Israel Begins West Bank Fence Project
It is a modest beginning for the most hotly discussed construction project in Israel, this stomach-high, two-bar fence backed by a ditch running along an empty stretch of dirt road.

The portion here, just north of the Israeli military checkpoint outside the Palestinian city of Jenin, is only the start of Israel's latest effort to stem the tide of Palestinian suicide bombers. All told, it is to be a 225-mile security fence, in various forms, walling off Palestinians on the West Bank from Israel proper. Serious work on the first stage, of 60 miles, is to begin in the next few days, at a cost of about $100 million.

It is a measure of fear that what a year ago might have seemed an unlikely idea is now wildly popular among Israelis, though not all of them. Settlers and some right-wing Israelis oppose the idea, and Palestinians are uniformly against it.

The fence is a physical manifestation of the concept of "unilateral separation" that is gaining ground, espousing the view that Israel must simply break off all contact with the Palestinians.

This early stage of the fence, however, did not prevent two stout middle-aged Palestinian women in traditional dress, one carrying an enormous bundle of vegetables on her head, from clambering under the bars, resuming their burdens, and walking through the ditch and up a well-trodden path toward the nearby village of Zbuba.

When Israeli paramilitary border policemen passed by, they said the bars were just an initial step to stop cars and that the final operation would be much more elaborate.

The fence would run roughly near the old Green Line — or the seam, as Israelis call it — marking the land that Israel won in its 1948 war of independence. The line is now referred to as the pre-1967 boundary with the West Bank, which Israel took from Jordan in the war that year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/international/middleeast/16FENC.html