JERUSALEM - Israel has begun a process of creating a physical barrier between itself and West Bank Palestinians while pushing off any discussion of Palestinian statehood on that land.
In the northern West Bank, bulldozers have been at work since last week, levelling the ground for the first section of a 110km fence aimed at stopping Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israel.
The project is part of a US$222 million ($460 million) network of barriers on 350km of stretches approximating the West Bank border before Israel captured it from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.
The work has angered Palestinians. Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat accused Israel of seeking to divide Palestinian areas into cantons and "start a new apartheid system".
But Israel says it has defence, not demarcation, in mind.
"The aim is to separate only from a security point of view - security separation, not political separation," said Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer yesterday.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Palestinian violence must end as a prerequisite for talks on Palestinian statehood.
He reiterated this on Sunday after returning from Washington talks with US President George W. Bush, saying Israel would not return to the 1967 borders.
Palestinian Labour Minister Ghassan al-Khatib called Sharon's remarks "another destructive position", indicating Israel had no intention of returning to negotiations, and contradicted the idea of a two-state solution.
Many Israelis consider Palestinian attacks an attempt to strong-arm a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The West Bank fence threatens the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinians who slip across the border to work illegally in Israel. Some Palestinians in the area also said parts of their ancestral land had been confiscated so the fence could be built.
There was also anger among Israeli ultra-nationalists, who fear the fence will set a border and weaken their claims to occupied land.
"This is the beginning of ... the cantonisation of the land of Israel," Israeli Cabinet minister Effi Eitam, a darling of the settler bloc, told Israel's Channel One television.
The overall plan would eventually separate the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of an independent state.
Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet security service, recently said militants in the Gaza Strip, where a fence is in place, had not succeeded in carrying out suicide bombings in Israel.
- REUTERS
Feature: Middle East
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