Thanks to Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump's promise to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, walls have become news.  Trump's promise has generated a lot of support but also much opposition.  

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," American poet Robert Frost famously wrote in "Mending Wall."  But Frost qualified his antipathy to walls by later asking:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out ...

In the early 1960s, the Communists constructed the Berlin Wall to wall in citizens of Communist East Berlin to prevent the residents from fleeing to the freedom of the West.  The people were walled in; those who tried to flee were shot.  After Communism fell and Germany was reunited, the wall came down.  

In 2002, after years of enduring Arab infiltrator terrorists who indiscriminately slaughtered Israeli civilians, Israel began constructing a barrier around its borders, especially in Arab-occupied Judea and Samaria (often referred to as the West Bank, although all of Israel is on the west bank of the Jordan River) to wall out the terrorists.  Countries that were silent during this reign of terror as innocent Israelis were constantly slaughtered condemned the barrier, with some of the most vicious racist Muslims and their equally racist enablers labeling it an "apartheid wall."  They complain about checkpoints and searches before Arabs can enter Israel from Gaza and other areas.  Nevertheless, the barrier has been successful, as terrorist incidents have decreased dramatically.  

Israel began construction of the West Bank security barrier in 2002 at the height of the second Palestinian intifada, or terrorist war of shootings and suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians.  That intifada was launched after PLO leader Yasser Arafat rejected an Israeli offer of a Palestinian state during U.S.-mediated negotiations in the summer of 2000.

Upon the completion of a significant continuous section of the security fence in 2003, Israel already saw a marked decrease in the number of suicide bombers able to penetrate Israeli cities.

About 95% of the barrier consists of a chain-link fence backed up by high-tech surveillance systems, not the concrete barrier routinely shown by the news media.  The concrete barriers are usually located only in areas where the wall intersects with Israeli communities and roads, including areas of previous Palestinian shooting attacks.

And now Israel has announced that it plans:

... to build a concrete wall tens of meters deep underground and aboveground to counter the threat of Hamas attack tunnels. Senior defense official: 'a confrontation with Hamas is inevitable, it must be the last one.'

The usual complaints about the desperate need for peace are sure to follow, ignoring the Arabs' refusal to make peace and their vows to destroy Israel.

Meanwhile, some of the major critics of Israel's wall, England and France, have ironically announced their own plans to construct a wall to wall out the migrants from the Middle East and Africa, many from former colonies of England and France, and now escaping war and seeking a better life in Europe.  Calais is a port city in France relatively close to  England, with an under-the-English (sic)-Chanel tunnel, the Chunnel, which leads into England.  Once in England, the migrants qualify for extensive British welfare and are usually not deported.

A huge concrete wall is to be built by Britain in Calais to stop migrants making it across the Channel.

Immigration minister Robert Goodwill confirmed the move last night as he looks to beef up security at the French port.

The 13ft concrete £2million barrier will stretch for a mile and replace fencing that has so far failed to stop stowaways targeting lorries.

In July official figures showed that one migrant is caught trying to sneak into the UK every six minutes.

As Frost concluded, "Good fences make good neighbors."  

Well, at least safer ones.