When our friends at the Jewish Federation of Cleveland offered us an opportunity to tour the Israeli Security Fence and Wall with a member of the Israeli Defense Forces, we jumped at the chance. With so many days behind us of hearing about the suffering and inconveniences that the security fence has brought to the lives of Palestinians, we wanted to understand as completely as possible the rationale for this wall from the perspective of the Israeli government and military. Never did we imagine that our guide for this tour would be the retired IDF Colonel Dani Tirza, the officer who had overall responsibility for the building and management of the fence and wall from 2002 to 2007. Over two hours, we had a chance to get acquainted with this congenial and articulate man, and hear his stories about what it meant to him to be given authority over this project.
Readers of this blog need to be warned of about a couple of things. First, this will be a longer post than any we have written, because we took thorough notes, and we want to present without editing the information Colonel Tirza offered us. Second, there are some premises that Colonel Tirza begins from, (and that the government of Israel and most Jewish Israelis and most Jewish Americans begin from) which we did not challenge and which this conversation was not about. Those premises include:
1) the religious premise that the land of Israel was given to the Jews by God 2) the political premise that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and is one city, reunited aft the Six Day War, which Israelis have a right to live in, both in the West and in the East.
3) the legal premise that Israeli law and not international law, determines what happens with settlements in what the international community sees as the Occupied Territories.
If you begin from these premises, which represent Israeli government policy, then there is a logic to the orders you receive as a leader in the Israeli military. Insofar as this blog post is being read by our Interfaith Peace Builders Delegation, we offer it as a perspective reflecting one of the most informed Israeli responses to frequent questions we had as we experienced the fence and wall from the Palestinian side. While we asked some challenging questions, we did not challenge these basic premises above, premises that the state of Israel is built upon, whereas most of the speakers and activists we met while inside the West Bank did challenge all of those premises, and begin from a different narrative. In a separate blog post, Kathleen has written at length about these two narratives.
This is exactly where Colonel Tirza began his tour: by acknowledging that Israel and the Palestinians have quite different narratives about the land they share and how the conflict about it came to the point where the security fence was built. He is well informed about the Palestinian narrative, although he presents it differently than some of the Palestinians we have heard from, especially those whose political positions may have evolved since 2007. Colonel Tirza was one of the senior officers negotiating directly with Yasser Arafat and the PLO negotiating team in the late 90's. Arafat called him the "father of maps". He was part of the sixteen member Israeli delegation at Camp David in July 2000 when Arafat turned down a final offer from Ehud Barack.
After the July 2000 Camp David Summit ended jn failure, the situation on the ground deteriorated quickly. On September 28, 2000, Likud leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount where the Muslim holy sites are located. The next day at protest demonstrations at the Western Wall the Israeli police used live ammunition and demonstrators were killed. Two weeks later, two Israeli soldiers who had mistakenly entered Palestinian territory jn Ramallah were brutally murdered. The violence of the the Second Intifada escalated and claimed many lives over the next two years.
As he described the events of 2000, we were standing at Gilo, an Israeli settlement inside the West Bank that overlooks the Palestinian towns of Beit Jallah and Bethlehem. This is where Colonel Tirza began his security fence work. The settlement is within rifle range of homes in Beit Jallah and homes were frequently shot at after 2000. Tirza built his first protective concrete barriers here. From the Gilo security tower overlook, we could see what came next, the security fence, the wall, and the checkpoint on the main road to Bethlehem.
The worst month for the Israelis during the Second Intifada was March 2002 when around 130 lives, mostly civilian, were lost. The Israelis responded with Operation Defensive Shield, shutting down the West Bank and laying siege to Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Colonel Tirza described the intense political pressure that month on now Prime Minister Sharon to keep Israeli civilians safe. Almost all Israelis wanted some kind of security separation. Colonel Tirza was charged at that time with creating a security fence that would limit the ability of people intending to do violence to access Israel at any point, and allow controlled access both ways for people (Palestinians, tourists) who had economic and medical reasons to cross the fence.
Tirza said that the mission he was given was to include as many Israelis as possible, regardless of where they live, inside a security fence without dismantling any Palestinian houses. Where he had forty-five available meters of space to build the several components of a security fence barrier with sensors and a patrol road, that was the preferred option. Where he did not have that kind of space available, because of legally recognized privately owned land or topography, or where a fence would involve dangerous routine interaction between Israeli soldiers and civilians, he had to build a wall instead. Colonel Tirza points out that of the 726 kilometers he built, less than 5 per cent of it is wall. He prefers to call the entire system a "security fence". In deference to presenting this point of view, this is the name we will use as well for the rest of this report. The elaborate sensor system and monitoring involved in the fence enables The IDF to know immediately that there is a breach and to investigate and deal with it while the person breaching is still within the forty five meters between the first fence and second fence. The wall is a much more crude security tool.
He pointed out that the goal of the project in his mind was security and nothing else. To illustrate, he told us stories of his discussion with then-Senator Obama at the same Gilo observation site where we were standing. Obama challenged him, saying he believed that the fence annexed Palestinian land. Tirza denies this, and told several stories to us about complex negotiations to avoid cutting off land or displacing any people. He also insisted that the entire fence and wall could and should be dismantled when there is a peace settlement.
