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THE WALL: ISRAEL’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF APARTHEID
By Daoud Sarhandi

There have been many attempts down the years to change geographic and political realities with walls: the ‘Great Wall of China’ and ‘Hadrian’s Wall’, built between Scotland and England, come immediately to mind. More recently, the ‘Berlin Wall’ and Belfast’s ‘Peace Wall’ stand out; in the 1990s Slovakia unsuccessfully tried to separate Gypsies from others with a wall; and I recently heard that a ‘Poverty Wall’ is being erected between two economically polarized communities in Brazil.The sheer scale of the ‘West Bank Separation Barrier’ - as it is euphemistically called by Israel - puts it in an entirely different class from similar recent endeavours, however. More accurately referred to by Palestinians as the ‘Apartheid Wall’ - or simply ‘the Wall’ – this gargantuan edifice is currently being constructed around (and between) the Palestinian people, blighting communities and lives as it snakes its way across a delimited Palestinian horizon.

On a recent trip to the region I was able to see the Wall up close: around the now entirely entrapped city of Qalqiliya - which like many other Palestinian towns and villages has been transformed into something resembling a giant open-air prison - as well as around Jerusalem, where standing on the edge of a sprawling Palestinian refugee camp surveying the construction of various sections of the Wall that will eventually link up to form the ‘Jerusalem Envelope’, I now recall a very unpleasant sensation of spatial and moral disorientation.

Israel’s goal is not simply a defensive effort to provide ‘security’ for itself, as it attempts to fool the world into believing; were it that, the Wall could quite easily have been built along the 1967 ‘Green Line’. Indeed, current Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie stated that if Israel kept the structure on this internationally recognized ‘border’, the Palestinian Authority might even consider contributing to the cost of such a sensible project! (After all, he pointed out, history proves that the Palestinians are in much greater need of protection from their Zionist neighbours than vice versa.) No, the real objectives of the Wall are something quite different from security for ‘Beautiful Little Israel’: that lush oasis of joyful ‘kibbutzim’ and fully fledged ‘democracy in the Middle East’ - some are cynical enough to conjecture, others deluded enough to believe.

Before examining the only barely concealed real objectives behind the Wall, let us first take a snapshot look at the perverse landscape into which it is being slotted: the occupied West Bank.

On the ground, a maze of nearly 300 permanent military checkpoints (with many more temporary ones springing up all around), machine gun-topped concrete walls, electrified and non-electrified fences, watchtowers, deep trenches, concrete blocks, sand banks, gates and other barriers, special military roads, fortified Jewish settlements and their ‘bypass’ roads (sheathed behind more electrified fences), plus a dizzying array of difficult to obtain, colour-coded permits required by Palestinians in order to get through, across, or over any of these obstructions, shatter the physical, political, and cultural space. Add to this picture the everyday harassment, humiliation and even murder of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and settlers at the checkpoints and gates, and one understands what a veritable nightmare travelling even short distances in the Occupied Territories is.

The net, surrealistic, result of all this ‘closure’ and ‘collective punishment’ shows, for example, that it takes less time to fly from Tel Aviv to London than it routinely takes a Palestinian to navigate the 70-or-so kilometres between Ramallah and Jenin! – provided that person can actually get a permit to travel between these two places, of course.The idea of some kind of barrier between Israel and the West Bank is not entirely new; Ehud Barak talked it about under the previous ‘Labour’ administration. ‘Good fences make good neighbours,’ he once quipped - as he simultaneously expanded Jewish settlements on an unprecedented scale. Also, the coastal strip of Palestinian land know as ‘Gaza’ has already been sealed off behind a fortified series of fences.In 2000, after Barak lost the election to right-wing ‘Likud’ leader Ariel Sharon, the idea of a wall was revived and reinvigorated with gusto. In fact, the ‘idea’ is an ever-expanding ‘work in progress’ - about which Palestinians are kept entirely in the dark until land confiscations begin and bulldozers arrive to uproot orchards and demolish houses.

