The main objections to the Israeli security fence center on two issues: its parameters and its effect on the economic viability of a future Palestinian state. The first issue could be negotiated between the parties. But in the absence of honest partners with whom to negotiate, Israel should keep building. Every country has the right to defend itself by peaceful means -- and putting up a wall to keep out terrorists is certainly within that right. If, at some future point, new borders are agreed upon, the wall can be moved.
The second objection is in some ways the more difficult to overcome. Despite billions of dollars in aid from the United States and the international community, the Palestinian people remain impoverished. More than 115,000 Palestinians have lost their jobs in Israel since the beginning of the current Intifada in 2000 because they cannot freely travel from the territories to their jobs.
This is not Israel's problem, but the Palestinians'. Their corrupt leaders have been unable or unwilling to provide jobs for them in the territories -- except in building more suicide bombs. The formation of a Palestinian state won't do anything to create jobs for Palestinians. And Israel would be better off not depending on Palestinian labor in the future. If Israel must import labor, why not do so from countries like Mexico, or Guatemala, or El Salvador, whose workers have already demonstrated their willingness to take enormous risks and travel great distances in search of jobs?
"Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out," the poet Robert Frost once wrote. Israel's fence may never make good neighbors of the Palestinians, but it will wall out the murderers among them.