The stories Colonel Tirza wanted to tell us were ones that illustrated both the engineering and human rights difficulties of constructing the fence and how he had to deal with both. He took us to a popular walkway overlooking Jerusalem from the south, one we had visited three weeks before with our Palestinian guide. During this earlier visit, our guide's goal had been to point out a large modern settlement built inside East Jerusalem (illegally from the perspective on international law) and how difficult the roads and security for that settlement has made the lives of the residents of the neighboring Palestinian village. Our guide also pointed out one group of houses that had been isolated by the security fence and had to go through a checkpoint just to leave their homes. From the same viewpoint, Colonel Tirza's goal was to show us how integrated a city Jerusalem is from his perspective. His goal and charge was to separate Jerusalem from West Bank, not to divide Jerusalem. He had nothing to say about the settlement nearby. For him it is a "neighborhood" of a united Jerusalem. The story he told us of the group of houses isolated by the fence was a story of extraordinary effort on his part to make sure these families could remain in their houses and have access to the routines if their lives, at great expense to the Israeli government.
In a similar vein, the story he told us the checkpoint he built on the road to Jerusalem was a story of the ultimate success of an administrative engineering task, making the checkpoint as efficient as possible over a couple of years of trial and error and budget struggles. The task and goal he had was to have the checkpoint for a Palestinian who commutes from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to work with the correct papers to involve no more than twenty minutes of time. Ten thousand people a day pass through this checkpoint currently. For Palestinians, the nightmare they describe to us is the one involved jn what it means to have "the correct papers" and who can get them.
We asked about blocking the Jericho road from Jerusalem, and isolating Rachel's tomb. The answers were easy. There wasn't enough available room at the Jericho road to build a proper checkpoint and a detour from the familiar road was necessary. Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem is a Jewish holy site only, and Jews and Christians have a right to access it easily and safely. He minimized the traffic issues for the Bethlehem residents, saying that people became accustomed to a new traffic pattern. In East Jerusalem, Colonel Tirza believes that most Palestinian residents would prefer to be inside Israel as citizens jn any settlement, and would prefer the democratic freedoms within Israel to living in a Palestinian state.
We asked Colonel Tirza about the most frequent complaint we heard in the West Bank about the impact of the fence in rural areas, and this was that it cut off access to agricultural land, often olive groves, that families had worked for generations. His response was framed within the context of Israeli law, which often doesn't recognize land claims that are not documented adequately, a frequent problem for Palestinians. Where there are documentable land claims, he said that a compensation fund was established to pay for loss of agricultural income or the value of expropriated land. He acknowledged eighty per cent of Palestinians entitled to money from this fund turn it down as a matter of principal, since it would recognize the right of the Israelis to build the fence jn the first place. He also described a trial and error process if establishing permits for access across the fence to land, and acknowledged that in the early years the system had not worked well, but was now improved, and that farmers separated from their land had daytime access to it, provided their security record was clear (something that many Palestinian men don't have due to widespread enlistment in Palestinian militias and the likelihood of arrest during the two intifadas.)
Colonel Tirza said there was a legal process to dispute the path of the fence and he had personally testified jn 124 of them during his career. Only four cases had gone against him . He said he had learned lessons from those cases, both about legal issues he had not taken into account and about humanitarian rationales for changing the path of the fence that had not been considered. Sometimes, he said, the fence had been relocated as part of a deal to settle a complaint, and not because the legal or human rights issue had been decided. He described Bil'in as such a case. He was also dismissive of the situation depicted in the film "Budrous", saying it became a convenient cause for left wing groups at home and abroad to rally around and that the trees involved had never been illegally or inappropriately destroyed.
Colonel Tirza's does bristle at the label applied to the fence as an "apartheid wall", although he did not directly refute this label with a direct comparison to South Africa. He described the differences between his fence and the Berlin Wall, particularly the difference that the fence is not armed with soldiers who shoot those trying to breach it. Their goal is to capture those breaching the fence and to send them back.
Colonel Dani Tirza is a man who is proud and satisfied with the work he did, although he retired before the security fence was completed. For him, the reason for his satisfaction is easy to point to. From 2000 to 2007, there were 1074 Israeli civilians killed in attacks inside Israel originating from the West Bank. From 2007 when his work in the most important elements of the security fence was completed, until the present day, there have been 18 people killed in attacks from the West Bank. The security fence works, he says. Colonel Tirza doesn't believe that this drop in deaths or the level of violence has much to do with any changes in political strategies within the Palestinian Authority or groups.
At the same time, Dani Tirza says that if there was a permanent settlement to the conflict, he would like to be the first person to start tearing down the fence. He says he has friends on the other side, in both the Palestinian military and in civilian life. He encourages his children to understand Arab culture and to be prepared to live in a Jewish state that is nevertheless bi-cultural. We were very grateful that Colonel Tirza would give us this time and courtesy. It is an indication of the value that he places on encouraging understanding among American opinion makers of the decisions Israel has made, and that he has made. We hope that thus report has presented them accurately.
Location:Jerusalem
