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Title: Up Against The Wall Author: Anonymous Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: Israel/Palestine, borders, occupation, anti-state, Fifth Estate Source: FIFTH ESTATE #363, Winter, 2003/2004, Vol. 38, No. 4, page 14 Notes: Scanned from original.
November 9--the fourteenth anniversary of the popular uprising that
destroyed the Berlin Wall--was also an international day of protest
against the more than 400 miles of wall being built by the Israeli
government around and through Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
All over the globe, special events and actions took place in solidarity
against this construction project.
Work on the Wall began in June 2002 and is expected to take three years
to finish at the cost of $1.7 million per mile. To date, about 90 miles
of the Wall have been completed through the Jenin, Tulkarem, and
Qalqiliya regions, adversely affecting the lives of more than 200,000
people.
Additionally, the construction project has enabled the annexation and
legitimization (through the building of by-pass roads) of almost a dozen
Israeli Jewish-only settlement-colonies. Estimates are that, upon
completion, the Wall will expand the size of Israeli territory in the
West Bank by nearly 50% through relocation and by isolating communities
into commercial cantons, ethnic enclaves and military zones.
Israel’s right-wing religio-nationalist Likud Party, led by war criminal
Ariel Sharon, mildly describes it as a “security barrier” or a “safety
fence.” Twice the height of the wall built by Ulbricht and Khrushchev
through Berlin in 1961, it bristles with armed guard towers and is
insulated by a buffer zone between 100 and 325 feet wide consisting of
razor-wire, electric fences, patrol trenches, surveillance cameras,
motion sensors, and heavily-armed soldiers.
Complicated Israeli security passes are required for anyone who tries to
pass through the checkpoints set up at the gates in order to regulate
and monitor the everyday movements of Palestinians who seek access to
their own homes, market places, groundwater wells, gardens, and grazing
lands. This disunification of Palestinian regions in the West Bank and
Jordan River valley allows Israel to seize and control ever more land
and water resources while creating townships for the Palestinians that
resemble both penal colonies and Indian reservations.
Palestinian nationalists insist that Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” will
destroy any chance for the establishment of a viable state for their
people’s future. Once assembled, these barriers and cordons will
effectively destroy the territorial contiguity said to be needed to
fabricate a Palestinian state and, in so doing, will reinforce the
bulwarks safeguarding the spatial integrity of Israel.
The Wall, then, performs two basic, interlocking functions: the
continued colonial partition of the Palestinian people and the further
augmentation of Israeli state power. This requires mention because the
popular rejection of this Wall by outraged people all over the world
needs to be made on grounds that are more meaningful and fundamental
than the authoritarian fantasies of statists. Instead of meekly
acknowledging that the Wall threatens the two-state solution by
crippling the process of Palestinian integration, anarchists could be
making the point that the Wall also menaces the no-state solution by
amplifying the power of Israel.
Fences have always been central to the capitalist project to dominate
space. The primary functions of caging and segregation bind fences to
the cults of property, identities of national sovereignty, and
imperialist expansion, all of which encourage grotesque outbursts of
self-absorbed possessiveness, dumb patriotism, militarism, and genocide.
Fences are used to enclose areas in order to keep what’s inside in:
following the Nazi invasion of 1939, a ghetto was created in Warsaw with
the aid of a nine-foot wall that forced 400,000 Polish, German and
Austrian Jews into an area of 100 square blocks. Fences are also
xenophobically used to keep the outside out, as in the fifteen-foot
high, 300-mile long militarized metal wall between the US and Mexico,
patrolled by a joint US Army-US Border Patrol task force on behalf of
the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s “Operation: Gatekeeper” and
“Operation: Safeguard.”
Restraint, confinement, and incarceration are concepts inseparable from
the delineation of property lines, the enforcement of racial-ethnic
quarantines, and the hardening of borders. The social history of barbed
wire--its invention and use in western North America during the range
wars of the mid-nineteenth century; its ubiquity in no-man’s land
between the trenches of the First World War; and its role in the
development of jails and forced-labor compounds during the last century,
from the pestilential concentration camps of the Transvaal during the
Boer War to the Nazi quarries at Mauthausen and to the Bush
Administration’s Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay--cannot be told without
mentioning the number of people robbed of their freedom (and their
lives) by forced relocation and brutal detention.
Radical anti-statists and anti-militarists should speak out and
unequivocally condemn the erection and existence of this and all other
iron curtains. Don’t let unimaginative pro-Palestinian statists
monopolize anti-Wall discourse; hostility towards Israel’s wall should
not be misinterpreted or misrepresented as support for some sort of
theocratic or nationalistic Palestinian initiative--a State will never
set you free.
States demand borders, and borders require walls and fences. Because of
their crucial role in the development of nationalist coercion and the
capitalist accumulation of private property, all fences are succinct
architectural representations of everything that disgusts
anti-authoritarians--note that the most advanced types of wall
construction are showcased in prisons, schools, psychiatric hospitals,
luxury condominiums, and national border crossings. We need, then, to
act accordingly. Spaces must be opened in our neighborhoods, in our work
places, in our regions, and all over the world. Borders and barriers
must be rendered ineffective and porous through our individual and
multi-directional efforts in the service of common areas and wilderness.
A comrade from the Tel Aviv-based “Anarchists Against Fences” reports
that on November 9 some two hundred Palestinians, 35 Israelis and a
similar number of internationals tore down about 65 feet of fence with
bolt cutters, rakes, and long-handled drag hooks near the village of
Zububa. During the demolition, Israeli soldiers arrived and dispersed
the wreckers with a half-hour barrage of gunshots, concussion grenades,
and tear gas. The actions of these protesters are not exactly ironic,
modern-day re-creations of the bloody Zionist folktale of the siege
before the walls of Jericho, but the reference is difficult to ignore.
And so is the moral of that story: this is just one of the many walls
that need to he torn down.
+++
Graffiti Voices
Excerpted from a report issued at gushshalom.com
In Sawahre, it really looked like a replica of the Berlin Wall, that
wall which had fallen exactly fourteen years ago--a long row of giant
concrete panels planted in the middle of a pastoral landscape. In no
time, the dull gray was overlaid by an enormous lot of graffiti, as
Israeli, Palestinian and international activists simultaneously pulled
out spray paint and cheerfully set to work:
Barrier for peace / No more ghettos! / No to the apartheid Wall! / There
are no good walls / Arabern raus: this is Sharonistan / Zionism of
dispossession / Pull down the wall / The Wall will fall / The IDF is a
terrorist organization / Remember the Warsaw Ghetto / Another future
without a wall / This is Israeli supremacy and Apartheid / This is not
security, this is stupidity / Ghetto Palestine / Wall = ethnic cleansing
/ Stop the shame! / Concrete is not security / No hands meet when walls
are built / Somebody is calling from the other side, do you listen? /
Down With Zionist terrorism / Remember, the Maginot Line / Remember the
Bar-Lev Line / This occupation is killing us / Love without borders.
And, in some places also the standard inscription of each block-Ministry
of Defense, Department of Construction-was transformed: Department of
Destruction / Department of Occupation / Department of Apartheid /
Ministry of Oppression.
There were demonstrations against the Wall in the US, England, Scotland,
France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Australia,
South Africa, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bangladesh and Jordan.
Details on: http://www.stopthewall.org/worwideactivism/62.shtml