The construction of the West Bank barrier has, in reality, been the construction of a border between Israel and a future state of Palestine. This does not mean that the location of the barrier will remain in situ and that there will not be changes in its course if and when a formal agreement is reached. But the fact that it was constructed as a physical part of the landscape, visual to all, negotiated and crossed only through a few official border crossings where documents have to be shown and where people can be refused entry (or exit) has, more than any other policy of the past decade, transformed the abstract notion of "border" into a tangible element within the political landscape.
Drive in and out of Jerusalem from the West Bank, travel along the cross-Israel highway in the center of the country, or drive along the roads parallel to the barrier and you cannot but understand what it means to have a real border, separating two distinct political entities. Successive Israeli governments can argue as loudly as they wish that this is a security barrier to prevent suicide bombers from coming into Israel and that it is not, nor is it meant to be, a political boundary. But the power of the facts is, in this case, much stronger than the rhetoric of the words.
Not only is it a political border in every sense of the word but it has, almost overnight, become one of the most closed borders in the western world. Palestinians are unable to cross if they don't have a permit to work inside Israel, and this is a luxury afforded to only a small proportion of the local residents, as Israel prefers to work with cheap immigrant laborers from other countries who do not, in its view, present a potential security problem. No Palestinian vehicles are allowed inside Israel; the border crossing points have large car parks where the vehicles are left during the day, while on the other side Israeli employers arrive with their trucks early in the morning and late at night to pick up and deposit the workers on their daily trek across the border.
Arab citizens of Israel are allowed to cross the border but they are invariably pulled aside for additional checks of their documents and the contents of their vehicles. Other Israel citizens are usually allowed through with a wave of the hand, their border visa being their ability to answer a simple question in colloquial Hebrew or to be dressed in clothing deemed "appropriate" by border officials. For these Israelis, the border is just a minor inconvenience that holds them up for a few moments on their daily travel into and out of their West Bank settlement homes.
The crossing points are administered by the same agency that manages all of Israel's borders, be they the borders with Jordan and Egypt or the booths at the international airport. In turn, security control of the borders is partly franchised out to semi-private security agencies that operate in accordance with guidelines issued by the Israel Ministry of Defense but that, on occasion, behave in ways a regular soldier in his/her uniform would not be allowed to. For a Palestinian crossing the border, it can be quite a humiliating experience. There are few places in contemporary Israel where the differential treatment of Israelis and Palestinians at one and the same place is as stark as at the barrier border.
The construction of the barrier has been implemented approximately 70 percent along the course of the green line, while nearly all deviations have been inside the West Bank rather than inside Israel. De facto annexation of Palestinian territory in this way has been aimed at retaining as many of the Israeli settlement blocs as possible under direct Israeli control.
But this has also created a new situation of Palestinian "spatial" hostages, namely those Palestinian villages that are to the east of the green line (inside the West Bank) but to the west of the barrier. Villagers have difficulty accessing schools, jobs and hospitals in almost any direction and the construction of the barrier has severely curtailed their basic human rights. If, indeed, the final delimitation of a border includes these areas as part of Israel, serious consideration would have to be given to the citizenship status of these "hostages" and/or their automatic right of free access across the new border.
During the past ten years it has become common parlance to talk in terms of territorial exchange along the border. When such ideas were first suggested as many as 20 years ago, they were thought of as no more than fictional, unrealistic proposals by ivory tower academics. But in recent years this has become a real topic of discussion between the two sides, with maps showing the potential areas of territorial exchange by Israel in return for the settlement blocs.
One alternative is the relatively unpopulated area inside Israel south of Qiryat Gat. Another much more contentious proposal is the area bordering the north of the West Bank. This would redraw the border in such a way as to transfer (without physically uprooting) tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel into the Palestinian state--regardless of whether or not they actually want this to happen.
The underlying conclusion to be drawn from this short essay is that construction of the West Bank barrier/fence/wall has been responsible for the transformation of the discussion of borders from something abstract into something real and tangible. Israeli governments, especially those of the Likud persuasion, may try to deny or avoid discussion of future borders between two sovereign and independent states. But they have, with their own hand, created the conditions that have brought this even closer.
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