// essays //
Fall 2005
This Wall Can Talk
Ethan Pack
Is the Israeli separation barrier an "apartheid wall," as its critics contend? I am not ignorant of the offenses that have given rise to such reactions, and yet I often find myself contending with that term based on my personal experience in the West Bank and the southern Galilee. My position can only be understood against a rough summary of relations between Israelis and Palestinians.
Before the first intifada in the 1980s, Israelis were largely ignorant of Palestinian national will, and therefore the necessity of granting Palestinian rights eluded them. But, after the chaos, when both public sentiment and the rise of Hamas made these national aspirations impossible to ignore, Israeli invited the return of the PLO, hoping it would evolve into a responsible and centralized Palestinian Authority. The second Middle East peace process was thus initiated, and the Israeli government hoped to remedy Israeli-Palestinian tension through a bilateral process of negotiation and concessions. Negotiations collapsed after Yasser Arafat unconditionally rejected Ehud Barak's 2000 unexpectedly generous final-status offer. A bilateral solution proved unachievable. Palestinian militancy, formerly expressed by political intransigence, now evolved into a second intifada. And finally, after years of frustrated military responses such as targeted assassinations, the Israeli government has formulated its own unilateral response: to establish a working border and to raise a fence along it that will repel Palestinian attacks and incursions.
The barrier in its most basic form shows that the Israelis have come to understand the unceasing efforts of militants to eliminate them, as well as the dual necessity to both secure their fellow citizens and recognize Palestinian national aspirations.
For me, the tendency to label the barrier as a monstrosity of oppression or obstacle to peace is too harsh. I'm conflicted; my instinctual self-criticism sears me for being an apologist, a blind supporter who casually dismisses the barrier's every negative effect. The barrier raises very serious questions, the most concrete and controversial being its route in the West Bank, and its physical composition.
It's hard to applaud the barrier's construction. Both far-right settlers and Palestinians are looking to the Supreme Court to curb the Likud government's route proposals, themselves antithetical to every Likud leadership before 2002, the second and bloodiest year of the recent intifada. Meanwhile, the defense establishment's role in the chain of command has been inverted, as it now takes orders based on disparate civilian interest rather than establishing the parameters for civic debate.
In articulating my response, both to my inner voice and to the barrier's detractors, I notice that the barrier's construction directly addresses the security concerns which motivated its construction. First of all, although photographs in the western media mainly feature a looming concrete wall, ninety-seven percent of the 450 mile barrier is in fact a ten foot chain-link fence. The sections made of concrete separate Israeli roads and houses from Palestinian neighborhoods that were used by gunmen as sniper posts to fire at apartment windows, passing cars, and even Israeli children playing soccer in parking lots. These walled strips have become pilgrimage points for protesters as well as lazy photographers with an eye for the symbolic, but they generally are only a few hundred yards long and traversable on either side. In a section east of Jerusalem that I visited, the wall was particularly imposing, reaching 12 meters above the ground it stood on. But I learned that it had been relocated from higher ground in order to avoid cutting through a residential area and razing illegally-built Palestinian houses. As a result, it had to be built taller than its originally-planned two meters.
The barrier's effectiveness reinforces the correspondence between its physical form and its political causes. I lived in Israel's north in 2003 for a four-month period, and during that time the region's towns were declared secure as the fence's northern portion was completed. In fact, after the first third of the barrier was constructed in the northern west bank, the rate of civilian deaths due to large-scale attacks dropped 84%. This drop comes from a failure of execution on the part of the terrorists, not a lack of trying. Unsuccessful attacks have averaged about 10 a day during the last two years, only slightly fewer than during the intifada as a whole. The barrier is the only conceivable explanation for their lack of success. Certainly, the lack of noticeable change in genocidal propaganda emanating from the Palestinian school system, media, and clergy have aggravated fears that, even after the barrier goes up, the population on the other side will be no more amenable to the two-state solution it imposes, having never been weaned off the milk of the militant celebritization of those "martyrs" who die fighting Israelis.
Still, nothing can obscure the clear humanitarian and political consequences of the barrier. It cuts off thousands of Palestinians from their fields, jobs, schools, and health clinics, forcing them to cross through a small number of tedious and humiliating checkpoints. In order to clear its path, the Israeli military has razed thousands of olive trees, and the task of monitoring it has increased Israeli military presence near the property of Palestinian towns and villages.
