The Metatron Project: A Vision for Security

The world opens its borders where wars have ended. Schengen became possible not because Europeans signed a nice declaration, but because France and Germany stopped disputing each other’s territory. First recognized borders, then their opening. Never the other way around.

The Berlin Wall isn’t a great example. It divided one people within one country and kept people locked in. The Metatron wall is built between two peoples who haven’t been able to live together for a hundred years, and it locks no one in: each side keeps its own way out into the world.

A different analogy applies here. The wall is a divorce. Humanity’s great invention: separating people who are fighting, letting them live apart without getting in each other’s way. Surgery where therapy no longer helps. A hundred years of family therapy lie behind us — negotiations, agreements, road maps. We know the result.

After October 7th, every conversation in Israel eventually circles back to security. This isn’t paranoia — it’s a broken social contract: the state promised to protect and failed to. Every initiative is now seen through this lens, and I’m convinced the security narrative is the only one that can actually reach Israelis.

Someday we’ll tear this wall down too. But only those who first stop shooting across borders get to open them. Let the two peoples live apart for a while. The rest will follow.

First, let’s not confuse things. What was destroyed on October 7th was a fence: a light structure of mesh and sensors that a bulldozer knocks down in minutes. The Metatron wall is a fundamental structure of reinforced concrete, going dozens of meters underground. A bulldozer is powerless against it, as is explosives, as are bunker-buster munitions.

Second, the project’s authors have no illusions: the eternal contest between shell and armor will continue, and attempts to breach the wall will keep happening. But that’s precisely the point — not to be theoretically impenetrable, but to make the cost of breaching it prohibitive. Approaching the wall unnoticed is impossible: sensors detect movement from kilometers away, response comes within minutes. Every attempt is expensive and yields nothing.

Put simply: breaching the wall should cost far more than sitting down at the negotiating table. That is its real purpose.

It won’t. Or rather, it will offer some protection against short-range types by forcing a change in trajectory, which makes those rockets less dangerous. But overall — no. For protection against missiles, Israel has a five-tier missile defense system, including Iron Dome and Iron Beam. Asking “how will the wall protect against missiles” is like asking “how will a door lock protect against fire?” It won’t. There’s a fire extinguisher for fire, and it’s already hanging on the wall.

Now look at the numbers. Over twenty years of rocket fire, from 2001 to 2023, rockets from Gaza killed 30 to 40 Israelis. Iron Dome intercepts over 90% of rockets. On a single day, October 7th, roughly 1,200 people were killed by ground infiltration — thirty times more than from all the rockets over twenty years.

Rockets are the most visible threat, but the least lethal. Ground infiltration is the opposite. On October 7th, the rocket barrage was a diversion: the main blow came through a breached perimeter. It was the wall, not missile defense, that could have prevented that horror.

And one more thing. No war has ever been won by rockets. Seizing territory, holding positions, taking hostages — all of this requires physical penetration. The wall cuts off exactly that possibility. Rockets remain terrorism, but terrorism without territorial results.

There’s also a reverse scenario worth stating plainly. If Iran or another adversary decides to spend expensive missiles trying to destroy the wall, there’s no better gift for Israel. The wall is concrete with not a single person inside it. Every missile fired at an empty stretch of perimeter is a missile not fired at a hospital, a school, or an apartment building. In this sense, the wall acts as a lightning rod for the enemy’s most expensive and destructive weapons, absorbing the blow where it kills no one.

A fair question, and for one specific stretch of the wall it’s especially pressing. The eastern border with Jordan runs right along the Dead Sea Transform fault, the very one where the region’s most serious earthquakes occur. The last major one was in 1927, magnitude 6.2, killing around 500 people. Seismologists estimate the recurrence interval for such events at 80–100 years, and that window is approaching.

This isn’t a reason to abandon the wall on that stretch — it’s an engineering requirement to design it differently from the start. A multi-kilometer wall is never physically poured as one continuous monolith; it’s already built in sections. Expansion joints are placed between sections, allowing the structure to move with ground shifts without cracking apart. This is standard practice for extended structures in seismic zones, from pipelines to bridges and dams.

