Israelis Find Themselves on Both Sides of the Fence

When a Palestinian suicide bomber devastated a bus in Jerusalem on Sunday, killing himself and eight other people, the Conference of Presidents (COP) of Major American Jewish Organizations was in a meeting nearby. James Tisch, chair of the COP, emerged onto the street to see body parts strewn on the pavement and the smoking ruins of the bus.

Tisch immediately proclaimed his support for Israel's so-called security fence, a planned 400-mile long barrier designed to exclude all Palestinians intent on carrying out "martyrdom operations" against Jewish civilians.

"The fence is very important and I would think most American Jews would agree with me," Tisch said, according to a report in Maariv International, the English-language Web site of the popular Hebrew Maariv.

Yet if American Jewish opinion is united on the question of the fence (and it is not certain that is it), Israeli public opinion remains divided. The World Court, at the request of the United Nations General Assembly, convened hearings at the Hague on Monday to hear testimony on the legality of the barrier, which is still under construction.

In Israel, the hot-button issue isn't the physical barrier between the two peoples. Most Israelis assert their right to protect themselves from suicide bombers who have killed 171 people in Jerusalem, not including the bombers, since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, just as most Palestinians assert their right to retaliate against Israel, whose armed forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians civilians in the same time.

The issue in Israel, as in The Hague, is the legality of the route that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants the fence to take. On this question, the debate in Israel is heated. Just read the country's two leading English-language news sites, the upstart Maariv International, launched last month by Maariv, one of the country's biggest Hebrew dailies, and the traditional leader in Israeli online journalism, the very liberal Haaretz.

Maariv International debuted in January with an attractively designed Web site that includes a snazzy online poll and in-depth coverage of breaking news inside Israel. One could say, very approximately, that the difference between Haaretz and Maariv is akin to the difference between the New York Times and the New York Daily News. Haaretz is a paper by and for the intelligentsia, while Maariv caters to the working middle class.

Maariv's journalism is not so erudite as Haaretz's, nor so ideological as the small circulation Jerusalem Post. Haaretz makes a serious effort to report on the lives of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation; Maariv International does not. But Maariv International almost certainly provides the online world with a more representative reflection of the broad center of Jewish Israeli public opinion. (The country's largest circulation paper, Yediot Aharonot, does not have an English-language Web site.)

Maariv, for example, would not likely publish a satiric "Glimpse into the future," written by Hebrew University professor Ephraim Kleiman that appeared in Sunday's Haaretz. In the piece, Kleinman mocks the quest for absolute security by envisioning the day when Israelis pave the entire country to prevent suicide bombers from tunneling in and then build a dome to cover the whole country--to ward off dangerous Egyptian tse-tse flies genetically engineered by a scientist from Islamic Jihad.

Maariv's less provocative journalistic style runs more to yesterday's sympathetic story about the families of terror victims gathering in The Hague to protest the World Court legal proceedings.

But Maariv's coverage of the conflict with Palestinians is not reflexively pro-Sharon. In a piece not likely to please the Israeli government, reporter Amir Rappaport notes that "the shadow of the International Court has already affected the barrier issue dramatically in recent weeks." The construction of the security fence, he notes, has already cut off many Palestinian children from their schools. TV imagery of innocent Palestinian children thwarted in their pursuit of education has put the Israeli government on the defensive.

"Security authorities realized that this issue would constitute one of the harshest charges against Israel in The Hague," Rappaport reports. "An emergency plan was therefore initiated to bus these pupils to and from school through the fence, at the expense of the Israeli taxpayer, starting next week."

And the paper's politics are hardly monolithic. Deputy editor Gideon Remez says the government's claim that the World Court proceeding is designed to delegitimize Israel's right to self-defense misses the point. "The question before the court really is the present route of the barrier" through the Palestinian West Bank, he writes.

The original route of the fence, he notes, was redrawn "at double the length with long salients reaching into the West Bank" to encompass several large Jewish settlements built on Palestinian lands. Even the International Red Cross, he notes, has criticized the wall where it encompasses the Palestinian land. Rapport says, the fence is "now harder to patrol" and "much less effective for Israel's defense." In short, he says, the fence in its current form is "indefensible."

By contrast, the editors of Haaretz don’t merely doubt the practicality of the security barrier as currently designed. They also question its morality. In a recent editorial, the Tel Aviv-based news site declared that a barrier "designed to separate the State of Israel's lands from bases used to dispatch terrorist suicide bombers" had become "a political fence that separates masses of Palestinian civilians from their sources of income and from centers in large cities that provide essential services."

They acknowledge the security fence has saved Jewish lives but denounce "the effective annexation of lands under the false disguise of the war on terror."

But for Maariv's Ben Kaspit the security fence threatens only the Palestinians’ "quality of life" while protecting Jewish lives. "In the struggle between life and the quality of life, life wins," he writes. That seems to be the dominant, though not undisputed, view inside Israel.

John Beecham provided research for this column.