Breaking through the Wall
By Samah Jabr
There are two striking examples of humankind’s
wall-building and crumbling: The crumbling
Great Wall of China, built in 215 BC, evokes
invading hordes sweeping down the hilly
terrain which created the need for this
1,400-mile long structure, and more recently,
the Berlin Wall, which was demolished in
1989, signaling the approaching age of
globalization. And hopefully, one day,
the Apartheid Wall, built by Israel,
will be a third example.
The wall of Israel is a plan initiated early
in the last century by Vladimir Jabotinsky,
the father of the Zionist Revisionist legacy.
The ideals proposed by Jabotinsky and perpetuated
by the Israeli government are as old, as violent and
as exclusionist as any manifestation of the wish to
keep the “other” out, on the other side of the wall,
whether in a shanty town, reservation, or
concentration camp. Jabotinsky’s article,
“The Iron Wall, We and the Arabs,” first
appeared 4 November 1923 in the magazine
Rasswyet. Among other things, Jabotinsky wrote:
"Any native people—it's all the same whether
they are civilized or savage—views their
country as their national home, of which
they will always be the complete masters.
They will not voluntarily allow not only a
new master, but even a partner, and so it is
for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst
attempt to convince us that the Arabs are
some kind of fools who can be tricked by a
softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe
of money grubbers who will abandon their
birthright to Palestine for cultural and
economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment
of the Palestinian Arabs…They look upon
Palestine with the same instinctive love and
true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his
Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie…
This childish fantasy of our ‘Arabo-philes’
comes from some kind of contempt for the
Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view
of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in
order to sell out their homeland for a railroad
network." He continued, "Zionist colonization,
even the most restricted, must either be
terminated or carried out in defiance of the
will of the native population. This colonization
can…continue and develop only under the
protection of a force independent of the local
population—an iron wall which the native
population cannot break through…All this
does not mean that any kind of agreement is
impossible, only a voluntary agreement is
impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope
that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these
hopes…they are not a rabble, but a nation,
perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living.
A living people makes such enormous concessions
on such fateful questions only when there is no
hope left…the only path to agreement is the
iron wall…a government without any kind of
Arab influence. In other words, for us the
only path to an agreement in the future is an
absolute refusal of any attempts at an
agreement now."
This by-now-familiar philosophy has been passed
from Jabotinsky to several Israeli leaders and
policy makers. Those of us who live in Palestine
have seen that, regardless of how receptive to us
an Israeli government purports to be, the
Jabotinsky strategy remains the internal party line.
Israel used the occasion of the first Gulf war and
the Iraqi threats to shell Israeli areas too close
to our towns and villages. From checkpoints to
piles of dirt that totally obstruct roadways, to
ditches that circle our towns, the Israeli
government seemed determined to put all
Palestinians under village-house arrest.
In April 2001, a huge iron gate was erected in the
narrow space that separates the West Bank town
of Jenin from land confiscated by Israel on one
side and the Palestinian town, Qabatiya, on the
other. The Jenin gate was the first structure of
this kind constructed on Palestinian land. It is not,
however, the first built by Israel. The Jenin gate
mimicked the huge Iron Gate that separates
south Lebanon from land once considered the
Palestinian motherland, now an Israeli farm.
Not long after that, in June 2002, Israel made its
contribution to the list of history’s infamous walls:
The Zionists who live around me have taken
Jabotinsky’s metaphoric idea—the iron wall—
and made it a reality: a multi-layered wall made
up of concrete consists of a series of 8-metre-high
concrete slabs, trenches, barbed wire “buffer zones,”
electrified fencing, numerous watch towers, thermal
imaging video cameras, sniper towers and roads for
patrol vehicles. It extends over 790 km, 80% of which
is being built in the West Bank on land confiscated
from Palestinians by the Israeli military, robbing
Palestinian’s most fertile land and natural wells
and wealth, annexing 70% of the total recharge
area of the Western Aquifer basin to Israel,
together with 62 springs and 134 Palestinian
wells and isolating some 60,500 Palestinians living
in 42 villages and towns in a closed military zone in
limbo between the Wall and the Green Line; 12
villages with a total population of 31,400 Palestinians
will be completely surrounded by the Wall,
Qalqiliya, for example.
