Go ahead. Build a big wall. Stretch it into the sky, festoon it with razor wire, line it with land mines that will make an amputee (or worse) out of anyone stupid enough to approach it. Do it all, and more, if it saves the life of even just one of your citizens. If this is your remedy of choice, don’t mince words or second-guess that extra slab of reinforced concrete. Do your best to keep the worst out. It’s a matter of security.
Every country in the world has a right to defend its citizens from illegals and aggressors from outside its borders. The U.S. does it, with varying degrees of success, on its southern flank, where it shares a border with Mexico. France, Germany, and any number of well-off European countries enforce their borders for similar reasons: to keep whatever is inherently bad for a country’s well-being – drugs, kiddy porn, terrorists/freedom fighters, illegal aliens, etc. – out.
No one – not even Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein, considered a two-headed hydra that torments Zionists everywhere – would argue that suicide bombers aren’t bad for Israel’s well-being. Since this present intifada began in September 2000, the wave of suicide bombings has killed hundreds and traumatized the living to the point of hysteria. If what these bombers have left in their wake is any indication, from twisted bodies of the dead to the average Israeli who has to think of this scene every time he or she leaves the house, they have had their desired effect. It’s one of the nasty truths of the whole situation.
But here’s another nasty truth: The Apartheid Wall or Lifesaving Fence, or whatever politically infused jargon used to describe the 800 meandering kilometres of border the Israeli government is arbitrarily enforcing, is hardly a matter of security. What it keeps out isn’t as important as what it will take in. Tel Aviv University professor Mark Heller inadvertently summed up the folly of the fence in a recent column in The Globe and Mail, when he wrote it will "encompass only about 16 per cent of the West Bank." Now, imagine for a second any other country in the world saying it is "only" annexing about 16 per cent of another’s territory. It’s absurd. More importantly, it’s a not-so-tacit acknowledgement of the already-illegal Israeli settlements ensconced in that 16 per cent sliver. This isn’t anyone’s opinion. It’s fact.
Were this about security, the fence wouldn’t cut into this land, conveniently encompassing stray Israeli settlements but cutting in 200 Palestinian villages in its path. Were this solely a security issue, and not a blatantly political one, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wouldn’t be playing coy, being forthright about the fence’s path one day, and changing it the next, depending on what serves his purpose. Nor would he stage a much-publicized pullout from Gaza in order to bury the negative headlines on the fence’s progress.
If you believe the fence is less about security and more about land acquisition, or even if you believe the fence serves both purposes well, then you have to think that the Israeli government’s parade of bombed-out buses and dead citizens is a deadly cynical form of promoting further encroachment on the West Bank. "Keeping Israelis safe" is a very effective, very convincing way of selling the fence, particularly to a population as jarred as Israel’s. As one former Israeli Defense Force spokesperson wrote in the Jerusalem Post recently, "Once the public was convinced [the fence] could give them additional security, there was no longer any need to justify its construction."
There you have it, in plain English. Attach the word "security" and the fence sells itself, no matter how illegal it may be, or how many lives it ruins. Suggesting that the fence is temporary is an equally cruel exercise: Walls, like taxes, have a terrible record of going away once established.
And how anyone in their right mind can think that disturbing (and, in many cases, uprooting) thousands of Palestinian lives with an illegal and arbitrary border will help quell suicide bombings is perplexing, to say the least. These people – ordinary people troubled by the day-to-day horrors of living in the West Bank – will be further enflamed by this ad hoc border.
Furthermore, groups like Hamas convince young men and women to kill themselves on a regular basis. They’re deathly good at it, judging from the number of recruits they reportedly have. If they can convince a human being to extinguish himself, how long can a fence keep him out?
Build that fence. Make it huge, and arm it to the nines. Just don’t be so disingenuous as to suggest it’s there only to save lives, that it’s only about security. The wall, the fence, the border – whatever you want to call it – is a cynically political beast, like most things in the Middle East.
Go watch this Discordia, the NFB documentary about Concordia University, the Middle East and student politics gone awry, will be screening at McGill on March 4. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. It’s showing at 7 p.m., Leacock Building, room 132. Admission is free.
8 comments
If the world is to succeed; and especially the middle east world. We need to look into the future and see how we can live our lives without fear, punishment or segregation. It’s a sad story when we look into the past and reconstruct a wall that will definitely destroy relations that badly need serious mending. It is basically bringing back the Berlin wall. A sure fire way to divide and conquer what is not considered superior. This atrocity will only enhance the violence and increase the death tolls to unimaginable numbers.
Historically speaking, it has never made a difference what your motives were in creating a barrier because the end result is always the same. If you create something to keep things apart you will only increase the need to breach it, be it by force or guile, the need to defy the barrier will only increase the pull of whatever you were trying to isolate or protect.
