MIDDLE EAST: Bulldozers are clearing the land. Tens of millions of dollars have been allocated. But as Israel yesterday formally announced the start of a project to fence off the West Bank from Israel, and thus prevent suicide bombers from entering the country, confusion reigned as to where exactly the barrier would run.
Palestinian spokespeople condemned the plan because, they claimed, it would involve Israel taking control of further West Bank areas. It would divide the territories into small cantons, and so represent a "new apartheid system", claimed Mr Saeb Erekat, a minister in the Palestinian Authority cabinet.
However, right-wing ministers in the government of Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon condemned the project precisely because, they said, it would do no such thing - but would, rather, run along the old 1967 border and thus effectively represent a unilateral Israeli retreat from the West Bank. "When you're dealing with a mad lion, you cage it in, you don't cage in everyone around it," said Mr Effi Eitam, head of the National Religious Party, who wants individual Palestinian cities, rather than the border, fenced off.
The director-general of the defence ministry, Mr Amos Yaron, intimated that both sides were right, talking vaguely about a security barrier that would straddle the 1967 border, along a "seam" that would vary from three to nine miles in width - extending into the West Bank in some areas, but not in others.
The first stretch of fencing - an electrified barrier, bolstered by motion detectors and patrol roads, at an estimated cost of $1 million per kilometre - is going up in northern areas of the West Bank, close to the city of Jenin, source of more than two-dozen recent suicide bombings. A map released by the ministry shows this initial stretch running largely, but not completely, along the 1967 border.
A similar barrier is envisaged around Jerusalem - but here the uncertain visions appear impossible to resolve. If the fence were to be erected along the eastern edge of the city, underlining Israel's claim to sovereignty throughout Jerusalem, some 200,000 Palestinians in east Jerusalem would be living on the "Israeli" side of the barrier. If, however, it were built along the line of the 1967 border, entire Jewish neighbourhoods built since the 1967 war would be left outside the "Israeli" area.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, insisted that the fence "is not a border - it's a blocking wall and a buffer zone, an obstacle - to defend the lives of Israeli citizens". Settler leaders, however, complain that it will cost lives in their communities - since suicide bombers unable to reach Israel will focus on settlements in the occupied territories instead. Israeli military sources counter that the fence may free up army manpower to better defend the settlements.
Still, the army is calling for the removal of 60 settlement "outposts," clusters of a few mobile homes, constructed without government approval on hilltops adjacent to existing settlements in recent months.
A Hamas spokesman, Mr Mahmoud Zahar, boasted that his group's bombers would still find a route into Israel. But Israeli intelligence chiefs say, tellingly, that none of the dozens of suicide bombings in Israel over the past 20 months were orchestrated from Gaza, which is heavily fenced off.
Inside the Gaza Strip on Saturday night, two Israeli solders were killed in a gun-battle with Hamas gunmen, two of whom were also killed, near the settlement of Dugit. Yesterday, an unarmed Palestinian man was shot dead by troops at a roadblock in the Jordan Valley. The army said he tried to bypass the roadblock and ignored soldiers' calls to halt.