Sharon’s unexpected declaration coincided with Israel’s hasty construction of a separation wall that disconnected it from the West Bank. The wall, which Israelis refer to as the “security fence” and Palestinians as the “apartheid wall,” is an imposing eight-meter-high, seven-hundred-kilometer concrete structure fitted with electronic fences, barbed wire, and highly sophisticated surveillance equipment.2 Israel ostensibly built this wall to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering its cities. Rather than building the wall on Israeli land or along the 1967 borders, however, the
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