Touring Israel's Barrier With Its Main Designer

Azariya

Along most of its length, Israel's barrier consists of metal fencing, patrol roads and razor wire, cutting a 150-foot-wide swath through the rural West Bank. But in cramped urban areas -- about 5 percent of the total -- the barrier is a 24-foot-high cement wall that takes up less space and protects against shooting.

In these places, it has become a canvas for protest murals and slogans, including a several-mile segment running from Azariya, a Jerusalem suburb also known as the biblical town of Bethany, south toward Bethlehem. The stretch also carves a confusing course -- incorporating some West Bank neighborhoods on Israel's side, abandoning others previously annexed to the Jewish state -- that illustrates the inconsistent way it was drawn in places.

"Nothing to see here," Tirza said, reading aloud the large block letters in English. He chuckled. In nearby Abu Dis, though, he bristled after reading "Berlin Wall" emblazoned on the gray background.

"That was a political barrier, and this is a security barrier," Tirza said. "That was electrified, there were attack dogs and automated machine guns guarding it."

"But there are some things that are the same," he continued. "The real solution to all of this will come with a peace agreement. And then, especially in Jerusalem, the wall will come down. And I will be among the first to help bring it down."

Tirza said he drew the wall around Jerusalem on a path that did not always follow the municipal boundary, sometimes excluding neighborhoods that Israel annexed after occupying East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. In Azariya, he placed on the Israeli side more than a dozen Christian monasteries that sit outside the Jerusalem city limits after they requested inclusion.

The wall also bisects some Arab neighborhoods, separating thousands of Palestinians from family cemeteries, the nearest hospital and businesses. Yakin Rajabi, a Palestinian carpenter in Abu Dis, lived across the street from his workshop. Now it sits on the far side of the wall.

"It is easier for me to go to Venezuela than to the Damascus Gate," said Salah Ayyad, an Abu Dis city councilman born in Jerusalem's Old City who is now able to visit only with rarely granted Israeli permission. "If they have a wall to separate Arabs from Israelis, fine. But we are Palestinians. Why are they separating us from each other?"

'The Least Bad Line'

In his retirement, Tirza, a father of five, is finishing a dissertation on how private-sector principles can make army units run more efficiently. He gives tours of the barrier to new Israeli ambassadors, helping them prepare to explain it to critical foreign audiences.

He also appears in court to defend his route, despite an order last year from then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz forbidding him to do so. Peretz sought to bar Tirza's testimony after the high court found that Tirza gave misleading reasons for the fence's route around one settlement. He said he has lost only three legal challenges to the path he drew, out of the more than 120 complaints that have been filed against it.

"This is the least bad line I could make," Tirza said. "In every place, there were problems. But I think we have saved the lives of hundreds of Israelis."