Through it, under it, over it, around it…it doesn’t matter. It never works. In the long run wall come down and those that don’t eventually outlive the need of their original creation. The Middle East conflict will not be stopped by a barrier. Separating the involved parties is hardly the solution. I’m not sure what is but it sure as heck isn’t this. Talks have repeatedly failed and they repeatedly will.
At this rate, they might as well save all the construction costs and dig one huge cemetary plot and be done with it. That would be a more honest use of the materials and time because no one believes the motives behind this thing.
The construction of this barrier is something that has perplexed and disgusted me since I first heard about it and saw it’s development from a small barbed-wire barricade to the huge concrete monstrosity it is now. However much I feel for Israelis living in fear of suicide bombers, this kind of action cannot be condoned, and all this crap about it being ‘for security’ has to stop. As Patriquin rightly says, if it was in place for security reasons alone, why does it stray so far into the West Bank? Why is it separating hundreds of Palestinians from their places of work, schools, family and friends?
I do not think that suicide bombing is a remedy to the situation in the Middle East, and this wall, so reminiscent of the one in Berlin, simply serves to further divide the population. What this area desperately needs is a way to realize that the ‘enemy’ is just like themselves – human beings with lives, children, pets, interests, favourite films and food, similar problems and worries. Religion plays an important part in both cultures, the greatest problem seeming to be that it is not the same one.
It saddens me so much that this situation has continued for so long and still doesn’t seem any closer to a resolution. I certainly don’t know how or when a time of peace will come, but am certain that this wall is not the answer
Maybe one day the Israeli Wall will become a tourist attraction like the Great Wall of China. Quebec City is also well known internationally for its walled inner city which brings it much pride. The old cannons on some of its ramparts give an added historical flavour. Even Montreal had dug up its old walls near the Champs de Mars. In all of these cases, these populations once needed the protection these walls afforded!
As history shows, old walls tend to remain even after they no longer serve their original purpose. Thus the actual location of the Israeli Wall will have long term repercussions. Its lasting effects will even outlive changes in Isreali politics. Its scars will remain forever!
As the Berlin Wall has shown in its thirty years of existence, determined individuals will still get across. It would take time, but tunnels could always be built to cross the border.
I hope the wise men out there find a more practical and less costly solution.
I will not wade into the political argument of right and wrong and righteousness, etc. My only comment is that although SOMETHING must be done to stop the bloodshed, walls are never the answer. Walls may keep the problems temporarily at bay, but they will never solve them. It is impossible to truly find answers when you’re blocking out the issues.
Whether or not there is a wall there or not, people will still keep living in fear and dying. More specifically, people will keep killing themselves and taking others with them. It doesn’t even matter why it started or who did what to whom anymore, the fact is that there has been far too much blood shed over there.
The difference between this structure and the Berlin Wall is that that structure represented something and served a function. An odious one, yes, but still a function. This Middle East one isn’t even that, it’s an exercise in futility that serves only to further deepen the rift over there. The Berlin Wall worked, this thing never will. Blood will run and lives will still be ruined regardless of whether it’s standing or not.
If this wall is meant to keep out terrorists, it may have some success at doing so, though certainly not total success. But what about all of the Palestinians living inside? I know nothing about those people, but I know there are a lot of them, and they are sometimes victims of the bombs as well. If the terrorist groups have members among them, then the wall will accomplish nothing. Does anyone know more about this?
Israel, as any other State, has a right to defend its sovereignty, its territory and its citizens. To achieve this goal, it can take any measure deemed legitimate by international law. A protective wall could even be put in place if no other measures were feasible. It might seem a harsh, even unjust measure but at least it wouldn’t infringe on another country’s jurisdiction. Just remember the Berlin Wall (the so-called “anti-fascist protection wall”, as it was referred to in East Germany): it was an ugly construction built to keep a whole population captive, but at least it was built on East German soil.
But the real problem arises when, in order to supposedly achieve this goal, Israel decides to build a so-called defensive wall on strips of land that it occupies militarily in contradiction of international law. I would find this wall somewhat offensive if it was built on Israeli land (i.e. Israeli territory from before the 1967 War), but at least it wouldn’t be another step taken in order to complete a de facto spoliation of Palestinian territory. After helping illegal settlers to relocate to so-called “colonies” set on occupied territory, the government of Israel is going even further with its scheme to complete its occupation of Palestine.
Furthermore, such a wall, by way of administrative intricacies (permits), forces Palestinian citizens to relocate if they want to move from one village to another without having to cross this wall.
I believe that, if they want to have peace within the confines of an enclosed territory, the citizens of Israel should move back to their country and build walls there if they wish so.