Fencing the Last Sky: Excavating Palestine after Israel's "Separation Wall"

Since 2002, the "Separation Fence” has emerged as Israel's most definitive effort at reshaping the West Bank to date. Surveying the project's genealogy, ideological underpinnings, and diplomatic context, the article maps its concomitant implications: the bantustanization of the West Bank and any Palestinian state on some 50 percent of the territory; the fragmentation of Palestinian society and economy; the expansion and consolidation of Israeli settlement; and the physical and "virtual" transfer that looms as its conclusion. The author argues inter alia that the project has thus rendered irrelevant the current international "mediations" in the conflict and terminally threatens also the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict.

Peter Lagerquist is a writer and researcher based in Israel and Palestine. He would like to thank Jan de Jong for contributing maps, calculations, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Palestinian terrain to this article.