Sharon approves hi-tech security plan to seal off Jerusalem in its entirety
By Phil Reeves in Jerusalem
30 January 2002
Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, approved a plan yesterday for security measures to seal off Jerusalem from the West Bank. The plan is expected to include look-out towers, electronic cameras, trenches and more military checkpoints.
Proposals to fortify the entire metropolis – including its occupied Arab eastern half – came as the city spent another day on the highest alert. Mr Sharon – who campaigned for election last year on a promise of providing security – met senior officials from the Israeli police, army, intelligence services and City Hall to discuss the plan, called "Enveloping Jerusalem".
Events were watched closely by his critics, who pointed out that Israel has been steadily strengthening its political control of the city, and the long military blockade of the occupied territories has, so far, failed to stop Palestinian attacks.
Mr Sharon appears to have rejected police proposals that the plan should include building a wall to separate parts of east and west Jerusalem. He refused on the grounds that it would be tantamount to the re-division of the city – flying in the face of Israeli opinion that it should be their unified capital.
Mr Sharon said: "The plan must be treated as a whole, covering the Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods alike."The Public Security Minister, Uzi Landau, a hardline right-winger, said talk of walls dividing the city was "simply nonsense". He said the plan was an effort to build a barrier between Jerusalem and "the Arab congestion" around it.
The idea of separation has long been debated in Israel, despite the enormous cost and impracticality of disentangling the Arab and Jewish populations – closely entwined in some areas – and despite the 1.2 million Arabs with Israeli citizenship, or ID papers, living inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. |
