BEIRUT - Since its establishment, the Israeli entity has relied on walls, both physical and ideological, as central pillars of its security doctrine. The project itself emerged from the logic of “preventive isolation”:  fortifying settlements against an Arab environment portrayed in Zionist discourse as inherently “hostile.” 

This entrenched paranoia produced successive generations of barriers: from the enclosure around Gaza, to the apartheid wall across the West Bank, and now the massive concrete blocks Israel is raising along the Lebanese border — especially opposite the plain of Yaroun, where it hopes to manufacture a “secure perimeter” shielding its northern frontier from the resistance (Hezbollah).

Yet none of this is new. It is merely a repetition of decades of failed strategies built on the false promise of “absolute security,” a concept marketed by the Israeli military since its inception.

A history of retreat behind barriers

Since the 1950s, Israel has surrounded its borders with Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Egypt with barbed wire, minefields, and fences. But the 1973 war, and later the rise of Palestinian resistance in southern Lebanon, exposed the fragility of these so-called “protected borders.” 

Each new barrier was met with a new form of resistance that surpassed it.

The apartheid wall built in the West Bank in 2002 after the Second Intifada was presented as a shield against “Palestinian terrorism.” In reality, it isolated Israel from the world. 

In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared the wall illegal, violating Palestinians’ rights to land, movement, and life. Stretching more than 700 kilometers, the wall still failed to stop resistance, including attacks originating within the occupied territory itself.

In Gaza, Israel built an underground steel wall armed with electronic sensors designed to detect tunnels. Yet the wars of 2021 and 2023 proved its limits, as resistance fighters breached it using simple tools, proving that no technical barrier can outmatch the will that drives a people fighting for freedom.

Walls beyond Palestine

Today, Israel is extending this architecture of isolation to the borders of Lebanon and Syria.

The most striking example is the massive barrier rising opposite the Yaroun plain, part of a defensive chain stretching from Naqoura to Al-Adaysseh and reaching up to nine meters high. Israel claims this wall aims to prevent “Hezbollah infiltration” amid rising tensions in the north.

But behind this narrative lies a deeper truth: a security doctrine so riddled with anxiety that it sees every hilltop, stone, orchard, and village in southern Lebanon — Yaroun included — as an existential threat.

Historically, Israel has never succeeded in securing its northern borders. 

From the 1982 invasion until the withdrawal in 2000, Lebanese resistance forces repeatedly penetrated and dismantled Israeli fortifications, from steel gates to electronic surveillance systems. 

Today, as Israel pours fresh concrete opposite Yaroun, it merely resurrects an old delusion: that concrete can replace justice, and that danger comes from outside rather than from the very nature of occupation itself.

Between wall and sky

Politically speaking, Israel’s walls symbolize the failure of the “regional integration” project promoted by the West through normalization agreements.
While Israel claims to belong to a “New Middle East,” in practice it retreats further inward, isolating itself behind barricades. 

These walls have not delivered security; they have deepened Israel’s psychological and political siege, and reinforced its identity as a settler entity trapped in fear.

Environmentally speaking, these projects have devastated Palestinian and Lebanese agricultural lands, fragmented communities, and seized water resources. 
The wall has become a monument not only to separation, but to the slow erosion of place — especially in front of villages like Yaroun, whose geography Israel seeks to reshape into a buffer zone for its anxieties.

And now, as Israel erects its latest barrier along the edge of Yaroun, it unknowingly builds yet another monument to its failure to grasp the logic of history: a people placed under siege do not disappear — they adapt, endure, and resist.

Every wall Israel raises becomes a mirror reflecting its own fragility, and a new source of strength for those who stand against it.