Israel is often condemned for the presence of various security walls that protect all Israelis from Palestinian Arab terrorism.
In fact, most nations have fences to protect their borders, and several use barriers in political disputes:
■ The United States built a fence to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants.
■ Spain built a fence to separate its enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla from Morocco to prevent people from sub-Saharan Africa from entering Europe.
■ India constructed a 460-mile barrier in Kashmir to halt infiltrations supported by Pakistan.
■ Saudi Arabia built a sixty-mile barrier along an undefined border zone with Yemen to halt arms smuggling, and, subsequently, erected new barriers in response to the escalation of the civil war in Yemen.
The Saudis also built a nearly six-hundred-mile fence on the border with Iraq.
■ Turkey built a barrier in the southern province of Alexandretta, which was formerly in Syria and is an area that Syria claims as its own. In 2015, Turkey announced plans to further fortify its border with Syria after a suicide bombing.
■ In Cyprus, the UN sponsored a security fence reinforcing the island’s de facto partition.
■ Tunisia began to construct a fence to guard its border with Libya after an attack on a Tunisian beach hotel killed thirty-eight foreign tourists.
■ The British built barriers to separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast.
■ Ironically, after condemning Israel’s barrier, the UN announced plans to build its own fence to improve security around its New York headquarters.
■ Three decades before any of these fortifications were built, Morocco built the oldest and longest security barrier to separate areas controlled by Morocco and the Polisario. In 2014, Morocco began construction of a new divider along its border with Algeria.
Only Israel’s security fence has been the subject of UN condemnation and a ruling by the International Court of Justice; one more example of the double standard applied to Israel.