Tom Friedman’s Journal: Trip to Israel and the West Bank

MARGARET WARNER:

Tom Friedman is back from a recent reporting trip to Israel and the West Bank. Tom, as you told me, you were really there working for nine or ten days on a documentary about the security fence that the Israelis are building between themselves and the Palestinians. What did you take away from your reporting on that in terms of what this fence says about the state of play?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Well, this fence is in some ways a monument to how bad the Israeli-Palestinian relations have become. It's a monument to the notion that there can be a peace and co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians, it's a triumph of the notion that all we can hope for is a wall to divide us. That's really, it really tells us what's happened since Oslo, that fence and that wall — it is a combination of the two, is really a monument to that.

MARGARET WARNER:

So what is driving, on the Israeli side, the desire for this fence?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Well, what's driving on the Israeli side is something very simple, something no modern society, any society has ever really encountered, particularly one as small as Israel — 100 suicide bombs in three years. And suicide bombing has made Israelis crazy. And I can understand it. An Israeli mother said to me Palestinians complain about their checkpoints, well, let me tell you, they've made my door a checkpoint, they've made my front door a checkpoint, I'm afraid to go out my door.

And suicide bombing has led to a mass appeal, really, from liberals and conservatives in Israel, Mr. Sharon, Mr. Government, I don't care how you do it, I don't care what you do, but I can't live with the notion that every time I go out the door I might get blown to bits — put up a wall.

MARGARET WARNER:

So what, explain what the big controversy is, though, in the way that Sharon is going about building this wall, the wall is about 20 percent built already?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Right, the wall is one fifth done, it's mostly fence actually and part wall. It started as a dovish project; it was actually spurred by the Labor Party to say okay, we want to get out of the West Bank so let's build a wall. It sounds good on paper. But when it was taken over by the Likud government, basically, what happened was as the wall began to be built, it wasn't built on the border. It was built inside the West Bank — in some cases just a few hundred meters, in some cases more.

MARGARET WARNER:

By border, you mean the old '67 truce line after the '67 war that separated —

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Israel from the West Bank. And people say, well, good fences make good neighbors, that's true; but bad fences make bad neighbors. And if you build your fence through my back yard, there's not a real good chance that we're going to be good neighbors, so Palestinians say to the Israelis, look, you want to build a wall, fine, build it on the border, you can build it 100 feet high for all we care, but if you're going to build it inside the West Bank, then there's going to be a problem because you divide Palestinians from their land, you divide Palestinians from each other.

But there's another problem with the wall, Margaret, it's not only not on the border; when you build a wall inside the West Bank, you have another problem, and that is that you have Jews on both sides of the wall. You have Jews in Israel and you have Israeli settlers on the other side of the wall.

MARGARET WARNER:

Maybe we can put up that map again so where it's really starting to cut into the West Bank is to, what, bring in some of these Israeli settlements that have been put out there?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Exactly, and even the settlements that aren't included in the wall, they have to be protected. So what happens is, let's take a town like Kalkilia, it's an Arab town, Palestinian town, very close to Israel on the Israeli border. In fact, when you go to Kalkilia today you can still see signs for kosher meat in Hebrew because they cater so much to the Israeli market. So what happens is the wall now cuts Kalkilia off from Israel, fine, Israelis save three Palestinian suicide bombers came out of Kalkilia, so who can blame them for not wanting to put up a wall.

But there are settlements north and south of Kalkilia too, so they had to then build another wall north of Kalkilia and another fence south of Kalkilia. Now there's only one little narrow opening to get out of Kalkilia to the West Bank, so I stood at that checkpoint one afternoon. We talked to an aid worker, Palestinian, who had been there for a couple hours waiting to get out of the checkpoint, he said look, see those two guards there, they're speaking Russian to each other, they're new immigrants to Israel. I speak better Hebrew than they do, okay.

MARGARET WARNER:

He's a Palestinian and –

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

He's a Palestinian, and he has to correct their Hebrew. Now, meanwhile I'm just trying to get to the town ten minutes from here, the village, al Funda [ph], they say where are you going, I say I'm going to al Funda [ph], they say "where's that?" They have no idea where they are.