‘Phase A’ of the Wall was approved in June 2002 and construction began almost immediately (leading many to suspect that authorization had actually been assured long before the official announcement); Phase A was completed in July 2003 and stretches 157 km from Jenin to Qalqiliya. In this first phase of the Wall a total of 1,468,000 cubic meters of Palestinian land was confiscated, 102,320 olive trees uprooted, 36 precious groundwater wells and over 200 water cisterns seized. Hundreds of buildings were also sequestered and demolished; one town alone lost more than 200 buildings - the heart of its commercial district.

‘Phase B’ was approved in March 2003; work is ongoing, and once completed will close off the rest of the West Bank’s western side - from Qalqiliya to Ramallah, Bethlehem to Hebron - bringing even more Palestinian land under Israeli control.An even more contentious, ‘Phase C’, plan is also ‘under consideration’, but many believe this too has already been secretly approved. Phase C - running north-south through the Jordan Valley - will shave off a huge swath of Palestinian land on the eastern side, well inside the 1947 borders. This final phase will also completely isolate Jericho from the rest of the West Bank.The total projected length of the Wall is around 730 km, and at the rate work is currently proceeding it could be completed by the end of 2005.

The issue of water mentioned above is a key aspect of the covert strategy behind the Wall; Israel is desperate for water, and the West Bank sits atop the ‘Western Aquifer’ - the richest source of water in the region after the Jordan River. If one looks at maps of the Wall, one sees that the desire to isolate wells and underground cisterns on the ‘Israeli side’ has often dictated its route. As a consequence only of Phase A, 6,705,000 cubic meters of water are being lost to Palestine annually; more water will be stolen after Phase B is completed; and Phase C will separate the West Bank from access to the Jordan River. With so many of Palestine’s water resources finally under Israeli control, Israel will then be able to dictate Palestinian water usage even more heavily than it does already, and to further squeeze the people off the little land they will be allowed to inhabit.

Another look at the maps shows the Wall meandering deep inside Palestinian land in order to enfold Jewish settlements within Israel. (Predictably, Israel consistently denies that it is actually annexing land in this way.) Not only is Israel bringing the largest settlements directly under its geographic, political, and military control, it is also seizing enough land around the settlements for them to expand with impunity later on. Palestinian population centres trapped within these annexed areas are as good as extinct, of course; while agrarian communities on either side that have become separated from their land must now apply for special permission in order to access it at set times per day, through gates manned by [often vindictive] Israeli guards. The same permit requirements apply to children separated from their schools, people who need to reach their local shops or to trade, patients requiring medical services, etcetera.

In an article titled ‘Fencing the Last Sky’ published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Ramallah-based journalist Peter Lagerquist sums up the statistical reality of land annexation: ‘Within this maze of enclosures and exclusions ... [s]ome 395,000 Palestinians will be isolated outside the “cantons”, including 225,000 in occupied East Jerusalem. Moreover, between 595,000 and 717,000 - a third of the West Bank population - stand to lose access to their cultivated lands. This is to allow Israel to annex de facto 129 out of an estimated 160 existing settlements in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, incorporating all but 25,000 of some 400,000 settlers. Furthermore, if pending extensions are approved, only nine smaller settlements, totalling about 4,000 residents, would fall outside the “Israeli” areas.’

Healthcare provision in particular is being severely impacted by the construction of the Wall. One of the most thorough up-to-date reports about the health situation - published by the Ramallah-based ‘Health, Development, Information & Policy Institute’ (HDIP) - states: ‘The present and projected path of the Wall, not including it’s proposed Jordan Valley section, will create 22 vulnerable pockets or “small ghettoes” separated from the rest of the West Bank, and will consequently also isolate 71 governmental and non-governmental primary health care clinics. This will on a number of counts further undermine the Palestinian health care system and its ability to care for some 450,000 people living in these enclaves.’

As Dr Mustafa Barghouti, the director of HDIP, pointed out at a recent press conference in Ramallah: ‘You simply can’t have a healthcare facility in every village; of course you have to transfer patients from villages to cities, and from one city to another. That’s how health care is provided. Otherwise the whole budget of the Defence Department of the United States would not be enough to build a healthcare system in Palestine.’

