The Wall

As a followup to my fences post, I'd like to read the wall a bit. Here's a typical example of the wall Israel has constructed between the state of Israel and the West Bank, minus the barbed wire along its top. Concrete seems to be Israel's favorite construction material (followed closely by concrete block), so much of the wall is constructed of concrete panels. The wall has both a practical and strategic aim. Practically, the wall separates and controls intercourse between Israel and Palestine, allowing people to pass from one to the other only through military checkpoints. Strategically, the wall is being constructed in such a way as to break transportation and communication routes between sectors of the West Bank. Online you will find various maps that show the current extent of the wall system and its planned additions. The wall does remind me of the walls around the Old City, built by an Islamic nobleman in the sixteenth century. The Old City walls have fortified gates and served defensive purposes. To be charitable to the Israelis, the wall serves defensive purposes as well.


However, two things strike me about the wall. First, Israel is creating a Palestinian state, albeit one under house arrest. By walling off the West Bank and securing it under military guard, the Israelis are in effect creating a state almost exclusively for the Palestinians. Yet, curiously, Israel continues to build settlements behind the wall, settlements exclusively for Jewish Israelis (when you hear of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, that's what they're talking about). So the wall in this sense serves to regulate Palestinian access to the rest of Israel, while Israelis can cross the wall as they please.

Second, the wall allows Israel to avoid dealing with the issues that created the Israeli government's perceived need for the wall, i.e. Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens. Whatever those issues are, and Israel's occupation of the West Bank in 1967 certainly ranks high on the list, by creating the wall Israel seeks to remove the possibility of Palestinian attacks without addressing those underlying issues. The creation of a free Palestinian state with open commerce with Israel depends on addressing those issues. The wall represents perhaps the clearest declaration that Israel is not interested in addressing those issues, certainly not in working with the Palestinians in creating a free state.

Now, I'm trying not to take sides on this complex issue: its dynamics are way beyond my bare knowledge of Middle East politics. But whatever the rationales or arguments, I cannot help but feel sympathy for any people placed in a ghetto/put in a gulag/settled on a reservation. The very fact of separating off a people from another shows one party to be way more powerful than the other and such a power disparity cannot help but serve the more powerful party. In short, Israel is getting a lot out of the wall.

Here's an image from Bethlehem. I find a disturbing ambiguity in this graffito. On the one hand, it may be descriptive: look around you, this is freedom in Palestine: restricted commerce, hovering threat of being expelled to the Gaza Strip, high unemployment and restricted access to quality medical care. A free Palestine is actually an ugly reality behind a locked metal door in a concrete wall. On the other hand, and more correctly I think, it may be an imperative: you folks, free us, Palestine. Interestingly, I noticed that most of these graffiti were in English, a language that most Israelis and Palestinians certainly speak fairly well. Yet English is the language we speak, a nation with a vested interest in supporting Israel, even in supporting its building of the wall (I hear about our country pressing Israel not to build more settlements, but I rarely hear about our country protesting the wall itself). In fact, in my more cynical moments I think our own efforts to build a wall between ourselves and Mexico is actually an elaborate ploy to draw criticism away from Israel's wall, at least here at home: if we need to build a wall to safeguard our interest, why should Israel not do the same? So our wall, too, becomes a pawn in international politics. Yet, to be fair, don't countries have the right to safeguard their borders, even to the point of building physical barriers?

But that breaks down in the Israeli situation. Let's for the moment grant that Israel has established claim to the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank. A wall safeguarding those borders would encircle the state. Israel, instead, is walling off Palestinians within its borders. They're walling off not another state, but an ethnic/political group within its borders. That's like our building a wall around the Cherokee nation in North Carolina, then going inside that wall and building additional walls between tribal or kin groups and policing those walls with our military. Again, I cannot help but feel sympathetic to those so walled in.

Additionally, here's a strategic image, but from the other side. Again, this one is in English. And again, I find it multivalent. On the one hand, this seems to be a call to the Palestinians to keep rioting and protesting in order to keep their situation in front of the world's eyes. Admittedly, our attention, so stressed these days by so much communication/information/media, seems to have enough energy only to see the most dramatic of issues. Hence, communication becomes wedded to confrontation, to rioting and protest. So Palestinians, according to this graffito, must keep the issue alive through confrontation with the Israelis. On the other hand, being in English the graffito may be addressed to you and me and our country. Perhaps it's a call to those in our country sympathetic to the Palestinian's situation to do our own rioting and protesting against our own country so that our country may hear our own convictions that this wall has serious problems, as does our support for its construction. Again, I'm not personally throwing my own voice behind one side or the other (or the others), since I'm so ill-informed about these issues. Also again, I cannot help but feel sympathy for all those behind this Israeli wall.

Finally, all the graffiti I saw was inside the wall: the outside was clean. I don't know if this is because the Israeli's do not allow graffiti on the Israeli side or if there's no one really interested in producing it. But I do know this: from the Israeli side, the absence of graffiti makes the wall seem benign, almost a normal part of the buildingscape like all the other concrete buildings of which the Israelis are so fond. The wall without graffiti seems devoid of critical content, full of vagueness, much easier to pass by and not notice, unassuming, modest. Thank you for reading.