The deep foundation, already required for security reasons (tens of meters underground against tunneling), has a side benefit: the support reaches more stable lower soil layers rather than staying on more mobile surface rock. The wall’s reinforcement is calculated to the seismic standards mandatory in Israel for major structures since 1980.

An earthquake can damage individual sections. It cannot bring down the whole wall, because from the outset it isn’t a single rigid slab, but a chain of independent blocks flexibly linked to one another.

Historical walls usually failed for one of two reasons. Either they had ends, and the enemy simply went around, as the Germans went around the Maginot Line through Belgium in 1940. Or they had weak, poorly guarded stretches where one could work unnoticed long enough: bribe a guard, find an abandoned section, chip away at the stone for weeks while no one was watching.

The Metatron perimeter is closed along the entire international border of Israel. It has no ends to go around, just as the country itself has none. And it has no unmonitored stretches: every meter is under constant multi-layered surveillance — seismic sensors underground, thermal and acoustic sensors on the surface, drones in the air. Working unnoticed here is physically impossible, not because the wall itself is unbreachable, but because any attempt is detected long before it succeeds.

There’s also a material point. Standard reinforced concrete with a regular rebar frame has a predictable structure: there are gaps between the rebar that a diamond drill can exploit if you know where to strike. Bank vaults and safes have long used a different approach: steel-fiber-reinforced concrete, where instead of an ordered frame, short steel fiber segments are randomly mixed throughout the entire volume. A drill hits metal at any point, because there are no predictable gaps. The same logic applies here.

This produces double protection. Even if a way is found to work the wall’s material, the process itself would take more time than is available on a guarded, closed, continuously monitored perimeter. Historical walls failed because they were static objects with human-made holes. This wall is alive precisely because it has neither holes nor ends.

It’s different in its route. The 2002 barrier veers, in dozens of places, beyond the Green Line, deep into the West Bank, looping around settlements. That’s exactly why the Hague court ruled it illegal — not for the fact of building it, but for running through occupied territory. The court never disputed a state’s right to build defensive structures on its own land. How could it?

That’s the lesson the Metatron Project has learned. The wall will run strictly along the 1967 line, not crossing into disputed territory by even a meter. The same logic that made the 2002 barrier legally vulnerable makes the Metatron wall legally invulnerable.

The 2002 barrier’s incompleteness stems from the same mistake. A route through disputed land means endless lawsuits, protests, and route revisions — twenty years of construction without completion. A route along a recognized line removes all of these obstacles at once.

For details on exactly where the wall will run and why this particular route was chosen — see the “Line” section.

Yes. The Tunnel is an attempt to finally resolve the root problem of the Partition Plan for Palestine — a plan that emerged despite the conclusions of the Woodhead Commission — the “checkerboard” problem. The territories of the two future states looked like squares on a chessboard, and the connectivity of these territories has raised serious questions for almost 100 years now.

Israel won’t allow the tunnel to be built on its territory by outside contractors; the state must control every stage, avoiding the appearance of “Trojan horses.”

The Tunnel is, above all, about Israel’s security. It means no border crossings and no thousands of foreign nationals crossing Israel just to visit relatives or go to the seaside. It means connectivity for the territory of both states, a single political, economic, logistical, and legal space. It means the end of the dual-authority situation and the “divide and rule” concept.

From where, to where? The tunnel connects Gaza and the West Bank directly, bypassing Israeli territory entirely. Weapons reaching these territories today already travel through entirely different routes: tunnels of the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Sinai, floating containers dropped offshore near Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, and overland routes used by Iran’s IRGC through Sudan and Syria toward Jordan. These are the exact channels through which Iranian detonators and mortar shells, later found on October 7th attackers, had already traveled. Israel and Egypt have spent years flooding and blowing up dozens of such tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor, and the flow never stopped.

