Orion Magazine - March-April 2008

Even those leaders who are concerned about the environment don’t
want to appear in headlines as the person whose qualms about the
fence led to a terrorist getting through.

another, it might fall farther up the slope or farther down, so the Bedouin’s >elds are spread over the landscape. The odds are that some will fail, but others will thrive. Thus the Bedouin are few but need a lot of land to keep their community viable. If the fence divides them from >elds and springs on the Israeli side, they will face a much larger risk of crop failure.

The animals that live in the desert pursue a similar survival strategy. The largest is the ibex, a mountain goat with graceful, back-curving horns that roams the ridges and canyons, moving with the rains. “The ibexes spend the summer near the springs in the low areas near the Dead Sea. In the winter, when the rains turn the desert margins green, they ascend to the plateau above to graze,” explains Ron Frumkin, an environmentalist and independent ecological consultant who authored a report on the ecological implications of the barrier. The fence would cut o= their access to this grazing area, forcing them to remain near the springs and setting o= a chain of ecological repercussions. The ibex would overgraze the vegetation in the lowlands, encouraging greater erosion and thus destroying the habitats of smaller herbivores, such as rabbits. Remaining closer to the springs would also make them more vulnerable to predators, in particular the area’s handful of leopards. While the leopards would have full stomachs, they would be entirely cut o= from their fellows in the Negev desert. The Judean Desert’s leopard population has been severely depleted in recent decades: some were killed when they attacked livestock, house cats, and occasionally humans in the area’s villages; some were hunted illegally; and others apparently migrated in search of better and less dangerous hunting grounds. Only replenishment of the population from the Negev can ensure its survival.

The plans for the fence, drawn up with the cooperation of the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority, the state body responsible for conservation, call for tunnels to allow small mammals to be able to cross under the fence. That will help to a certain extent, but Frumkin says that foxes, jackals, and other such creatures are too big for the tunnels and that in any case there is no way to know whether the animals will even >nd and use tunnels built large enough to allow them to pass.

Herodion, a ?at-topped mountain southeast of Bethlehem and north of Mount Hetzron, is crowned by the ruins of a palace built by Herod the Great. We hadn’t come for the antiquities, however. What Boral had wanted to show me was the view. The site’s parking lot faces south, forming a balcony above the Teqoa riverbed, still lush and green after the winter rains. If any water was ?owing, it was too little for me to see. But the huge pipes that run under the road that crosses the canyon indicated that when it rains torrents rush down the canyon as ?ash ?oods that eventually reach the Dead Sea.

The well-ordered, spacious houses of two Israeli settlements lay on either side of the riverbed. Just below the mountain we stood on, right on the main road, was an army base and a clutch of Arab houses that looked faded, small, and run down compared to those in the settlements. Were Israel to want to build a barrier, it would be impossible to >nd a path that could divide Arab from Jew without blocking the riverbed. Boral had brought me here to demonstrate that there are ways to provide security without building a wall.