Maximum security maximizes profits. But there's a price.
Once upon a time, in that great cauldron of epic mythology optimistically called the Holy Land, there lived two peoples. These two tribes were the despair of sensible peoples in happier places. After 50 years of incessant war, oppression, uprising, occupation, annexation, demolition, torture, imprisonment, deportation, and enthusiastically inventive terrorism, they became the world's poster children for utterly dysfunctional cultural, economic, national, and military interactions.
They didn't allow each other real names, because they each refused to formally recognize the other's existence. Side I was the ultimate unassimilable ethnic group. Side P, which should have been doing at least as well as, say, the Lebanese or the Cypriots, preferred hating Side I to building a functional economy, civil society, or government.
The two sides were offered a "road map to peace," but everyone knew it would lead to a dead end. After all, who needs a road when you've got the Wall?
The 250-mile barrier around the West Bank, currently being constructed by Side I at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion, is a 21st-century version of the Maginot Line. The people on Side P call it the Apartheid Wall, implying that it's inherently unjust and likely to go away. Its builders use several euphe-misms: Seam Zone, Green Line, Separation Fence.
Ground was broken in June 2002, and already the Wall makes its long-gone Berlin prototype look like something out of a city park. The structure is a vast, forbidding concrete dike reaching as high as three stories in places and featuring enormous free-fire bastions that are dead ringers for the stone redoubts of a medieval castle. It's surrounded by electric fencing, patrolled by aerial drones, and outfitted with cameras, infrared sensors, and surveillance balloons.
Soon, thanks to the Wall, Sides I and P really will be two different sides, physically and permanently. They won't even be able to see each other; suddenly, the enemy will become little more than a blank concrete slab. Humanizing interaction will become impossible, except for email - but even that medium has found the two sides at odds: In 2001, Mona Awana, a bright and pretty young Side P activist and journalist, used her cyberchat skills to lure a 16-year-old Side I boy named Ofir Nahum into a deadly Kalashnikov ambush.
The Wall is a practical solution of sorts - better than war and a lot more psychologically realistic than outsiders' blather about peace. After all, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, who once slaughtered each other's children with gusto, erected a wall in 1974, and it has mellowed them considerably. The DMZ between North and South Korea is now a wildlife refuge. The Great Wall of China is a tourist attraction. So what could be wrong with the Great Wall of the Holy Land, besides the fact that it fails to adhere to UN-recognized borders, traps innocent Side Ps in Side I territory, screws up the water table, and wastes useful farming acreage?
The problem is that the Wall has global reach. It's a product of multinationals such as the Magal Group. Magal, whose board features spooky military-industrial veterans from Side I, has subsidiaries in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Mexico, plus an office in China. It has a compelling commercial interest in extending the Wall far, wide, and deep.
The Magal Group has a 40 percent market share in perimeter intrusion-detection systems worldwide. So Magal seals not only Side I's purported national borders but also maximum-security prisons, nuclear facilities, military bases, utilities, and estates of the ultrarich in 70 countries. Seam Zones turn out to be just about everywhere: Magal's newest business, New York-based Smart Interactive, sells high tech intrusion detection to American banks, credit unions, and warehouses. Magal's tech is in Chicago's busy airport, in distant India, in Thailand. Even in the United Arab Emirates, where the company's Canadian subsidiary, Senstar-Stellar, will soon be marketing the Wall's security spinoffs to nervous, wealthy Arab sheiks.
Nowadays, every man, woman, and child in every fiercely defended airport doffs their shoes in homage to Richard "Shoebomber" Reid. It's a pain in the neck, but hey, there's big money in those scanners. And the farther we go down that road, the faster we'll all be up against the Wall.
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