The Metatron tunnel adds nothing to this geography. It doesn’t run through Sinai, doesn’t reach the sea, and has no entry points outside Gaza and the West Bank. The wall, intelligence services, missile defense systems, and the full strength of the Israeli army already guard against the existing smuggling flows, and they continue to do so regardless of the tunnel.

The benefit the tunnel can bring to Palestinian connectivity and reduced friction with Israel is incomparably greater than the potential risk. Asking “won’t the tunnel become a smuggling channel” is like proposing to ban cars because people die in car accidents.

Checks at the entry and exit points are the Palestinian side’s responsibility. It’s their territory, their infrastructure, their obligation. Israel doesn’t interfere in that process.

On its side, Israel handles a different task: guaranteeing that everything that enters the tunnel arrives at the other end without exiting partway into Israel. A “dead zone” is created over the entire route — a strip of land several hundred meters wide, under constant surveillance, with a total ban on construction, farming, or any civilian activity. Surfacing unnoticed here is physically impossible: sensors, drones, AI cameras, patrols. Underground, acoustic sensors run along the entire length, detecting any attempt at digging — toward the tunnel or away from it, equally impossible. Traffic is also strictly logged: however many vehicles and trains went in, the same number must come out. Any discrepancy is flagged immediately.

This produces a clean division of responsibility. The Palestinian side is responsible for what enters the tunnel. The Israeli side is responsible for ensuring none of it ends up on Israeli territory.

Thousands of what, and whose? There are no Israelis in the tunnel — it connects Gaza and the West Bank, and its passengers are exclusively Palestinian. A collapse wouldn’t accomplish much either, since the “dead zone” above the tunnel has no people in it.

So the only people who could blow up the tunnel would be Palestinians acting against Palestinians — those opposed to the very idea of Palestinian statehood and connectivity. That’s no longer a threat to Israel’s security. It’s a matter of internal security for the future Palestinian state, and the responsibility for it lies with Palestinian services.

The logic is the same as for any national infrastructure. A subway system in any country in the world is theoretically a possible terror target. That’s not an argument against subways — it’s an argument for professional security services.

The project proceeds from a proactive logic. Don’t wait for the ideal counterpart to appear — start acting in a way that makes that counterpart emerge.

Israel starts with the most uncontested and uninhabited stretch — a pilot section of the wall in the Negev, on the border with Egypt. No political negotiations, no disputes over the route. Just the start of work. In parallel, white papers are published covering the whole project, including the tunnel. The hypothesis is simple: a tangible, visible future that’s already beginning to materialize changes the political landscape on both sides of the border.

Hamas thrives wherever there’s no political solution. Its only product is the promise of military victory as the sole way out. When an alternative appears — real Palestinian connectivity, real access to the sea, a real way out into the world through Amman — Hamas’s product loses its value. The same applies to Israeli extremists, whose ideology rests on the claim “there’s no one to negotiate with.” A concrete project on the table makes that claim false.

The agreement gets signed by the Palestinians who want a future rather than endless war. The project’s task is to make sure there are more of them.

This is a hypothesis — yes. It can only be tested in practice. The good news is that there simply are no other hypotheses, let alone strategies.

Because this is about logistical connectivity within a single state. If Gaza is part of a future Palestinian state, then, by your logic, someone wanting to travel from Ramallah to Gaza City should have two options:

Exit through the border into Jordan, fly to Egypt, enter through Rafah — and the same route back.

Cross Israel’s border twice and drive 50–60 kilometers through its territory.

Which of these routes strikes you as safe? Or convenient? And would any country in the world tolerate its internal transportation depending on transit through a neighboring state’s territory — especially a state with which relations are, to put it mildly, tense?

The tunnel solves exactly this problem — territorial connectivity. If humanity managed to connect Britain to the continent under the floor of the English Channel, and builds tunnels through the Alps between France and Italy, what’s stopping a tunnel in the desert? This is an engineering task, solved many times over, long ago. The only question is the political will to solve it.

Erez and Rafah don’t solve the problem — they merely preserve it.