There are many other serious consequences of living behind the Wall: chronic depression and anxiety are on the increase; and unemployment in wall-affected towns and areas is skyrocketing. Statistics for psychological problems are hard to ascertain, partly since there is very little funding for mental health programs in Palestine; the now caged town of Qalqiliya, for example, has only one full-time psychologist for a population of 42,000. Unemployment statistics, meanwhile, clearly show a horrifying trend: in Qalqiliya, unemployment rose from 18% to 70% between 2000 and 2003, and the once bustling main street has been transformed into a dusty ghost town. According to the World Bank, poverty in the Occupied Territories has tripled in the last four years, with between 60% and 75% of Palestinians now living below the official poverty line of US$2 per day. As a result of this economic reversal, malnutrition, which has been a severe problem among Palestinian children for many years, is increasing at an alarming rate - and especially in those areas affected by the Wall. In total, the health of some 500,000 children is adversely affected as a direct result of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.

Although Israel attempts to pass the Wall off as a ‘temporary security solution’, such claims blatantly defy the reality of the enterprise. Construction costs are currently running at around US$1.5 million per kilometre. In the places where it is a concrete structure, the Wall arches eight meters above the ground and is replete with watchtowers manned by Israeli snipers, as well as remote control machine guns and additional ‘security zones’ where unauthorized entrants may be shot on sight. In other places ‘the Wall’ is a series of equally forbidding, heavily fortified fences or depth barriers, which are just as uncrossable, restricting access and funnelling population movement.

If Phases B and C progress as planned, Palestinians will be left with very much less land than they now occupy; as a total of the overall pre-1948 land mass (when Israel was created), ‘Palestine’ will be no more than 12%; cut from the present 22% that Yasser Arafat accepted at Oslo as the basis of the future Palestinian state. Furthermore, as we have seen, this 12% will be split into four disconnected parts: impoverished Gaza, and three islands of land in the West Bank - islands that will never be allowed (or able) to develop into a ‘viable Palestinian state.’ In this respect, the Wall is one more step toward Israel’s long-dreamed of ‘final solution’ for the Palestinian people.

‘[I]n Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country ... The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs and hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’ So wrote Lord [James Arthur] Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, in a memorandum dated 1919. And with these sentiments the fate of the Palestinians was effectively sealed.

What we are witnessing today in regard to the Wall is simply an extension of a long-standing, ultra-colonial attitude that has become endemic in the way Palestinians are viewed and treated. Whether the Palestinian people actually want to be imprisoned in their own towns and villages, on two ‘reservations’ that are visibly shrinking as each year passes, seems to strike many of our leaders as entirely irrelevant; that the Palestinians should dare to rise up against their overlords, protest, or even complain, a source of intense irritation.

Finally, on July 9, after more than six months’ deliberation, Israel’s ‘Separation Barrier’ was overwhelmingly condemned by the ‘International Court of Justice’ (ICJ) in The Hague. (Only American judge Thomas Buergenthal dissented from his fourteen international colleagues’ opinion.) Indeed, in one brief reference the ICJ went even further than its recommendation that the Wall should be removed and financial reparations made to those adversely affected by it, saying that the construction of the barrier should be seen in the context of ‘the succession of armed conflicts, acts of indiscriminate violence and repressive measures’ since 1947, when Israel declared itself a state.

Of course, Israel and its most eloquent sponsors (the United States and Britain) have consistently expressed their profound disapproval of this legal challenge (the first such challenge Israel has ever been subjected to) on the grounds that any ruling would hurt the Israel-Palestine ‘Peace Process’. But as Mustafa Barghouti pointed out in response to a question posed during an HDIP press conference I attended, there really is no peace process - unless, he added to the amusement of all, ‘someone knows where it is being hidden and isn’t telling.’

Despite the fact that Israel has predictably vowed to entirely disregard the world’s highest legal body - and regardless of the fact that the U.S. is still backing Israel and will undoubtedly use its position on the Security Council to veto any attempt to sanction Israel for its non-compliance - unless this immoral project is stopped, in the lengthening shadow of ‘the Wall’ it is going to be a long dark night in Palestine - and that spells a gloomy future for us all.

Copyright © Daoud Sarhandi, Mexico 2004
Published along with other articles by Daoud Sarhandi in Proceso magazine, Mexico
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