Touring Israel's Barrier With Its Main Designer

"It is easier for me to go to Venezuela than to the Damascus Gate," says Salah Ayyad, a Palestinian city councilman born in Jerusalem's Old City who can visit only with Israeli permission. (By Scott Wilson/Post)

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"One day he took me in a helicopter and set me down in a spot in the desert," Tirza said of a trip he made in the early 1980s. "He told me, 'This is where you will settle.' " Tirza did make his home in the southern West Bank, not far from the spot Sharon had indicated.

In March 2002, as scores of Israelis were being killed in attacks during the second Palestinian uprising, the Likud-led government of then-Prime Minister Sharon resurrected the idea of building a barrier, which had been proposed six years earlier by the rival Labor Party.

"The army had asked for it, and the government said no because of money," Tirza said. "But the real reason was that no one wanted to draw the line."

When he was given the job of designing the barrier that summer, Tirza was known as the officer who knew the West Bank's topography more intimately than anyone.

Sharon's security cabinet approved the barrier's first three segments in June 2002, a year when the number of Palestinian suicide attacks peaked at 60.

Last year, according to Israel's Foreign Ministry, there were five. But some Israeli military officials say factors besides the barrier -- including stepped-up army operations in the West Bank and a two-year-old decision by most armed Palestinian factions to refrain from such attacks -- better explain the sharp decline.

Working from an office in the army's Central Command, Tirza headed a staff of 36 people from the army, police agencies, the environment ministry, and the military government in the territories. The group pored over maps, considered water rights and archaeological sites, and began the task of facing angry Palestinians as cement and chain-link cut into their land.

"There is always going to be a man behind the fence," Tirza said. "The Palestinians need us. And we need them to be good neighbors."

During several hours of touring the barrier recently, Tirza described what he said was a painstaking process of working with Palestinians to find the best course. But the visits also illustrated the hardships imposed on them by the barrier's circuitous route through the West Bank.

Highway 443

Highway 443 runs northwest from Jerusalem toward Tel Aviv, a shortcut of crests and valleys through the West Bank.

But only Israelis and a relatively small number of Palestinians with permits are allowed to use the four-lane highway, part of a separate road network Tirza conceived, also in the name of Israel's security. The narrow roads that once connected 443 to dozens of Palestinian villages have been sealed off with cement blocks and berms.