The Palestinian Question: The Wall

One of the most obvious signs of the "sophisticated system of apartheid" in place in Israel and the West Bank is the still-under-construction separation wall.

          

As planned and approved by the Israeli cabinet in 2005, the wall will be slightly more than 700 km in length. (More than 400 km of the wall is completed at this time.) Once finished it will be four times as long and on average three times as high as the Berlin Wall. Importantly, almost 60% of Palestinian water sources will be behind the wall.

(Download a detailed pdf map of the wall here. More information is available from B'Tselem: The Israeli Center For Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.)

The Israelis refer to it as a security wall, and Israeli public sentiment maintains the wall is designed to separate Jews from Palestinians. This is because, as we have already discussed, the prevailing (false) narrative says that Palestinians are inherently dangerous. This strategy alone is brilliant because it instantly nullifies the political and sociological justifications for resistance on the part of the Palestinians. Never mind that the wall is a violation of international law, it's a better story when it's about preventing terror attacks.

Friends who recently participated in a more traditional Christian tour of the Holy Land recounted this experience: Their tour guide was a retired ajor in the Israeli Defense Force. The one and only time he made reference to the wall he commented to the effect that seeing as they were unable to stop the terrorists, they decided to build a wall around them. In this way the actual physical structure contributes to the false narrative of fear.

The reality of the wall tells a different story. More often than not, the wall separates not Jews and Palestinians, but Palestinians and Palestinians. Neighbourhoods are cut in half, people are separated from their places of employment, and families from their relatives. A Palestinian farmer who works fields 150 or 200 meters from his house may now need to travel several kms to a checkpoint and wait in line with hundreds of other Palestinians to cross. His 200 m commute may now be 10 kms and require an hour, two hours, or more, depending on the times of day, the crowds, etc.

Our own experience in passing through the wall several times also belied the security argument. Our bus, with its Palestinian license plate and Palestinian driver, was stopped each time.

“Who do you have on board?”

“Americans.” (And one Canadian, but I wasn’t about to argue the point with an 18 year old armed with an M16.)

Usually we were waved on at that point, without any security officers setting foot on the bus. Once, we were asked to provide a single US passport. One other time someone boarded the bus, took one look and got off. Only once did someone actually walk the length of the bus and look at each person, although on that occasion they didn’t check passports. If this is security, it’s really, really bad security. This is not about security.

The fact is that any Israeli occupation of land beyond the "Green Line", determined in 1949, is deemed to be a military occupation. And yet, 90% of the completed or planned route of the wall is built on Palestinian land, beyond the Green Line. One might speculate that the Israeli government is hesitant to restrict the wall to the Green Line as that might be seen as a de facto acceptance of the Green Line as the limit of Israeli control. The World Court has determined that it is illegal to build the wall on Palestinian land. It seems more likely that these incursions are an attempt to annex further Palestinian land under the guise of “security concerns."

These are "the facts on the ground", a term we heard often while visiting with our Palestinian friends. These facts directly contradict the prevailing narrative. It's hard to describe to you the emotions of living in this environment, even for a very short time. There is a sense of oppression, and a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that was evident in the conversations we participated in. As a Follower of Jesus I maintain that God is always on the side of the oppressed. Always. What we end up with in discussing Israel then is a clash of theology. And yet, as many of our friends stressed to us, it's not a spiritual issue at all, but an issue of human rights violations and contravention of international law. I think perhaps it's both.

I'd like to hear from folks on this, especially those who are uncomfortable with the explicit and implied criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people. This is a massively important issue, particularly for people of faith who have perhaps unwittingly lent unquestioning support to a government and therefore its policies.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[Dave]

When I think about the slaughter in Gaza and conditions arising from the Wall I cant help pondering Prov 25:21 & 22:
If your enemy is hungry give him food to eat
If he is thirsty give him water to drink.
.......................................
Dean Merrill has two refreshing thoughts on how badly we in Christendom (and the Chosen people) have screwed up things. He points out: First: Lincoln said the best way to destroy your enemies is to make them your friends.
Re "witnessing" (ugh) David Yonggi Cho (has a church in Korea of 750,000 people) actually prohibits all members from mentioning Jesus until they have helped someone in need 3 times. How much we have to learn....and change. Bubs

[sonja]

Hey Mike ...

It's a completely spiritual AND an international justice issue all wrapped up together. I'm afraid to write much more than that because it will become a huge rant on my part. This has been a place where I part ways with the church for my entire Christian life.

My BA is in Political Science/International Studies with a focus on the Middle East. I took Arabic for a year and spent a semester studying the Camp David Accords in detail.

For a people which championed such movements as abolition and the civil rights movements here in North America and the movement to overcome apartheid in South Africa, we've allowed the crock of dispensation theology to blind the church to the truth of what is happening in Israel. It is atrocious. We should be ashamed.

[idelette]

Argh. Walls that segregate people make me want to wail. Pun intended. I can't actually believe we--the international community--are allowing this. Have we not learned any lessons from history?

You speak of the prevailing (false) narrative that feeds the fear. That just sounds too eerily familiar to this girl.

Your journey has both enlightened and burdened me. That's what we're meant to do as communicators of a story such as this, I guess. Keep speaking it, bro. So much consciousness-shifting that needs to be done. Jesus, heal my blindness, please.

[sonja]

One more thing that I forgot ... it is ironic in the extreme that this wall is being built.

The state of Israel was created by men and women who came from (primarily) eastern Europe. These people had survived hundreds of years (generations) of living in ghettos -- walled off portions of cities -- and pogroms the last of which (Hitler's Final Solution) finally pushed everyone to create the state of Israel. But the prejudice and horror against Jews had been going on since the Inquisition and before. And pressure to create a nation-state in Palestine had been building since the late 1890's and was codified in the Balfour Declaration.

So ... now ... just three or four generations removed from the creation of Israel in 1948, they are creating their own personal ghetto? Because walls that are built to keep people out, can also keep people in. This is terrible in so many, many ways.

[Nick Baines]

I have been there this last week and blogged accordingly at nickbaines.wordpress.com.

[ron cole]

I see the wall as reinforcing a mindset of fear and terrorism. It pollutes the minds of future generations. I worked with an infantry unit in Cyprus in the early 70"s maintaining a buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. What saddened me the most was talking to kids on both sides, who hated the other. They had never met each other, it was almost a genetic hatred passed on from generation to generation.I think long term walls of any kind whether they be concrete, or green lines reinforce this mindset. The reality, this is not faithful living by the beliefs of any religion...and it's time to say so.