Israel’s secret border

The Judea and Samaria security fence has become more of a border than a barrier.

By MICHAEL HARRIS
view of the west bank (photo credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)
view of the west bank
(photo credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)
The purpose of the Judea and Samaria security barrier has been to prevent the infiltration of terrorists into Israel, but the consequences of the barrier affect more than Israel’s security. It has created a de facto eastern border of Israel; forever changing the map of the modern Middle East. 
The barrier has placed approximately 10 percent of Judea and Samaria on the Israeli side. This forces many Israelis to change their visual perception of these territories.  Judea and Samaria is no longer one territory with a Palestinian majority, but two territories with very different demographics. The Palestinian side of the barrier has a Palestinian majority, but the Israeli side contains both a Jewish majority as well as the majority of Israeli settlements.
This alters the way that many Israelis perceive the demographic argument.  Before Israel constructed the barrier, many had opposed Israel’s presence in the territories. They believed the demography would have forced Israel to choose between its Jewish and democratic characters. However, Judea and Samaria is now divided into two separate territories, so many people feel that this argument only pertains to the Palestinian side of the barrier; since on the Israeli side there is a Jewish majority.
Likud Minister Dan Meridor, one of the most senior members of the Israeli government, has confirmed this belief. In an interview with the Times of Israel, Meridor referenced Judea and Samaria when he said, “The reality now is that we can’t get all of it and stay a democratic state or a Jewish state.” 
However, when Meridor mentioned the areas that Israel should not control, he said that Israel should only freeze further settlement, “across the line of the blocs or the [security] fence or whatever you call it.” 
What about the areas within the security fence?
Meridor said that Israel should attempt an “expansion of Israeli sovereignty” within these areas. In other words, until Israel and the Palestinian Authority establish a sovereign border, the security fence will be the de facto border in the eyes of the Israeli government.
Because the Israeli perception of the border has changed, the international community has this new perception as well.  Moshe Arens gave an example of this in his Haaretz article, “The battle of Ariel.”  In 2003, then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice opposed the construction of the barrier east of Ariel, and Arens’ interpretation of this was that the “Security fence had implications that went beyond security.”
Arens continued to describe these implications. "The assumption by almost everybody is that territory to the west of the fence will remain under Israeli control for the foreseeable future, eventually lying within the borders of the state of Israel," he explained.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert confirmed this reality. Olmert believed that the fence has significance in both a negotiated as well as a unilateral solution. A few years before he became prime minster, he championed a unilateral redrawing of the borders in which the security fence would “ultimately become part of Israel’s final borders." When Olmert later became prime minister and tried to reach a negotiated solution with the Palestinian Authority, Haaretz reported that, “Olmert's proposed annexation to Israel of settlement blocs corresponds in large part to the route of the security fence.”
Furthermore, one 2011 poll asked members of the Likud party if Israel should unilaterally annex areas within the barrier if the PA tried to achieve statehood recognition at the UN. Eighty-one percent of respondents said yes.
One may counter that it is unfair to use this poll since it only measures the opinion of Likud members, and not of the general public. However, the significance of this poll is not the response, but that the pollster found it necessary to reference the security fence and not the settlement blocs.
This cannot be good news for the PA. Peace talks are deadlocked, and consensus is growing across the Israeli political spectrum that sovereignty over the Israeli side of the barrier should be expanded.  The PA wants the 1949 armistice lines to be the basis of border negotiations, but this may not be realistic as the barrier's growth slowly eliminates the relevance of these lines.
It is true that the PA can avoid this problem by suggesting a land swap with Israel, but this may not be possible in the coming years. The possibility that more Israeli settlements would want to be on the Israeli side of the barrier, especially in the Jordan Valley, may reroute the path of the barrier to cut deeper into Judea and Samaria. This would make a potential land swap nearly impossible.
In the end, only one lesson is learned from this development.  The barrier is a border, plain and simple.
This writer is the President of TorchPAC, the Pro-Israel Political Organization at New York University.  You can email him at michael.harris@nyu.edu.