It won't cut off "200,000 Palestinians" from Palestinian territory.
And it won't involve Israel annexing massive chunks of the West Bank.
Hebrew University Geography Professor Noam Shoval made those points in a lecture at the Asper Jewish Community Campus's Berney Theatre February 5, 2004.
The Jerusalem-born Shoval, who has a PhD in geography from Hebrew U, spoke about Israel's Security Fence - The Impacts on Israel and Jerusalem.
Shoval tackled myths that have sprung up about the fence over the past few years in his lecture, sponsored by the Winnipeg Chapter of Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University.
"Palestinians have managed to convince the international media that Israel is building a 600-kilometre concrete wall, eight metres high," he said, as maps of the wall, statistics and photos appeared on a screen behind him.
In fact, the "concrete wall" the media often use to make that point was built by a Canadian company at the end of the 1990s."It (originally) didn't have anything to do with the security fence,"the first section of which was finished only last July 31.
The Israeli government of the day arranged to have several kilometres of concrete wall built parallel to three large Palestinian towns. The reason? To prevent wouldbe Palestinian snipers from being able to"shoot across"Highway # 6, a new north-south toll road in Israel beside that concrete section, Shoval explained.
So far, only"8.3 kilometres"of the 198 kilometres of the security fence already built are made of concrete. Those stretches include the barrier beside (and around) Kalkilya, a Palestinian city that's only"13 kilometres"from the nearest Israeli town on the Mediterranean -"the same as the distance from Winnipeg's North to South End."
The barrier, which will eventually be 720 kilometres long, separating Israel from the West Bank, will be formidable enough, Shoval acknowledged.
Most of what's already gone up and remains to be built will be a chain-link metal fence. Coils of barbed wire run parallel to it, serving as the first and last obstacles. Next on one side, comes a ditch more than two metres deep, to stop vehicles from breaking through the barrier.
Sand paths on both sides allow for tracking of footprints of anybody trying or managing to get through. The fence also features surveillance cameras in towers to detect approaching dangers, and a paved patrol road for soldiers in vehicles.
The fence, itself, is filled with"electronic sensors".
"If somebody cuts through,"the sensors send a signal to a central control centre and to patrolling soldiers in jeeps." Contrary to Palestinian claims that building it will result in Israel annexing "50 per cent" of the West Bank, only a total of"six per cent"of that territory will be Israeli, once the fence is completed, Shoval claimed.
In fact, that won't be much more than Palestinian Authority negotiators offered Israel in a"final status"map they presented to Israeli negotiators at peace talks in Taba, Egypt, in January, 2000.
That map, which Shoval also illustrated on the screen, showed that those Palestinian officials agreed to allocate three areas containing the bulk of Israeli West Bank settlers to the Jewish state.
Those Palestinian negotiators were "leaving Israel with three per cent of the West Bank."
The separation plan the Sharon government has since approved allots only another three per cent of West Bank land to Israel.
That six per cent of West Bank territory, however, will contain "70 per cent" of the Jewish residents of the West Bank.
It will involve three indentations from the "green line" that unofficially separates Israel from the West Bank, to include a thin band of settlements as far east as Ariel, the biggest Jewish community in the West Bank. A second protrusion will connect the area around Maale Adumim, another large Israeli city in the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, to Israel, and a third, south of Jerusalem, will connect the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements to the rest of Israel.
As for Palestinian claims that the security fence will leave hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on the Israeli side,
Shoval claimed that number will total only "10,000" once the fence is finished, including Palestinians in the Jerusalem area.
He acknowledged, however, that once the fence in the Jerusalem area, now about one-half finished, is closer to completion, "up to 70,000" Palestinians from nearby towns will try to rent housing in the Jerusalem's Old City, so they won't be cut off from their jobs there.
Shoval said the fence is slated to be finished by "the end of this year."
The challenge to it being heard by the International Court of Justice in The Hague this month will probably delay completion, he predicted, but by "no more than half a year."
Shoval also pointed to another myth world media and the Palestinian Authority have fostered: that the fence is cutting thousands of Palestinian farmers off from their farmlands.
In fact, he said, there are"gates" every four kilometres, to permit farmers to reach their crops. "People with permits can pass every day to work on their plots, even after a suicide bombing."
As for other Palestinian claims - that"23 per cent"of the land for the fence has come from Palestinian landowners, that"85"Palestinian houses have been demolished, and that large numbers of Palestinian children are being cut off from their schools, Shoval replied: Only "one per cent" of the Palestinian land used was formerly private, and compensation is being offered; not a"single"Palestinian home has been destroyed in the fence-building process, and only"61"Palestinian schoolchildren have been affected.
Meanwhile, Shoval noted, the 198 kilometres of fence already built have already proven their worth.
Since that first stage of the fence opened last summer, "22" terrorists have tried to penetrate it.
"Twenty-one out of those 22 were blocked. One attempted at one of the crossings, but no one managed to cross the fence."
Shoval described the fence, and the increased security it will offer Israelis, as the biggest event in the Jewish state since the War of Independence of 1948 and the Six Day War of 1967.
As for precedents, Shoval said, "there are fences like the one in Israel between the U.S. and Mexico, in Northern Ireland, dividing Catholics and Pakistanis, in Cyprus, between Greeks and Cypriots, in Korea, dividing North and South.
"You know the saying: Good fences and high fences make good neighbors."
For more maps of completed and planned sections of Israel's security fence as of October, 2003, go to the Jewish Virtual Library on the Internet, and select the topic, Israel's Security Fence.</>