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Israelis for Human Rights
But some Israelis agree that the way Palestinians are being treated in the West Bank and Gaza is a major issue. David J. Forman, founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, wrote in a Jerusalem Post commentary that "Jewish national identity was forged on the anvil of the Egyptian experience of slavery. Did we return to our ancestral homeland only to become like the ancient Egyptians?"

Forman noted that a growing movement (now over 1,000) of Israeli soldiers and reservists have refused to serve in the occupied territories, protesting that the way Palestinians are being treated there is immoral.

"Whoever thought that we could indefinitely rule over 2.5 million people and maintain not just our security, but our sense of decency, simply misread our dramatic historical march over the centuries from exile to restoration," Forman said.

The Bush administration has cast doubt on the fence strategy from the start.

"I don't know that you're going to solve the problem with a fence unless you solve the underlying problems of the Palestinians feeling that they are disenfranchised, that the occupation continues," Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2002.

Thousands of protesters from both sides of the issue demonstrated outside the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands in February during three days of hearings on the legality of the structure under international law.

But rulings of the international court are nonbinding, and even if future construction slows or stops, Palestinians wonder what will happen to the approximately 110 miles of fence that already exist around the country.

A Life Before Death
Speaking in January, two weeks before a Palestinian policeman from Bethlehem detonated a suicide bomb on a Jerusalem bus, Lutheran pastor Raheb said the Israeli strategy is actually sowing the seeds for more violence, and challenging even his faith.

Raheb, a gentle man who preaches peace, gestures with his hands and tells one story of how the fence invaded his world.

"My father-in-law had a heart attack [in January], and we called an ambulance to take him to the hospital in Jerusalem, because we don't have really any good hospitals here," Raheb says. "And they stopped him for one and a half hours at the checkpoint. They didn't let the ambulance go through. Then after one and a half hours they said, 'We cannot let you through,' and we had to ask for another ambulance to come from Jerusalem. He was then transferred from the one ambulance to the other. And this is somebody with a severe heart attack.

"My father-in-law has a permit to go to Jerusalem! Yet they didn't let him in, because, they said, 'Your permit is as a businessman, and now you are a sick person.' Can you imagine?"

"For me personally, what I experience every day pushes me to revenge," Raheb says. "The logical way would be to revenge. It's basically my faith which is [pushing] me to reason."

Few outsiders understand that Israeli security restrictions affect virtually the entire population—including students, women, and children, Raheb says.

"Part of our ministry here is to show children and young people that there is a life before death. For most of the people here, they don't have problems with believing in life after death. To believe in life before death—a life which is worth living—this is the difficulty," Raheb adds. "I mean, look how [people] are treated. They have so many people from their family in prison, they cannot travel, they can't enjoy very basic life. So many of them think, So why should we live this way? It's better to die."

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May 2004, Vol. 48, No. 5