OK. Now that just about everyone else on earth has linked it, quoted it and pointed to it, allow me. (Especially since The Jerusalem Post has suddenly retooled its website and, at least for now, many of the old links no longer work.)
Sep. 26, 2003
Column One: Against the fence
By CAROLINE GLICK
[ . . . ]
Yet not only is the fence of little defensive value, building it will provide another excuse -- both for this country's Left as well as the international community -- to demand the withdrawal of the IDF from Palestinian cities and villages. So, a fence that will not stop infiltrations will also prevent us from doing the one thing that works in stopping terrorism.
But the fence is more than an obstacle for operations. It will furnish our enemies with static targets. Today they murder construction workers building the fence more or less at will. When completed, they will target the soldiers patrolling it.
[ . . . ]
For the Palestinians, the true beauty of the fence is that they object to it. While the fence furnishes them with a state, by objecting to its construction they are ensuring that the border only works in one direction. While Israel, in building it is renouncing its claims to everything on its eastern side, the Palestinians, in objecting to it, renounce none of their claims to land on its western side. By maintaining that it is bound to a negotiated settlement, Israel is laying the groundwork for future claims by the Palestinians.
But in true bass-ackwards fashion, Israel is expending boatloads of political capital trying to defend this travesty. How has it been so quickly forgotten that the fence was the brainchild of the same nitwits who brought us Oslo? And when and why, exactly, did Sharon hop so obligingly onto this bandwagon? Or did he? The answers, it seems, are lost somewhere in the murk of the blood and tears of the past three years of unrelenting terror.
