Dershowitz said Sunday’s terrorist attack, in which a Palestinian bomber killed eight Israelis and wounded dozens on a Jerusalem bus, underscored the need for the barrier.
“If this fence had been up, lives would have been saved,” he said.
Rami R. Sarafa ’07, treasurer of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee and a member of the Society of Arab Students, said the argument that the barrier will prevent terrorist attacks against Israel is not valid because “there’s going to be an angry population of about 300,000 Palestinians that will still be on the Israeli side of the wall and therefore have access to Israel proper.”
“I can’t imagine that this more desperate, anguished and now isolated population will have much incentive to pacify and cease attacks on Israel,” he said.
The barrier—a combination of walls, razor-wire fences and electronic monitors—runs around, and in some places through, the West Bank. If completed, it will extend over 450 miles.
Dershowitz said the barrier is not a static, rigid boundary.
“I’ve examined the fence. A very, very small part of it is wall, most of it is a moveable fence. In fact, yesterday, much of it was moved and it will continue to move all the time,” he said.
When the idea of building a security fence in Israel first arose, Eric R. Trager ’05 was an intern in the Knesset, or Israeli parliament.
Trager, who is secretary of the Harvard Students for Israel, called the barrier an “unfortunate necessary evil” brought on by the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to crack down on Palestinian terrorism.
“If people are going to oppose the Israeli security fence, which is a passive means of Israel defending itself against Palestinian terrorism, they have to come up with an alternative through which it can protect its citizens,” he said.
Suvrat Raju, a second-year graduate student in physics at Harvard and member of the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice, agreed that Israel has a right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks but maintained that “the route of the wall suggests that the [Ariel] Sharon administration is primarily concerned with acquiring Palestinian land.”
The barrier is not a “constructive step,” Raju said in an e-mail.
“It will annex land, violate the human rights of Palestinians and integrate settlements into Israel,” he said. “This reduces the viability of a future Palestinian state and creates a hostile atmosphere that is detrimental to the security of Israeli citizens.”
—Materials from the Associated Press were used in this story.
—Staff writer Andrew C. Esensten can be reached at esenst@fas.harvard.edu.