By Israeli standards, it is hardly a whopper of stupidity. I mean, after all, there have been so many cases of gargantuan stupidities serving as operational axioms in Israel over the past decade, the greatest of all being that one can make peace by pretending that war does not exist, this one hardly seems prize-worthy.

While perhaps slightly below whopper status, nevertheless the idea that building a Nice Wall of separation between the Israelis and the Palestinians will create peace is pretty close to a blue ribbon.

Suddenly all of Israel is abuzz with plans for a Nice Wall, one that will keep THEM away from US. A wall representing a unilateral act of Israeli disengagement, a wall to reduce violence and keep out murdering terrorists and suicide bombers.

The immediate impetus for the Nice Wall idea seems to have come from the PLO’s latest suicide bombing campaign and also from a Knesset appearance by my Haifa University colleague Arnon Soffer, a geographer and sometime-demographer. Soffer told the Knesset recently that by his projections Jews will be well below 50% of the population of Palestine west of the Jordan River by 2020. That seems to have been much of the basis for the sudden obsession with a Nice Wall.

Arnon Soffer is an engaging, bright and witty fellow, with a keen sense of communicative drama, and one of the very few non-leftists at Haifa University, renowned for its leftist extremists. His demographic projections, and all such projections, are at best dubious. They are based on "worst-case scenarios" and lots of questionable assumptions. Demographic forecasting is a notoriously unreliable calling. In any case, such talk may now inadvertently stampede the dimwits in the Knesset into yet another round of folly.

The Nice Wall concept suddenly enrapturing both Left and Right in Israel is totally flawed and as silly as the day is long. It will not prevent Palestinian atrocities and warfare. It is far sillier than the Maginot or Siegfried Lines and similar ideas based on nice walls.

No Nice Wall will prevent incursions by PLO terrorists into Israel. These will dig under, run around, sail around, and shoot over even the strongest wall. They are already using the Palestinian zones to fire mortars and rockets into Jewish towns and more of the same will come after a Nice Wall is erected. The areas beyond the Nice Wall will be the familiar PLO Nazi-style training grounds and launching points.

The PLO will fill its territories with Iraqi, Iranian, Afghan and other troops and equipment. The PLO areas will be used for the sole purpose of attaching Israel within its Nice Wall. The Great Wall of China did not keep out the barbarians for long. And there is no shortage of barbarians, bombers and terrorists, among the Israeli Arabs who will remain within Israel once the Nice Wall is erected. Two of them nearly shut down half of Israel last week while trying to bomb a Haifa nightclub.

The only way to put a stop to the atrocities and terrorism of the PLO and its affiliates is through invasion and re-occupation of the PLO zones, placing them under permanent Israel martial rule. ALL other proposals for a solution are delusions. Even if the Soffer projections prove correct, the political damage from such demographic development will be controlled through open-ended martial rule. And of course Soffer did not work into his demographic projections any out-migration of Palestinians preferring to start new lives overseas rather than live indefinitely under martial law and denazification.

The martial rule and denazification Israel must impose on the lands now under PLO occupation would continue for an indefinite period and with no specific timetable or promises of lifting. If, within this Re-Occupation program, Israel wishes to place the Palestinian cities under siege and behind a Nice Wall of barbed wire and mine fields to prevent incursions of terrorists, that is one plausible possibility. I personally would implement a Los Angeles style weapons-swap program whereby the only way the besieged Palestinian cities get food is as swaps for their weapons. If they prefer to KEEP their weapons and starve, so be it.

But a Nice Wall? Just another in a long series of silly fantasies for ending the Middle East war without any real tribulation and through wishful thinking, exactly like those that produced the Oslo debacle in the first place.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission