Dany was charged with building the full separation wall just after March 2002, the bloodiest month of the Second Intifada. He refused to elevate the uprising by using that name, instead referring to it as the “Palestinian Terror Attack.” In the thirty-one days of March, more than 120 Israelis and twice as many Palestinians were killed. Near the end of the month, a Hamas suicide bomber from Tulkarem attacked a Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, killing thirty. It was the deadliest explosion inside the State of Israel in its history. “As long as there is occupation, there will be a resistance,” a Hamas political leader declared. “So we say it clearly: Occupation should be stopped and then there will be something else.”
For the preceding year and a half, Dany had been tasked by IDF Central Command with figuring out how to stop the attacks, and, more specifically, prevent Palestinians from entering Israeli cities. Initially, he sought temporary solutions, believing that the intifada would pass after a few months and the two sides would resume negotiations. He was right about the renewed talks but not about the uprising. Neither the talks nor the army’s responses succeeded in bringing it to an end. Dany’s first project was to limit the points of entry into Jewish areas, channeling all Palestinian traffic in the West Bank onto the main roads by shutting down entrances, exits, and connective arteries with fences, gates, barriers, cement blocks, and earthen mounds. The army then quadrupled the number of checkpoints in the West Bank, stopping every Palestinian car that entered Israel, its settlements, or annexed East Jerusalem.
But the checkpoints were like gates in the desert, Dany observed. They were very easy to bypass on foot. Next the army decided to arrest and assassinate the intifada’s commanders. As the resident map expert, Dany brought aerial photos of the homes of Palestinian militants when it was time for the cabinet to approve plans of attack. Within a few months, more than one hundred of the top Palestinian fighters had been apprehended. New leaders soon took their place. After that, the army shut down explosives factories, putting three hundred out of operation. Explosives didn’t need to be mass produced, however. They could be made inside a bathtub or a kitchen sink.
All the while, the violence was intensifying. Dany was afraid to send his daughter to school in Jerusalem. Bombs were exploding all over: buses, cafés, markets, nightclubs, and pedestrian boulevards. Nowhere felt safe. With the country burning, there was enormous pressure on the government to do something. Both sides of the political spectrum called for separation from the Palestinians. Dany concluded that the only viable solution was to put up an extensive series of fences and walls. He and his colleagues devised plans for a separation barrier, expanding on the West Bank walls built during Oslo.
After the Passover bombing, Prime Minister Sharon decided to take up Dany’s recommendation. The plan was approved by the government two weeks later. The main debate was not over whether to erect a barrier but where it would be placed. There was fear on the right and hope on the left that whatever went up would serve not as a temporary security solution but as a permanent boundary. Israel had no internationally recognized borders with Gaza or the West Bank. Even the 1949 armistice line—known as the Green Line, for the color in which it was drawn on the 1949 maps—had never been sanctioned as a permanent border. After the 1967 war, Israel prohibited printing the Green Line on official maps.
The question of how much of the West Bank would be carved off by the barrier was one of the most divisive in Israeli society. The umbrella body for settlements, known as the Yesha Council, campaigned for it to go up around the islands of Palestinian autonomy that were designated Area A. The Zionist left—and the United States—wanted something that looked less like a series of cages around Palestinian towns and more like a border fence that wrapped around the major settlement blocs but otherwise adhered fairly closely to the Green Line.
Sharon aimed to avoid the impression of drawing a final border. There would be carping from the United States and the international community if the barrier looked like an excuse for a land grab: in the early plans, 90 percent of its route strayed from the Green Line, seizing 16 percent of the West Bank for Israel. This did not include territory in the Jordan Valley—more than 20 percent of the West Bank—to be carved out by another enclosure in some of the initial plans. Sharon also worried that the settlers, for their part, would complain that the route followed the Green Line too closely, handing a victory to terrorist extortion. As a ruse, he instructed Dany to place a series of pillars in the West Bank more than a mile beyond the Green Line, to suggest that the barrier might be built there and that the actual location was merely one of several possible borders.
Within Sharon’s government, there were almost as many views about the location of the barrier as there were ministers. Those who hankered for full annexation argued that the only route should be along the border with Jordan—that is, encompassing the entire West Bank. Others believed that the primary objective should be to encircle as many settlers as possible while walling off most Palestinians. The IDF chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, echoed the Yesha Council’s idea of putting walls around the major Palestinian cities. Dany was against it: he didn’t think Israel could get away with placing so many people in sealed ghettos, nor did he think the plan would work: attackers could easily come from the villages outside the walls. Still other ministers lobbied for the barrier to go inside the Green Line, so as to place large numbers of Palestinian citizens of Israel on the same side as the West Bank. This scheme for fencing off fellow citizens was justified by the claim that many of them had protested in support of the intifada and thus their loyalty was to the Palestinian nation, not to the Jewish state.
Dany worked on the project night and day. He assembled a team of more than twenty experts—engineers, archaeologists, conservationists, environmental scientists, and Civil Administration officials with knowledge of land registration, water, electricity, and education. They went to the field to examine every inch of the proposed 450-mile route. The PA refused to cooperate with its construction, so Dany spoke directly to the Palestinian farmers and land owners whose towns and livelihoods the project would destroy.
Since the barrier would snake around Israeli settlements and Palestinian communities, doubling back on itself in some areas and creating entirely closed Palestinian enclaves in others, its route was more than twice the length of the Green Line, taking in 80 percent of the settlers. It formed a giant scar across the land. In most parts of the West Bank, it was made up of fences, trenches, barbed wire, cameras, censors, access roads for military vehicles, and watchtowers. But along more than forty miles of it—especially in urban districts such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and Qalqilya—it was a twenty-six-foot-tall concrete wall.