Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on Tuesday that he has won a years-long battle to get authority to build a new hi-tech border fence with Jordan to block smuggling, especially from Iran.
An announcement said that the fence, which will include a variety of cutting-edge sensors and cost tens of millions of shekels, would be constructed “a number of months,” but did not set a formal end date.
It was unclear at press time how Katz had overcome the alleged opposition of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and possibly also from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who various defense officials have accused of preventing the idea from going forward in recent years.
The defense establishment has asked for a budget to build the wall in previous requests leading into 2024 and again leading into 2025 - and until now this was never approved by the Finance Ministry and the government.
Former IDF central commander Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yehuda Fuchs had pushed for the fence for a long time, even sending a formal letter of warning to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi about the dangers of failing to build a fence, before retiring. Fuchs had pointed the finger at the Finance Ministry.
However, simply the fact that Katz has entered into office and Netanyahu may have wanted him to get a quick win to move the narrative on from Katz’s recently fired and highly-respected predecessor, Yoav Gallant, could have been a factor.
Gallant had publicly pushed for the fence multiple times and had cited that years before the government had already approved such a fence, only to be ignored allegedly by Smotrich and Netanyahu, even after the Israeli public became much more sensitive about border security after Hamas’s 2023 invasion.
In addition, whereas Gallant had significant political pull with security-minded Israelis, he had little to hold over Smotrich politically, and Katz, who is more of a long-time political maneuverer, may have had more to negotiate with regarding Smotrich.
Smotrich praises the move
Smotrich also was one of the few officials who publicly praised Katz on Friday when the defense minister rescinded any new administrative detention orders against violent Jewish activists, though this move was mostly criticized by current and former security chiefs as potentially empowering such extremists regarding their attacks on Palestinians.
Katz may also give Smotrich a freer hand regarding building new outposts in the West Bank despite opposition within the IDF and from Israeli allies in the EU and US.
A spokesman for Smotrich rejected this narrative saying he has always supported a new fence on the Jordan border.
Pressed for previous statements Smotrich made in favor of the fence or regarding why such a fence was not built until now, he pointed the finger back at the IDF, saying that if it had really wanted to build the fence, no one could really have resisted.
Rather, the spokesman said the IDF itself likely did not prioritize the issue given the intense wars in the North and the South.
Further, the spokesman noted a tour of the Jordan border which Smotrich took in mid-September with Netanyahu in which he discussed the importance of reducing smuggling and penetrations of the border. Smotrich does not specifically mention a new fence in his public statement, but he does discuss budgeting new items to protect Israel in a positive way.
It was also unclear what changes would be made to the budget to account for the new spending of tens of millions of shekels.
A spokesman for Smotrich said that this sum of money was tiny for the IDF and that it could easily shift funds from one or another project to cover it.
"We see a relentless and institutionalized Iranian effort to establish an eastern front against the State of Israel," said Katz on Monday night.
"I have decided to intensively promote the construction of the fence on the eastern border between Israel and Jordan," he added, "We are going to do it very quickly."
"We cannot lose in this campaign against the establishment of the eastern front, and we will have to do root cause treatment in some places to prevent Judea and Samaria and the refugee camps from becoming a model for Gaza."
The Defense Ministry said that it was starting to work on producing the new barrier material as well as the intelligence collection and communication sensors and network that would be integrated into the new fence, as well as mapping out the actual topography.
Defense Ministry Director-General Eyal Zamir said he had directed Brig. Gen. Eran Ofir and the engineering and building department of the ministry to coordinate the project.
It was unclear if the IDF would also increase its border troop presence with Jordan or would rely more on technology as it did with Gaza leading up to the 2023 Hamas invasion.
Jordan has been traditionally viewed as a quiet and safe border since a peace deal between the countries in 1995 and the nations even share high level intelligence to fight terror.
But Israel believes that Iran is outplaying the Jordanians and sometimes succeeding at smuggling high level weapons into the West Bank for terror purposes, a phenomenon that even started earlier in 2023 and has only gotten worse.