The Wall has serious economic and humanitarian
consequences and blocks the horizon for a future
sovereign Palestinian State. Palestinians have been
cut off from their farmland and livelihoods, places
of employment, schools, universities, social support
system and health services. Women continue to be
forced to deliver at checkpoints and newborns
continue to die as a result because they are cut off
from accessing, and being accessed by
emergency services.
Despite an advisory opinion by the International
Court of Justice in The Hague on 9 July 2004, which
had recognized that the construction of the Wall is
“contrary to international law,” and that Israel is
under obligation to cease the Wall’s construction,
dismantle the existing structure, and make reparations
for any damage caused by the construction,
Israel accelerated it’s building of the Wall.
The peace talks that took place in Annapolis at the
end of 2007 also refrained from referring to the
Wall as an obstacle to peace, to say the least. The
Wall is considered a fait accompli, and I and my
family and my neighbours and my countrymen
are expected to pay the price of the Revisionist
tradition and the ideology of the Wall that betrays
humanity forever.
Instead of boycotting Israel for its illegal wall,
the international community supported the
ideology of the Wall when they boycotted the
democratically elected Palestinian government
and complied with the siege on Gaza.
I understand that the Zionist Wall was constructed
in the minds of world politicians long before I
was born when the leaders of the world reacted to
the message of the Nuremberg Trials saying, ‘Yes,
the suffering Jewish people needed a place to call
home, even if that causes the expulsion and the
subjugation of another nation.’
Gaza remained occupied despite Israeli settler’s
withdrawal since the summer of 2005; Israel
continued controlling an army of collaborators
inside Gaza and remained an outside power
controlling the borders, border crossings, air space,
coastal waters, economy and electricity.
Israel kept locked in a kind of prison 1.5 million
Palestinians since January 2006. That lock-down
was tightened in June 2007, and had created a
rising humanitarian crisis as Israel completely
cut off access into and out of a walled-off Gaza,
escalated assassinations and halted crucial
supplies of fuel, food and medications. Israel was
not above cutting water and electricity on the
occupied people. We saw people taking turns to
manually ventilate their loved ones in the
hospitals of Gaza and heard schoolchildren
complaining of their inability to study in the
cold and dark nights of Gaza, but it is outside
Gaza that we lose sight and the light of justice
for allowing all this darkness to overwhelm Gaza.
The breaching of the Israeli-built Wall dividing
the Gaza Strip from Egypt was a great event for
both humanitarian and political reasons. The
starved people of Gaza managed to get some
temporary relief and were able to restock a
few supplies that will help in their steadfastness
in the face of a brutal siege; the mass participation
in the "no-border" crossing has provided a huge
boost to social and political mobilization, not
only in Palestine, but in Egypt and other Arab
countries as well. The level of involvement of
ordinary people showed the potential to rebuild
on a national scale the kind of popular resistance
movement that characterized the first
Palestinian intifada.
As much as it was a triumph for the starved
people on both sides of the Gaza border, it was
a shame for the authorities who threatened to
break the legs of any Palestinian who would dare
to cross the border again. Different methods of
propaganda were diffused to undermine this great
popular event: "Gazans are fleeing from the
oppressive or extremist regime in Gaza which is
forcing Islamization on an unwilling population";
"Palestinians are taking the opportunity to definitely
immigrate to Egypt once they crossed the border"
are but some of this unfounded propaganda.
The short memory of the world forgot how much
the Gazan pilgrims pleaded to be allowed to
return to Gaza, just a few weeks before
breaching the borders.
Were he alive today, Vladimir Jabotinsky would be
disappointed. Jabotinsky was partially right:
Palestinians are not a rabble, but a living people. And
a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful
issues only when they have given up all hope of getting
rid of the occupation. However, Jobotinsky and
his followers didn’t imagine that Palestinians
could break through even their monstrous
Apartheid Wall. Breaking through the Wall and the
symbolism of collective popular defiance and the
reclaiming of human and social rights give us a
gleam of hope that we will succeed in getting rid of
the occupation; nothing in the world can cause
Palestinians to relinquish this hope.
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