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March 5, 2004/Adar 12 5764, Vol. 56, No. 24
Jerusalem citizens oppose security fence
DAN BARON
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
MEVASSERET ZION - This quiet corner of Israeli suburbia never needed to mend fences with its Arab neighbors - until the West Bank security barrier came along.
Now 200 residents of the affluent Jerusalem suburb Mevasseret Zion are lobbying alongside scores of Palestinian farmers for the controversial project to be rerouted, in a campaign that has vexed an Israeli defense establishment adamant that says it is only trying to save lives.
"We are hopeful this will change things in our part of the country and set a precedent for similar changes elsewhere," Mohammed Dahla, a Jerusalem lawyer handling a petition against the five-mile section of fence due to go up between Givat Ze'ev and Mevasseret, told JTA on March 1.
Farmers at eight Palestinian villages just over the Green Line - the boundary that divides Israel proper from the West Bank, captured from Jordan in 1967 - stand to lose access to 12,500 acres of land when the fence at Mevasseret goes up.
When construction began last week, hundreds of locals rioted outside the biggest villages, Bidu and Beit Furiq. Police opened fire, killing two local men.
The bloodshed shocked Mevasseret residents, the vast majority of whom never thought of the Arabs living in the next valley as a security threat. Apart from a brief spike in car thefts police attributed to local Pale-stinians, Mevasseret's 25,000 residents have been virtually untouched by more than three years of conflict in the Palestinian intifada.
Mevasseret veterans speak of deals for mutual respect struck between town elders and their counterparts in Bidu and Beit Furiq shortly after the villages came under Israeli rule in the 1967 Six-Day War.
But since the West Bank fence arrived, new fears have been felt on the streets of Mevasseret Zion, Hebrew for "Good Tidings of Zion."
"If the current planned route is acted on, it will blow up in our faces," local Sara Bartel said. The town's Palestinian neighbors "will feel discriminated against and frustrated, and violence will break out."
Bartel was one of 200 Mevasseret residents who signed a petition that per-suaded the High Court of Justice on Feb. 29 to issue a one-week stay on construction of the fence. Dahla said he expected to meet with Defense Ministry officials with a view to changing the route so that it approximates the Green Line and reduces land appropria-tions to the minimum.
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