Sharon's plans, made concrete

"For a Palestinian state to be viable, it has to be contiguous, but people should think about the Jewish state," says Yuval Steinetz, chairman of the parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "It should be viable as well in this hostile region, and that means it should be defensible. It will be more difficult to defend the country with no strategic depth."

Mr. Steinetz says a viable Israel requires security zones around the coastal Tel Aviv area, around Jerusalem and along the Jordan Valley - in effect, the barrier's route. Indeed, a senior official told the Associated Press that the Jordan Valley barrier reflects Sharon's belief that Israel must have permanent control over the valley to buffer Israel from attacks from Jordan.

"Israel faces great challenges in the next five to ten years," Steinetz says.. "We don't know what will happen with Iraq. In case of a regional general conflagration, we have to have a way to keep the Syrians or Iranians from crawling in."

Increasingly, though, voices on the Israeli right and left are joining Palestinians who warn that Sharon, Steinetz and others are overlooking the threat from within.

"The classic argument is that you need the West Bank to provide a buffer," says Gerald Steinberg, director of Bar Ilan University's program on conflict management and negotiation. "The argument is, can you afford to give up that buffer zone? But we have to ask, what are the costs of keeping it?"

The dilemma has bedeviled Israel for decades. The country's founders wanted a state that was Jewish, democratic and anchored in their historical homeland, an area that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea into parts of Jordan. The early Zionists won their Jewish, democratic state in 1948. They gained their historic lands when they occupied the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

But it has been a Pyrrhic victory, because the presence of 3.2 million Palestinians in the territories means that Israel can only ever fulfill two of the three elements of its perceived national destiny.

To keep its biblical lands, Israel can only be Jewish if it denies Palestinians political rights. To be democratic, and give Palestinians a vote, means the loss of Israel's Jewish identity. To remain Jewish, democratic and hold the land requires expelling Israeli Arabs and Palestinians to other countries, an option likely to meet fierce international resistance.

For years, Israel has avoided examining this predicament too closely, but inaction has a cost. There are 4.9 million Jews in Israel and the territories and approximately 4.4 million Palestinian Arabs, according to Israel's Bureau of Statistics and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). With Palestinian women having an average of 5.9 children each, compared with Israeli women's 2.9 children, according to the UNFPA, Arabs are expected to outnumber Jews by 2015 at the latest.

In the meantime, maps show Israeli settlements and Palestinian towns often cheek-to-jowl. In many of these areas, where Palestinian villages fall on the western, or "Israeli" side of the barrier, they will be walled inside secondary barriers.

"What Sharon has done is hijack the fence not so much to keep Palestinians out of Israel as to keep Palestinians inside what he envisions as enclaves," says Mr. Alpher of the Jaffee Center. "It is not a vision that could conceivably be acceptable to Palestinians, and it makes it that much harder for Israel to deal with demographic problems."

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