So, you see scenes like that, what happens is that you end up not just with a wall, but you end up with a series of cages inside the West Bank. Israel isn't deliberately trying to do that, but it's the net effect of having a wall with Jews on both sides. And you have to protect people, therefore, on both sides.

And those cages, what they're going to do over the long run, Margaret, they're going to become factories of despair for Palestinians because the ability of a Palestinian to move from one end of the West Bank to another becomes an exercise of hours, if not impossible. So people want to take tests, people want to do commerce.

And over the long run, what I think that's going to do is the most paradoxical thing of all. You know, the iron law of Arab-Israeli history is the law of unintended consequences. And this wall is going to be the mother of all unintended consequences because by putting Palestinians in these little cages what's going to happen is they're going to be sitting there and there's going to be a Jewish settlement over there, they're going to say, let's see now, what do the Israelis have — they have the rule of law, they have the right to vote, they have welfare, they have jobs. What do I have, I got nothing. I want what the Jews have. I want to be a voter inside Israel. What it's going to do is going to drive Palestinians to say forget the idea of a Palestinian state, it's never going to happen.

MARGARET WARNER:

Because you've already carved us up.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

We're already too chopped up and the Palestinian Authority is gone so I want one man-one vote. I want a one-state solution, not a two-state solution, so a wall that was begun by leftist Israelis to separate Israel from the West Bank is going to end up actually driving not a two-state solution, but a one-state solution.

And Palestinians will gradually shift from the campaign of Arafat to the campaign of Mandela, and that will be a real problem, I think, for Israel over the long run.

MARGARET WARNER:

Did you see evidence of that in people you talked to?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Oh, yeah, we talked to Palestinians, intellectuals, and Halil Shakaki, a Palestinian pollster, has done a poll that found that 28 percent of Palestinians today are calling for a one-state solution. Now, think about that, Margaret. That is an idea that no Israeli party and no Palestinian party is even advocating, but 28 percent of the people are for it. So they can see what's happened. It's, I think, a very —

MARGARET WARNER:

Which of course then, and demographically, that would be a nightmare for the idea of a Jewish state?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

It would be a nightmare because if you take all the West Bank, all of Gaza and all of Israel together it's about 55 percent Jewish, 45 percent Palestinian. In ten years, given the different growth rates, it's going to be about 51 percent Palestinian, 49 percent Jewish and so, when they demand one man, one vote, if you think it's hard for people like my kids to defend Israel on a college campus today, imagine what they have to argue against the principle of one man, one vote. So this is a real problem for Israel. When you build a wall, Margaret, without a border, and with your people on both sides of the wall, what you end up with is a bad fence, and a bad fence will make for bad neighbors.

MARGARET WARNER:

Now, what did you find, because I know you also went to some of these settlements, and the old article of faith has been ultimately we know the solution, it's going to be that the Israelis are going to have to dismantle a lot of these settlements and move back on their side of the green line, and the Palestinians have to agree they're not going to try to return. What did you find when you went to these settlements?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Well, you know, I've been hearing that for all these years, you know, in a deal they'll have to go. Back in the 80s there's was this debate whether it's five to midnight or five after midnight whether you can get the settlements out or not. Margaret, it's 5 A.M., it's so far past midnight. I mean, when you see the degree of settlements and not the illegal settlements that are now up in the West Bank, it's really hard to imagine how these are going to come out. I interviewed Israel Harel, one of the leaders of the settlement movement, an old friend of mine, someone I have a lot of respect for, one of the founders of Ofra, one of the earlier settlements, where did I interview him? I interviewed in the illegal settlement, or as they call it the unauthorized settlement, now started by his son. So you have now second generation and third generation, you know, growing up there.

I went Ariel to the big urban — sorry — suburban settlement that has been created in the West Bank that they are now debating whether to include the wall. When I was back there in the 80s interviewing Ron Naufman, the mayor, there were 5,000 people there; there are 20,000 people there now. They have a university there now. They have a huge industrial park. So, at one level I got to tell you, I have a lot of respect for these settlers, because they know something, they know the rest of us are just a bunch of moderate wimps. They know what they're doing, they know where they're going, and they know five after midnight, five to midnight, it's five in the morning and they are creating facts.

MARGARET WARNER:

Bleak picture. Thanks, Tom.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

Pleasure.