Defense Focus: Israel's fence -- Part 4

JERUSALEM, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- The Israeli government succinctly defines its controversial barrier, or security fence, on its official Web site as “an intrusion-detection fence, in the center, with sensors to warn of any intrusion.”

Alongside the fence runs “a ditch and a pyramid-shaped stack of six coils of barbed wire on the eastern side of the structure, barbed wire only on the western side.” Also parallel to the fence runs “a path enabling the patrol of the IDF -- Israel Defense Forces -- forces on both sides of the structure,” and there is a “smoothed strip of sand that runs parallel to the fence to detect footprints.”

Only about 6 percent of the barrier, the Israelis say, is comprised of what they call a “solid barrier system” -- in other words, a wall. The Israelis say the main purpose of the solid concrete portions of the barrier “is to prevent sniper fire into Israel and along major highways and roads." These sections look no different from the highway sound barriers that are so familiar alongside freeways and turnpikes in the United States and along motorways in Europe.

The barrier is therefore in structure low key and unprepossessing. It is not a huge, awesome construction like an underground missile firing base. It has only a fraction of the concrete and none of the enormous heavy artillery guns that were built in the French Maginot Line or Hitler’s Atlantic and Sniper Walls during World War II.

The barrier is also low tech. None of the technologies used to build it or guard it is less than 60 years old. Jeep-like patrol vehicles almost identical to the ones the U.S. Army used in World War II sweep along its dirt road. The barbed wire it uses was invented 120 years ago. Only the movement-detection sensors are relatively sophisticated, and even there the emphasis is on toughness and reliability rather than innovation. The fence does not require any new technologies, only an unfashionable and old-fashioned but curiously effective application of old ones.

Yet unlike such huge fortifications as the Maginot Line or the Atlantic Wall, the Israeli barrier works. When it became fully functional two years ago, the wave of suicide bombings that killed more than a thousand Israeli civilians during the five years of the second Palestinian intifada was stopped dead in its tracks. Since then not a single suicide bomber from either Gaza or the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank has been able to kill a single additional Israeli civilian. The cafes along the main arteries of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are now thronged with customers day and night as though the second intifada never happened. Even tourism has soared back to pre-intifada levels. The fence is doing its job.

And as we have noted in previous columns, it has also changed strategic calculations around the world, with major consequences for companies supplying the lower end of the market with low-tech but essential defense equipment.

India and Saudi Arabia are now major customers for barbed wire, ground sensors, night-vision equipment and jeep-like ground forces patrol vehicles because they have both invested in enormous passive defense; border-control systems far larger than Israel’s, Saudi Arabia's fences must guard it against incursions from Yemen and Iraq, and India's are along the line of control with Pakistan in Kashmir and all around its land border with Bangladesh.