In his latest NRO column, Victor Davis Hanson examines the idea of an Israeli wall:

Walls, for better or worse […] bring to disputes both political and moral clarity — especially in the manner that they reveal exactly who wants to broach them and in what direction. The Berlin Wall and the DMZ in Korea made it clear that purportedly content communists wanted out of their countries more than supposedly exploited Westerners wanted in. Indeed, since a sudden attack was always more likely to come from the communist Russian or Korean militaries, such barricades were especially revealing: It was more important for the commissars to stop refugees from leaving their own societies than it was in placing obstacles in the very path of their own planned armored assaults.

The United States and Mexico are often criticized for sharing an ambivalent policy toward illegal immigration: The borders stayed porous as we played down our enormous appetite for unskilled aliens, while they claimed that American, not Mexican, pathology was the engine of mass flight from their beloved motherland.

But the growing fortifications in the American Southwest now reveal that at least officially the United States does not want illegal aliens to broach its borders and that Mexicans most surely do. In the same manner, the new Israeli wall has now brought a great deal of light to the heat of the Middle East. Since the contours of the fortifications are not all that different from the 1967 borders, Palestinians should be rejoicing at being walled off from their hated enemies. But now we are learning that it simply is not so.

While a majority of Palestinians praise their countrymen who sneak into Israel to blow up Jewish women and children, thousands apparently also do not want such murder to result in being completely cut-off from the Jewish state — the source of jobs, capital, and ideas that it turns out many Palestinians appreciate.

Mr. Arafat, whose state-run media glorifies suicide-murdering more than his aides pro forma denounce it, is aghast for other reasons. With this new fence, he really will have his own private state of sorts — a land cut off from the Jews but with an open border to all his beloved Arab neighbors. His ire, rather than delight, suggests that the Palestinian Authority is parasitic on Israel: It wants an open border with a free, democratic, and economically vibrant neighbor for profit and fun — but it also needs an indefensible populace ‘a stone’s throw away’ that it can threaten and from time to time vent frustrations at due to the failure of its own corrupt government. Without accessible Jews, who is Arafat to terrorize or profit from?

Sad as it is to say, sometimes razor wire and electronic sensors are far more useful in the service of peace than all the “dialogue” and lip-service pluralism you can pile into a diplomat’s stretch limo. I’ve written here before about the need for a wholesale change in the attitude of Palestinians toward the Jewish state — an attitude produced unnaturally by a system of cynical indoctrination and official reinforcements. That still applies.

For the time being, though — while the Palestinians are reforming their goverment and striving to build a productive society of their own — making it more difficult for Hamas to shuttle exploding teens into the markets and bustops of Israel proper seems like a prudent idea. Doesn’t it?