. Oh, there are a few Israelis in the book too.

The subject of this work is known as the "anti-terror obstacle" to some, the "apartheid wall" to others. That it aims to separate Israelis from the Palestinians is unquestionable, but its composition as a wall is not quite right, as Kershner acknowledges.

Five to six percent of the 600-kilometer long barrier will be concrete. The rest, when the project is completed, will be fence. The natural landscape will still be marred - something mourned by all involved - but Kershner's talk of "stolen sunsets" and "big prisons" is overstated.

Conceived by Israel during the second Intifada (2000-2005) in direct response to the infiltration of suicide bombers into its cities and villages, the barrier has proven to be an extraordinarily effective means of preventative security. It has also created a humanitarian morass, separating Palestinians from their lands, their schools and their families.

The demographic patterns of the Holy Land are complicated, and in many areas there are no clear boundaries between battling peoples. Any artificial barrier is bound to make artificial divisions, and it is no great surprise that there are many who are losing out in the process. Kershner's forays into isolated Palestinian towns, where unemployment is rampant and frustration is high, effectively tug at the heartstrings. The loss of property, of livelihoods and, most importantly, of lives is, tragically, all-too-common. The plain fact is that the many suffer greatly due to the sins of the few.

But Kershner doesn't do much to highlight this fact. To be sure, she includes references to murderous terrorist rampages (such as the Palestinian gunman who murdered Revital, Noam and Matan Ohion - a mother and her two little boys, at Kibbutz Metzer in 2002), and there's even a whole page on suicide bombing (with an accompanying picture). But the weight of the narrative falls very heavily on the side of Palestinians as victims, not aggressors.

Kershner is outraged at a 64-page report by the International Court of Justice on the illegality of the barrier that only once mentions the context of its construction. Yet, she demonstrates a similar case of context lessness. It is as if the barrier sprung from Israeli soil to make Palestinian lives miserable, when in fact it emerged from hard thinking about how to protect Israelis under near-daily assault.

If one is going to write a book about the effects of prison walls on prisoners, isn't it worth considering how the prisoners got there to begin with?

"Barrier" compellingly raises the moral complexities of slicing up a troubled land, but Kershner fails to give adequate treatment to the motivations for doing so.

Meyrav Wurmser is director of the Middle East Policy Center at the Hudson Institute.

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