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CNN Saturday Morning News
Support Grows in Israel for Physical Separation From Palestinians
Aired September 08, 2001 - 07:17 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: There's also a saying that good fences make good neighbors. Now there's growing support in Israel for just such a separation.
COLLEEN MCEDWARDS, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. The Palestinians view the idea of a dividing wall quite differently.
CNN's Jerrold Kessel looks at the issue from both sides.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): If Israel wants unilaterally to build a wall around it, Palestinians say it already exists, part of it, the military checkpoints like this, along the Israel West Bank border.
These men are being stopped while trying to cross to work inside Israel. They've been sent back to the Palestinian sided, their identity cards confiscated by Israel soldiers.
For fear of bombers, Israel now stops most Palestinians from crossing, even to jobs they used to hold.
Among those waiting, Haled Essa, a business graduate, but he works in construction in Israel on a piecemeal basis. His livelihood depended on whether he's able to bypass the soldiers. Haled says he doesn't see a future if Israel tries to break away.
HALED ESSA, WORKS IN ISRAEL: We can't separate. We'll lose everything if we separate us. All of our life, it's joined with their life, from 30 or 40 years.
KESSEL (on camera): Workers like Haled point out the practical objections to the separation idea, the cross-border workers, joint power facilities, and water. And Palestinian leaders say separation is not only impractical and impossible, but also impolitic and immoral.
And they're opposed to the idea, scornful of it, for another major reason.
(voice-over): Israel is hardly likely, they believe, to remove the multiple checkpoints through which Palestinians have to pass, 263 such checkpoints by one Palestinian count, nor remove the scores of Jewish settlements around the West Bank.
Those doubts reinforced by another separation image here, near one such major settlement outside Jerusalem. The fence is being constructed to block potential stone-throwers from the neighboring Palestinian village. A fence around the Palestinians rather than between them and the Israelis -- a question less of keeping out than of hemming in.
SAEB ERAKAT, CHIEF PALESTINIAN NEGOTIATOR: What do they want, to turn the West Bank and Gaza into the biggest prison on earth? Separation is that this road here is used by Palestinians, while this road here is used by the Israelis. It's nonsense. How can you speak of separation? It's within a stone's distance.
KESSEL (on camera): But won't fences perhaps create -- recreate the trust?
ERAKAT: Where? Where? Where fences? You put fences here, around Hezmanah (ph)? That's a prison. Hezmanah, this village, is being treated like a prison. Jericho, my own hometown, is a big prison. Gaza is a major prison. So is Ramallah.
It's really what's happening now, minus or plus a kilometer here, a kilometer there, it's exactly the same situation. Certain roads are -- will be only for Palestinians, but the majority of roads will be for the Israelis. Roadblocks of the entrance of each village and towns, barbed wires to be added here and there. It will worsen the situation.
What we need is a meaningful peace process that will lead to the end of the Israeli occupation, the establishment of a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel.
KESSEL (voice-over): Palestinians are sure the ebb and flow of life between them and the Israelis will simply be too strong for the idea of any unilateral breakaway. For all the problems, says Haled...
ESSA: It's very, very difficult. Every day we are going -- half of the week, they arrested us, and the other half, we work.
KESSEL: Without a permanent land-for-peace agreement, this will continue to be the reality, Palestinians say, even if the Israelis choose in desperation to latch onto the separation idea as the only way for the two battling peoples to live, not together, but alongside each other within the same land.
More and more Israelis are latching onto this new image -- walls, fences, between them and the Palestinians. Unilateral separation, it's called, increasingly seen as the way to extricate Israel from the present morass. Short walls sporadically installed are symbols of a psychological need to provide a sense of security for Israeli bedroom communities such as this, Matan (ph), cheek-by-jowl with Hableh (ph), a Palestinian village just across the Israel-West Bank border.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I still hope that we will have good relations with our neighbors, and one day we can put down the wall like they did in Berlin.
KESSEL: In fact, many Palestinians still simply wander past the wall and ditch on their way through the open fields to work inside Israel. But the barrier seems to satisfy a deep need -- out of sight, out of mind.
"The idea of the wall," says this man, "is to create some sort of separation from the eyes as well."
The concept that's gaining ground goes beyond real walls to a wall of the mind. One of its foremost proponents is Dan Meridor, a centrist and the newest member of Ariel Sharon's wall-to-wall unity government. He's positioning himself to grab this new public baton and to make it policy.
DAN MERIDOR, ISRAELI CABINET MINISTER: We have to ask ourselves whether the demography of the land does not make it imperative on us to divide ourselves from them and set a border, even unilaterally, and say, Here we are, and there you are.
KESSEL: This map is like a relic from the past. It's been 34 years since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, and rarely these days does one find an Israeli map showing the so-called Green Line the way the pre-1967 border was marked. It's in the office of one of Israel's most emphatic would-be peacemakers.
But Yossi Beilin says the temptation of unilateral separation must be resisted.
YOSSI BEILIN, FORMER ISRAELI PEACE NEGOTIATOR: It won't help us with negotiations with the Palestinians. But it will put an end to the idea of making the Jewish state part and parcel of the Middle East.
KESSEL: The Israeli military is dead set against.
MAJ. GEN. MOSHE YA'ALON, ISRAELI DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF: It will be a Palestinian victory, and we can't do it.
KESSEL: Major General Moshe Ya'alon is Israel's deputy chief of staff, the number two man in the military hierarchy.
YA'ALON: It's a political strategic question, talking about our future in this region. If it will be done unilaterally, I think that it will be a disaster.
KESSEL: Some see the separation idea as an illusory attempt to restructure reality. Opposite Beit Jalla, the Israeli neighborhood Gilot (ph), built on land Israel captured in 1967. On the wall constructed to keep out shots from Palestinian gunmen, artists have tried to recreate the Palestinian reality across the hill -- the reality the wall keeps out.
Whatever the true reality, the separation concept seeks to free Israel from its interdependency with the Palestinians, and by disengaging in that way, supporters of separation say Palestinian demands would become less and less relevant as Israel charts its own future.
New reality, or an illusion?
Jerrold Kessel, CNN, Jerusalem.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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