The statement should have come as no surprise, after all I had heard during the previous three hours, but still, I was stunned. The speaker was one of two British journalists I'd spent the morning with in and around the West Bank town of Kalkilyah. The Israel Defense Forces were taking foreign reporters on a tour of what's known in Hebrew as the "separation fence" late last month, days before Israel's Supreme Court balanced humanitarian and security considerations, ordering the army to remove a small portion of the barrier, and to re-route other sections that might impose undue hardships on Palestinians.

Conducting our tour was a lieutenant colonel named Shai, the former battalion commander for the area; he previously served in other hotbeds of terrorist activity, including the West Bank towns of Jenin and Tulkarem. Also in the van: an IDF spokesman, and the two Brits: Harriet, a foreign editor of the influential UK publication The Guardian, and Martin, a correspondent for the Times of London.

It was in 2001 that The Guardian editorialized, "The establishment of (the State of Israel) has been bought at a very high cost in human rights and human lives. It must be apparent that the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely." Having questioned Israel's right to exist, the paper later called Israel's actions in Jenin "every bit as repellent" as the Al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. on September 11^th.

The Times, considered a tad more even-handed in its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, published this depiction of the so-called massacre in Jenin (which according to a subsequent United Nations report, never happened) from one of its correspondents: "Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life."

I was, therefore, not particularly expecting objectivity from my fellow travelers, although I embarked on our trip with my own baggage. As a Hebrew-speaking Jew who has spent time in Israel nearly every other year since 1970, one with scores of friends and relatives in the country, I had already come to the tentative conclusion that the security fence was a desperately-needed, non-violent, changeable solution... possibly the only one at this moment... to the murderous wave of terrorism that has taken the lives of one thousand Israelis over the last four years, injured another six thousand, and wounded the Israeli psyche and the Zionist enterprise in ways that perhaps will not become clear for some time.

Now (to the dismay, incidentally, of my Israeli cousins) I was back in Kalkilya... a village I first visited three years after the 1967 Six-Day War. I still have the photo I took then of a disarmed rocket-launcher aimed in the general direction of Tel Aviv. Just over three decades later, a suicide bomber left Kalkilya and blew himself up outside Tel Aviv's Dolphinarium disco, killing 21 young people.

Shai, a wiry, upbeat, fast-talking Israeli with a desert-dry sense of humor, pointed to the bustling highway that skirts the town. "This is Route 6, the main route between the north and south of Israel. It's a toll road. I'm not sure how it is in England, but I don't know any Israeli that will pay money to get shot. We don't like that over here, so we built this wall to make sure no Palestinians can shoot onto the road". (Less than four percent of the barrier is comprised of concrete walls, which are used only in sniper-prone areas).

Shai's comments were not theoretical; he later revealed that while he was in charge of the area, a terrorist had opened fire on an Israeli family returning from a wedding. A seven-year-old girl was killed, and Shai removed her body from the car. "When you take out a child with a big hole in her chest," he said, lowering his voice and pointing to the spot where the attack occurred, "you understand why you need this wall. We measured the angle from the highest house where a sniper might be hiding to the road, and built it accordingly."

Harriet had a question, but it was not about the horror that Shai, himself a father of young children, had witnessed that day. "So if they build something higher," she asked, "you'll raise the wall?"

No, Shai explained, the army has basically cleared the terrorists out of Kalkilya, so one benefit for the residents is that an Israeli army battalion no longer must be stationed inside the town. "Wait," Harriet interrupted, "are you trying to say that the fence is making life better for the Palestinians?," lavishly spreading a thick layer of sarcasm atop the word "better."

"In some cases, yes," replied Shai... echoing recent comments by the head of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, who said the retreat of the Israeli army following the construction of the security fence has led to a revitalization of business, nightlife, and investment in that Palestinian community.

Martin was having none of it. "This wall is killing Kalkilya, economically," he opined, clueless to the irony in his choice of words. "Do you see signs of ordinary citizens turning into terrorists because of it?" The questions were coming fast and furious now. "Why do you need so much space for the fence? What if Lebanon or Syria said 'We need a few kilometers of your land for security, in case Israel invades.' You'd go mad, wouldn't you?"

I listened without comment, and, without speaking Hebrew to the Israelis. "Eavesdropping," as I felt I was doing, on inquiries that seemed almost willful in their disregard of any facts being presented, was alternately infuriating and comical. As we stood next to the wire fence and its motion detectors, Martin asked "Is it electrified?" "Touch it and see," Shai suggested. As we laughed... nervously... Shai, then Martin, grabbed the barrier. "It's electronic," said the soldier, "not electric. We're not trying to electrocute them; we're trying to stop them from coming in and killing us."

He recited a litany of terrorist incidents and a flood of statistics, contrasting the number of Israelis murdered on a particular road in 2002 (63) with the figure this year, after the completion of the fence in that area (zero). In a more subdued tone, Shai spoke of the bus with a suicide bomber on board that he happened to be driving behind on Mount Meron two years ago. He was one of the first on the scene, removing bodies and limbs, and giving CPR to a Filipino woman who died in his arms. "You don't forget something like that," he concluded, "and it makes you understand why we need this fence."

But Harriet and Martin persevered. "How long must the Palestinians wait at this checkpoint?" "How far inside the green line will the fence go in that area?" "Can you shoot them from the fence, or are those just cameras up there?" "You say you compensate Palestinians if you confiscate land for the fence; what if there are olive trees growing on that section for 100 years; how can you compensate them for that?"

We entered command headquarters, with its banks of video screens monitoring every section of the barrier. We saw a tape of a Palestinian from the previous night, being apprehended while trying to get over the fence back into Kalkilya after a day of working illegally in Israel. "How long will he be held?," was the question this time. "He's already home, once it was determined he wasn't a terrorist," came the response.

Each description of efforts to ease the disruption caused to Palestinian life was met with skepticism; every mention of death and destruction on the Israeli side was bypassed in favor of intricate debates over land confiscation and access to fields.

As our tour came to its conclusion, I told my journalistic colleagues I had a few queries for them. "It seems to me," I began, "that most of the British coverage I've seen of this story is inordinately focused on the inconveniences suffered by the Palestinians due to this fence, as opposed to the Israeli lives it is apparently saving. Why might that be?"

After heated denials by both journalists, Martin said "I could turn the question around. Why is there no coverage in America given to the root causes of terrorism? We try to understand why Palestinian people feel driven to take such extreme measures as suicide bombings. You have to scratch under the surface. I understand why Israel is building a wall to stop terror, but terrorists only flourish if they have grievances to exploit."

"Grievances? You know, I'm from New York," I responded. "Should I try to understand the grievances of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center?"

"Well, yes," answered Martin. "I think Bin Laden tapped into grievances." Harriet chimed in, "Do you think they just did it for fun? They have reasons."

Our conversation was over. I returned to New York, where I later read the International Court of Justice's decision declaring Israel's security fence illegal, which eerily echoed the deep concern of my English friends about the property of Palestinians over the lives of Jews.

And Harriet and Martin returned to Great Britain, where they may have been enjoying a spot of tea and a scone as they read about last Sunday's bus-stop bombing in Tel Aviv, in which more than 30 people were wounded and a strikingly beautiful 19-year-old woman was torn apart by the metal bolts and ball bearings tightly packed into an explosive device. Perhaps the parents of Maayan Naim, who loved to dance and wanted to study and travel the world, would be comforted by knowing the terrorist who so brutally murdered their daughter had "grievances." Somehow, I think not.