Aside from these particular problems, the barrier's route raises broader political questions. First of all, it strays from the Green Line, the 1949 ceasefire border between the then Jordanian-ruled West Bank and Israel. Israelis insist that the Green Line does not delineate a defensible border, and therefore cannot serve as the exclusive guideline for the path of a security barrier. Political analysts point to the three wars before 1967, when Arab armies invaded Israel, as evidence of these borders' real and perceived vulnerability. In some places, the Green Line sits ten yards from Israeli cities, a distance that would give security forces insufficient time to detect and react to terrorist intrusions. In other areas, the Green line sits on high ground nine miles from the Mediterranean coast, into which Hamas, and certain PA, officials swear they will push the Jews.
Nevertheless, factors other than pure geographic necessity have influenced the fence's construction. The Likud has attempted to use the fence as pretext for their expanionist vision of a final settlement. The Supreme Court has responded by halting construction at two different points in time, and in both cases it eventually ruled that equally strategic routes could cause less humanitarian harm and better preserve the contiguity of Palestinian land. And although it is understandable that the barrier's route snakes around settlement blocs, whose location were often chosen at points of previous vulnerability, certain elements on the right also aim to significantly inconvenience Palestinians from Jerusalem and Qalqilya and force them to vacate to the east. But having lived in East Jerusalem, straddling volatile Israeli Arab, Jewish, and Palestinian neighborhoods, it is obvious that attempts to alter demographics by the relocation of people is both reprehensible and counter-productive. The more settlers the fence tries to encompass, the more Palestinians it will leave on the Israeli side. As such, any attempt to include populated Palestinian areas within the fence's purview threatens the demographic constitution of Israel proper, and cuts into the land and people of what must be a Palestinian state-- the sooner the better.
Israeli, Jewish, and world critics of all stripes must ensure that no Israeli government uses the barrier to frustrate Palestinian national aspirations that concord with a mutually affirming two-state solution. But any critic must realize that no Israeli government will be able to remove a barrier that is the last line of defense against death. No one can deny the necessity of a militarized border. Any look into the Palestinian school system or media will tell you that their opposition to the fence, though valid for many reasons, does not stem from a desire for neighborliness. Nonetheless, those who only emphasize the collective Palestinian inconvenience the barrier has caused overlook the fact that for years Palestinian towns along the Green Line shelter snipers as well as suicide bombers en route. The barrier raises questions about collective punishment that cannot be ignored. But death, unlike detours, is an irreversible inconvenience.
Before the first intifada in the 1980s, Israelis were largely ignorant of Palestinian national will, and therefore the necessity of granting Palestinian rights eluded them. But, after the chaos, when both public sentiment and the rise of Hamas made these national aspirations impossible to ignore, Israeli invited the return of the PLO, hoping it would evolve into a responsible and centralized Palestinian Authority. The second Middle East peace process was thus initiated, and the Israeli government hoped to remedy Israeli-Palestinian tension through a bilateral process of negotiation and concessions. Negotiations collapsed after Yasser Arafat unconditionally rejected Ehud Barak's 2000 unexpectedly generous final-status offer. A bilateral solution proved unachievable. Palestinian militancy, formerly expressed by political intransigence, now evolved into a second intifada. And finally, after years of frustrated military responses such as targeted assassinations, the Israeli government has formulated its own unilateral response: to establish a working border and to raise a fence along it that will repel Palestinian attacks and incursions.
The barrier in its most basic form shows that the Israelis have come to understand the unceasing efforts of militants to eliminate them, as well as the dual necessity to both secure their fellow citizens and recognize Palestinian national aspirations.
For me, the tendency to label the barrier as a monstrosity of oppression or obstacle to peace is too harsh. I'm conflicted; my instinctual self-criticism sears me for being an apologist, a blind supporter who casually dismisses the barrier's every negative effect. The barrier raises very serious questions, the most concrete and controversial being its route in the West Bank, and its physical composition.
It's hard to applaud the barrier's construction. Both far-right settlers and Palestinians are looking to the Supreme Court to curb the Likud government's route proposals, themselves antithetical to every Likud leadership before 2002, the second and bloodiest year of the recent intifada. Meanwhile, the defense establishment's role in the chain of command has been inverted, as it now takes orders based on disparate civilian interest rather than establishing the parameters for civic debate.
