Trump cites Israel’s ‘wall’ as model. The analogy is iffy.

By Isabel Kershner, New York Times News Service

Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017 | 2 a.m.

President Donald Trump has invoked Israel’s “wall” as a model for the barrier he has vowed to build along the United States’ border with Mexico. His wall, he says, will keep out unauthorized immigrants who bring drugs and crime into the United States.

“A wall protects,” Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday. “All you have to do is ask Israel. They were having a total disaster coming across and they had a wall. It’s 99.9 percent stoppage.”

It is not immediately clear which “wall” Trump was referring to. Israel has built fences along its borders with Egypt; along its northern border with Lebanon; and along its boundary with the Gaza Strip.

But Israel’s best-known barrier is the one built along and inside the West Bank after a surge of terrorist attacks. It was intended to regulate Palestinian movement into Israel.

That barrier — a system of fences and some sections of concrete wall — was constructed under very different circumstances, and with different goals, than Trump’s wall, raising questions about whether the president’s analogy between the United States and Israel is sound.

What was the purpose of Israel’s barrier?

Israel began constructing this system of fences and concrete walls in 2002, at the height of the second Palestinian uprising when suicide bombers were detonating themselves in cafes and buses in Israeli cities.

Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, was reluctant to put down any marker that could be interpreted as a future border between Israel and the territories it won in the 1967 war, but which are claimed by the Palestinians for an independent state. After the particularly bloody month of March 2002, in which 130 Israelis were killed, the Israeli military re-entered the major Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which it had evacuated under the peace accords of the 1990s. At the same time, Sharon gave in to mounting popular pressure and experts, who viewed a barrier as a security imperative.

As planning of the route got underway, however, it became increasingly political. Israel made great efforts to loop the barrier around settlements and strategic areas of the West Bank that it wished to keep on its side under any future peace deal. Most of the barrier ended up east of the pre-1967 line, inside West Bank territory, prompting international criticism and creating humanitarian problems for thousands of Palestinians trapped in enclaves between the barrier and Israel proper.

Some areas proved so problematic, legally or politically, that after years of construction, the barrier was never entirely completed.

The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2004 stating that Israel’s building of a barrier inside the occupied territory was illegal.

To emphasize the stated security purpose of the barrier, some Israeli officials refer to it as an “anti-terror obstacle.” Palestinians routinely refer to it as a “racist separation” or “apartheid” wall.

How effective is it?

Since March 2002, there has been a sharp decline in the number and scope of terrorist attacks by West Bank Palestinians in Israel. Security officials say that the barrier has undoubtedly helped, but that there are several other important factors.

As the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, waned around 2004, Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, put a moratorium on suicide bombings. Furthermore, the Israeli military still operates on the other side of the West Bank barrier, carrying out nightly raids in Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps to arrest people suspected of being militants. Israel also benefits from continuing security cooperation with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which has an interest in suppressing Hamas and other militants in the West Bank and preventing attacks against Israel.

The barrier was never meant to stop all Palestinian movement into Israel. Palestinian laborers apply for permits and more than 50,000 people legally cross daily through a series of checkpoints that puncture the winding 400-mile route of the barrier.

But the system has proved far from hermitic. Depending on the season, up to 60,000 Palestinians without work permits sneak across the barrier to work in construction, agriculture or service industries in Israel, either through gaps in the route or by using the services of local smugglers. And occasionally, the system is defeated by Palestinians who carry out terrorist attacks.

Israel has been lax in clamping down on illegal workers, usually just sending them back if they are caught. Unemployment in the Palestinian territories is high and wages are low relative to earnings in Israel, and the Israeli military argues that the economic well-being of Palestinians contributes to stability and security. In Israel, the illegal workers are generally accepted as part of the economy. Few Palestinians are looking to immigrate, since home is typically no more than a few hours’ drive away.

What about other Israeli barriers?

Israel recently built a fence along its border with the Egyptian-controlled Sinai to stanch the flow of Africans seeking asylum and work in Israel, and to guard against the threat of infiltrations by jihadi militants, affiliated with the Islamic State, operating in the desert peninsula.

About 60,000 Africans, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, surreptitiously crossed from Egypt into Israel from 2005-12. The fence has proved effective. After about 200 asylum seekers were smuggled from Egypt in 2015, some sections of the fence were made higher. In 2016, only about one dozen were reported to have crossed.

Israel also built a security fence along its border with the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian coastal territory from which Israel withdrew all its forces and settlers in 2005. Some Palestinians manage to cross it, often looking for work in Israel, but the border is intensively monitored and patrolled by the Israeli military, and many of them are caught.

The fence has hardly solved Israel’s problems with Gaza. Hamas has developed rockets and tunnels to bypass the barrier, and Israel has fought three wars there in the past decade.