Sealing in the Palestinians: The Story of the Most Controversial Border Wall in the World

The following is an excerpt from A Wall in Palestine by Rene Backmann (Picador, 2010).

Who invented the wall? Who came up with the idea for it? "Maybe it was me," Dany Tirza says half-jokingly as he weaves his car through Gilo morning traffic. Adjacent to the southern neighborhoods of Jerusalem, this truly "new" city of thirty-seven thousand people, which dominates the nearby Palestinian enclaves of Bethlehem and Beit Jala, is considered by the Israelis to be a natural extension of the Holy City. In fact, Gilo was built on the outskirts of "Greater Jerusalem," as it was redefined by Israel in 1967 after the Six-Day War, on approximately seven thousand acres of annexed Palestinian land. But Gilo is on the Palestinian side of the "Green Line," which, since 1949, separates the State of Israel from the present- day West Bank. Thus, it is a settlement, one of twelve built by Israel since 1967 at the periphery of Greater Jerusalem.

Colonel Dany Tirza lives in Kfar Adumim, a settlement near the Jordan Valley. He is a strapping man with salt-and-pepper hair who wears the crocheted yarmulke of a settler. Forty-six years old, he has recently been relegated to the Reserves, but remains in charge of "strategic and spatial" planning at the Ministry of Defense. This grants him a plastic ID card authorizing passage at any crossing. He travels with an armed soldier in the backseat of his car for protection. Tirza never goes anywhere without a thick folder of daily updated aerial maps. He is considered by the military forces to be one of their top experts on the West Bank. He has trekked its villages and pathways in all directions in his Jeep. Perhaps only Ariel Sharon possesses as much ground-level intelligence about the region. At the beginning of the Oslo peace process, Tirza was put in charge of the Rainbow Project, planning military withdrawals and redeployments in the West Bank, during the region's initial period of self government. As such, he was also part of the Israeli delegation involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. It was during this time that Yasser Arafat, amused to see Tirza arrive at the meetings every day with a roll of maps under his arm, gave him the nom de guerre Abu Karita, or "the father of maps."

When the Sharon government decided in 2001 to launch a study on a barrier project between Israelis and Palestinians, Dany Tirza was naturally put in charge of it, and of sketching the barrier's path. Today he supervises the construction sites, works on modifications called for by the Supreme Court, and adds the finishing touches. He has even become a diplomat, traveling to the Vatican to negotiate the course of the wall on Catholic-owned lands. "Here's where it all might have begun," he says as he gets out of his car and steps onto a rocky promontory at the southern edge of Gilo, across from the village of Beit Jala, on the other side of the valley.

"At the beginning of the Second Intifada, in October 2000, this area was under attack by snipers. They were taking potshots at people in the street from their apartment windows." The snipers were located in Beit Jala, which sits on a hill overlooking Gilo. "A policeman was killed nearby. At that time, we knew the liaison to the Palestinian police in Bethlehem very well. He was a part of the town's security force, he spoke Hebrew, and he had four thousand men with Kalashnikovs at his disposal. But when we asked him to stop the shooting, he said that it was impossible, because the snipers were young people from the refugee camps hiding in the Beit Jala mayor's house, and that he could not take them out by force. So we brought two tanks to a parking lot in Gilo and fired shells on the mayor's house from here." Indeed, the tanks had a remarkably clear shot of the building from this parking lot. "As you can see from here, the mayor's house has never been repaired. After this, we conducted military operations and engagements inside Beit Jala, but we could not stay forever and watch every house.