In articulating my response, both to my inner voice and to the barrier's detractors, I notice that the barrier's construction directly addresses the security concerns which motivated its construction. First of all, although photographs in the western media mainly feature a looming concrete wall, ninety-seven percent of the 450 mile barrier is in fact a ten foot chain-link fence. The sections made of concrete separate Israeli roads and houses from Palestinian neighborhoods that were used by gunmen as sniper posts to fire at apartment windows, passing cars, and even Israeli children playing soccer in parking lots. These walled strips have become pilgrimage points for protesters as well as lazy photographers with an eye for the symbolic, but they generally are only a few hundred yards long and traversable on either side. In a section east of Jerusalem that I visited, the wall was particularly imposing, reaching 12 meters above the ground it stood on. But I learned that it had been relocated from higher ground in order to avoid cutting through a residential area and razing illegally-built Palestinian houses. As a result, it had to be built taller than its originally-planned two meters.
The barrier's effectiveness reinforces the correspondence between its physical form and its political causes. I lived in Israel's north in 2003 for a four-month period, and during that time the region's towns were declared secure as the fence's northern portion was completed. In fact, after the first third of the barrier was constructed in the northern west bank, the rate of civilian deaths due to large-scale attacks dropped 84%. This drop comes from a failure of execution on the part of the terrorists, not a lack of trying. Unsuccessful attacks have averaged about 10 a day during the last two years, only slightly fewer than during the intifada as a whole. The barrier is the only conceivable explanation for their lack of success. Certainly, the lack of noticeable change in genocidal propaganda emanating from the Palestinian school system, media, and clergy have aggravated fears that, even after the barrier goes up, the population on the other side will be no more amenable to the two-state solution it imposes, having never been weaned off the milk of the militant celebritization of those "martyrs" who die fighting Israelis.
Still, nothing can obscure the clear humanitarian and political consequences of the barrier. It cuts off thousands of Palestinians from their fields, jobs, schools, and health clinics, forcing them to cross through a small number of tedious and humiliating checkpoints. In order to clear its path, the Israeli military has razed thousands of olive trees, and the task of monitoring it has increased Israeli military presence near the property of Palestinian towns and villages.
Aside from these particular problems, the barrier's route raises broader political questions. First of all, it strays from the Green Line, the 1949 ceasefire border between the then Jordanian-ruled West Bank and Israel. Israelis insist that the Green Line does not delineate a defensible border, and therefore cannot serve as the exclusive guideline for the path of a security barrier. Political analysts point to the three wars before 1967, when Arab armies invaded Israel, as evidence of these borders' real and perceived vulnerability. In some places, the Green Line sits ten yards from Israeli cities, a distance that would give security forces insufficient time to detect and react to terrorist intrusions. In other areas, the Green line sits on high ground nine miles from the Mediterranean coast, into which Hamas, and certain PA, officials swear they will push the Jews.
Nevertheless, factors other than pure geographic necessity have influenced the fence's construction. The Likud has attempted to use the fence as pretext for their expanionist vision of a final settlement. The Supreme Court has responded by halting construction at two different points in time, and in both cases it eventually ruled that equally strategic routes could cause less humanitarian harm and better preserve the contiguity of Palestinian land. And although it is understandable that the barrier's route snakes around settlement blocs, whose location were often chosen at points of previous vulnerability, certain elements on the right also aim to significantly inconvenience Palestinians from Jerusalem and Qalqilya and force them to vacate to the east. But having lived in East Jerusalem, straddling volatile Israeli Arab, Jewish, and Palestinian neighborhoods, it is obvious that attempts to alter demographics by the relocation of people is both reprehensible and counter-productive. The more settlers the fence tries to encompass, the more Palestinians it will leave on the Israeli side. As such, any attempt to include populated Palestinian areas within the fence's purview threatens the demographic constitution of Israel proper, and cuts into the land and people of what must be a Palestinian state-- the sooner the better.
Israeli, Jewish, and world critics of all stripes must ensure that no Israeli government uses the barrier to frustrate Palestinian national aspirations that concord with a mutually affirming two-state solution. But any critic must realize that no Israeli government will be able to remove a barrier that is the last line of defense against death. No one can deny the necessity of a militarized border. Any look into the Palestinian school system or media will tell you that their opposition to the fence, though valid for many reasons, does not stem from a desire for neighborliness. Nonetheless, those who only emphasize the collective Palestinian inconvenience the barrier has caused overlook the fact that for years Palestinian towns along the Green Line shelter snipers as well as suicide bombers en route. The barrier raises questions about collective punishment that cannot be ignored. But death, unlike detours, is an irreversible inconvenience.
// Ethan Pack, CC ‘08, lived in Israel for a year after high school. He is the Columbia Spectator Associate Opinion Editor, and was an activist in high school for various Jewish and secular causes.