In an editorial earlier this week titled “Up Against the Wall,” The New York Times mocks President Trump’s plan to build a wall to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants and uses Israel’s wall to keep out Palestinian terrorists as support. And it sounds slightly unhinged.
The editorial begins with a quote of some remarks by then-candidate Trump:
Trump: By the way, if you want to know if a wall works, just ask Israel. Israel built a wall and it worked.
Question: And they have rockets over it.
Trump: Yeah I know. Well, no. Now they’re doing rockets, yeah. That’s a – they have a – they have a different – they probably have a bigger – they have a different kind of problem. You have to build a real wall. They don’t have a real wall right now. They don’t have a wall that works.
The Times goes on to comment:
Did you get that?
- There’s a wall in Israel and it works.
- But it doesn’t work.
If you are confused, it’s probably your fault, because you are not Donald Trump, master builder, president of the United States and source of the quotation above, from an interview with The Times’s editorial board before the election.
Mr. Trump has always said stuff like this, things that are self-contradictory or untrue or breathlessly mindless. It didn’t matter so much back when he was just a rich guy who liked to share his opinions with the world the way some talk at the TV.
But what plainly comes through the exchange is Mr. Trump’s view that Israel’s wall continues as a success in terms of what it was built to achieve. Thus, he rightly notes that the wall works in the sense that it keeps terrorists out. He also rightly notes that it doesn’t work in terms of problem of rockets emanating over the Green Line. It was never envisioned as providing protection from rocket fire. To claim otherwise is just absurd.
Surely, though, the Times recognizes the difference. In fact, since the construction of the barrier, suicide attacks against Israelis from over the Green Line have become almost non-existent. Of course, even one is too much, but it defies reality to claim that the Israeli wall doesn’t work.
And the last time we looked, the U.S. is not concerned about dealing with rocket fire from Mexico. It is concerned about the free flow of undocumented aliens. Whether a wall between America and Mexico is a good idea, is not our point. What is, though, is that the Israeli model could work for us here as well.