Can bad fences make good neighbours?
Israel's separation wall is being used to annex territory

By: Neve Gordon, Jerusalem.

Although Mazmuriah is located less than 20 minutes' drive from my Jerusalem apartment, all roads connecting the small village to the city have been blocked off. Using roundabout roads that wind across the hilly terrain of the southern Jerusalem municipal border, we took more than an hour to reach the village. The Palestinian residents invited us. They wanted to tell Israeli peace activists about their imminent expulsion, about their fear of being forced to move from their ancestral land. They wanted to tell us about the bad fence.

But first some background. After the 1967 war, Israel annexed some 70sq km of land to the municipal boundaries of West Jerusalem, imposing Israeli law on this area. These annexed territories included not only the part of Jerusalem that had been under Jordanian rule but also an additional 64sq km, most of which had belonged to 28 villages in the West Bank.

Unlike most of the inhabitants of the annexed villages, who were subsequently registered by the Israeli civil administration as Israeli residents (as opposed to citizens), the inhabitants of Mazmuriah were given West Bank identity cards. This created a juridical situation straight out of Kafka. The Mazmuriah residents and their houses belong to different legal and administrative systems: the houses and land are part of the Jerusalem municipal system, while the inhabitants are residents of the West Bank and therefore subjected to Israeli military rule.

Using its juridical control of the land, in 1992 Israel classified the area in which the village is located as "green land" - land that cannot be built on and is basically a nature reserve. The idea was to strangle the local population, prohibiting them from constructing any new houses.

Simultaneously the Jerusalem municipality also refused to provide basic services to the village such as extending water and sewage lines. Later, after the eruption of the second intifada, all roads between the village and Jerusalem were closed off, thus forcing the residents to become dependent on the West Bank for their livelihood and their children's education.

What appeared to be a "legal anomaly" slowly became the grim reality of everyday life. Although they live on land annexed by Israel, for all practical purposes the Palestinian residents themselves do not belong to Jerusalem; they are West Bankers. The only "defect" in this grand plan is that they still reside in the annexed area. It is this so-called defect that Israel now intends to fix.

Accompanied by border policemen, a coordinator for the Israeli housing ministry, defence ministry, and Jerusalem municipality recently showed the residents a map of where the separation fence will pass. The fence, the residents learned, would surround the village on its southern side and thus separate it from the West Bank. Even if the residents are allowed to stay, their water supplies will be cut off, they will not be able to reach work and their children will be unable to go to school. To make things clear, however, the Israeli official notified the Palestinian residents that, because of the village's proximity to the planned separation fence, they would have to move.

Israel's goal, it appears, is to expropriate the land "uninhabited". It is highly unlikely, however, that the villagers will actually be forced out of their homes. A more intricate strategy will be employed.

Creating a physical barrier between the village and the West Bank and not allowing the inhabitants any contact with either the Palestinian Authority or the Jerusalem Municipality will undermine their existence. Ultimately they will have to leave the village of "their own accord".

This scheme of expelling a whole population from their land is in blatant violation of basic rights as well as all the agreements that Israel has signed, not least the principles laid out in the "road map". In Israel we call this policy "transfer".

While the end of this story has yet to be told, the first 145km of the separation fence will be completed in two months' time, violating the rights of more than 210,000 Palestinians residing in 67 villages, towns and cities, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem.

The crux of the matter is that the fence is not being erected on the 1967 borders, but is being used as a mechanism to expropriate Palestinian land and create facts on the ground that will affect any future arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians. Already in this early stage, 13 communities - home to 11,700 people - have become enclaves or bantustans imprisoned between the fence and Israel. Thirty-six communities, in which 72,200 Palestinians reside, will be separated from their farmlands that lie west of the fence.

Yehezkel Lein from B'tselem concludes: "In the past, Israel used 'imperative military needs' to establish settlements on expropriated Palestinian land and argued that the action was temporary. The settlements have for some time been facts on the ground and Israel now demands that most of them be annexed to Israel. As in the case of the settlements, it is reasonable to assume that the separation fence will also be used to support Israel's future claim to annex territories."

Good fences, the American poet Robert Frost once wrote, make good neighbours. The question the Israeli government must ask itself is, "What do bad fences make?"

Neve Gordon teaches politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University