The Wall: Building
To Destroy
By Anwar Darkazally
The Electronic
Intifada
04 November 2003
The Road Map is
in tatters, and not by accident. It is business as usual for the most
right wing government in Israels history. Business is building,
and building is booming.
For many months
now, before and after the launch of the Road Map, land has been confiscated
and homes and agricultural land levelled for the construction of the
separation wall along the north of the West Bank. People
are being separated from their land and each other, greenhouses and
crops have been destroyed and towns and villages are being encircled
by the wall as it snakes through the West Bank annexing land to Israel.
In areas outside the major enclaves that are being created, individual
Palestinian villages and towns will be enclosed. Concentrations of Palestinians
of 3,000 up to 25,000 are being crowded together behind razor wire and
electric fences.
Thirty six years
ago the settlements were a temporary measure according to
the military orders that stated that the massive land confiscations
for the construction of the settlements were absolutely necessary for
security reasons. These security reasons have
seen the construction of 123 settlements over the years since Israel
occupied the Palestinian territories and 380,000 Israeli settlers now
live on Palestinian land. If the wall is for security, then why is it
not being built on the Green Line?
It is these temporary
settlements, these subsidised, fortified towns that drive the route
of the wall. A temporary measure for security purposes now
drives another temporary measure for security purposes
the destructive cycle of construction goes on. This latest temporary
measure, a concrete wall or a high tech electric fence with up to 150
meters of roads, ditches and barbed wire on either side of it, will
cost $1.3 billion. Coincidentally, the wall will annex approximately
50% of the West Bank to Israel, conveniently land that holds only 2.4%
of the Palestinian population. Take the land, leave the people, has
long been the Zionist philosophy.
Nowhere is the land
grab more obvious than in the Jerusalem area. Here the wall is constructed
so as to leave a clear passage to the settlement city of Maale Adumim
to the East. Maale Adumim, is the largest illegal colony in the West
Bank with a (confiscated) land mass larger than Tel Aviv. This will
leave some 300,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side of the wall. This
is a separation wall that separates Palestinians from Palestinians,
not Palestinians from Israelis.
There will be no
freedom of movement once the walls are built. Bitter experience has
taught Palestinians that freedom of movement is a privilege to be granted
or withheld at the whim of individual soldiers. Where the wall has been
constructed in the north farmers now sleep in their fields as they never
know when they will next be allowed to reach their land.
In Jerusalem it
is not just land that is being confiscated but a whole capital. Annexing
East Jerusalem and its hinterland prevents any future Palestinian state
from being possible by breaking the West Bank into pieces and giving
Israel control of tourism, water, mineral resources and most of the
fertile agricultural land of the West Bank the economic and natural
resources vital for a Palestinian state to function independently.
The Road Map is
in tatters and the the Sharon government has been hard at work tattering
those aspects necessary to build a Palestinian state: territorial contiguity
broken, transportation axis severed, public services
disabled, revenue generation blocked. The world has condemned
this Israeli governments hunger for Palestinian land through the
General Assembly resolution on 21st October. Now to preserve any opportunity
for a sovereign Palestinian state, with the Green Line as its borders,
we must see an engaged international community actively pushing for
the end of construction of the wall and for its destruction where not
built on the Green Line. Otherwise, given Sharons promise to complete
the wall within a year, the construction of the wall will mean the destruction
of the possibility of the Palestinian state envisioned by President
Bush by 2005. It seems that the Sharon government has decided that the
Palestinians will remain stateless, but now cut off from each other
and imprisoned in their own houses.
The author is legal
advisor for the Negotiations Support Unit.