Former Mossad agent Gad Shimron reports that while the European Union attacks Israel mercilessly for the partition fence it's building to protect Jewish lives, the EU itself funds and operates a similar fence designed only to protect itself from illegal immigrants.



The fence is located in a Spanish enclave in northwestern Africa, the coastal city of Ceuta just across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain. Unknown to most of the world, when Spain handed over most of northern Morocco to the newly independent kingdom in 1956, Spain retained Ceuta and Melilla (about 250 kilometers further east) - thus that the European Union is present in Africa as well. Poverty-stricken Moroccans attempting to cross into Ceuta, from where they will then be able to work anywhere in Europe because of the EU's no-checkpoints policy, are stopped in their tracks by the eight-meter-high, double layer fence. Funding for the fence, some 60 million Euros, came from European Union coffers.



Frequent Spanish patrols, together with policemen who do not hesitate to beat potential infiltrators, render crossing the partition a nearly impossible mission - but the needy say they will continue to try. One of the many who are determined to immigrate to Europe said, "Whoever came all this difficult way and reaches the mountains of northern Morocco, opposite the fence of Ceuta, will not give up. You see the lights of Ceuta? As far as we're concerned, that's the Promised Land. The people here are in despair and will do anything to pass over that fence, enter Spain, and from there continue northward and blend in with the other millions of immigrants in Europe."



The EU continues to oppose Israel's fence, constructed to protect against murderous terrorists and suicide bombs - even as it plans to build another fence of its own around Spain's second enclave in northern Africa, the Moroccan town of Melilla. "It appears," concludes Gad Shimron in Maariv today, "that from a European point of view, the ethical aspects of a separation fence are sometimes a matter of geography."