The Contest for Palestine (Redux) • 441The effect of the 9/11 attacks was to bring together the US and Israel in
what Bush at first called a "crusade" (later, when apprised of the term's
negative meaning to Muslims, he renamed it a "war") on terrorism. Amer¬
icans shared the Israelis' horror when some Palestinians strapped bombs
to their bodies and blew themselves up amid Israeli teenagers waiting to
enter a popular discothèque, or Jerusalem bus passengers, or diners in a
Haifa restaurant frequented by both Arabs and Jews. They ignored the
conditions that had led to these attacks. During its thirty-seven-year occu¬
pation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has confiscated Arab land
and water, flattened homes, and torn up farmlands to make room for Jew¬
ish settlements. It has imposed prolonged curfews on whole towns and
placed hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks that impeded commerce
and travel for Arabs within the occupied territories. A state should protect
its borders and defend its citizens from terrorism, but these policies aim at
permanent colonization and ultimate absorption of land.
As you know from our description of the first intifada, Palestinians com¬
mitted violent as well as nonviolent acts of resistance to the Israeli occupa¬
tion, but no suicide bombings took place until after Baruch Goldstein, an
American Jewish fundamentalist living in the occupied West Bank, walked
into a Hebron mosque in 1994 and killed twenty-nine worshipers in cold
blood. He has since come to be seen as a martyr and hero by the Orthodox
Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. As Palestinian violence intensi¬
fied, especially after negotiations broke down in 2000, Israel adopted poli¬
cies of mass arrests, targeted assassinations, and destruction of homes of
relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers. The Israelis also began to build a
wall as a barrier to terrorism.
The wall, which Israelis call a "security fence," is a series of electronically
monitored fences, consisting of concrete barriers and barbed wire, up to nine
meters (28 feet) high. Most Israeli parties (and their supporters abroad) fa¬
vored its construction. At first, some Palestinians supported it on the mis¬
taken assumption that it would be placed along the pre-1967 borders.
However, the Israelis have placed it deep within occupied territory, taking
land internationally recognized as belonging to a future Palestinian state.
The International Court of Justice in the Hague declared in 2004 that the
erection of the wall violates international law, a ruling ignored by Sharon's
government. The wall creates a physical barrier that will divide West Bank
cities and villages into virtual cantons. Its completion will compress 3.5 mil¬
lion Palestinians into ghettos with high unemployment (50 percent in the
West Bank and 60 percent in Gaza as of 2004), few resources for develop¬
ment, and indefinite poverty. Palestinians are often harassed, not only by
Israel's soldiers, but also by well-armed settlers. Israelis believe that the wall