The Berlin Wall is Gone but Israel’s Apartheid Wall Still Stands

From The Berlin Wall, Germany 1989...

...To The Apartheid Wall, West Bank 2009                   (copyright Pavel Walberg/EPA)

Article in The Scottish Herald, by David Pratt. Published on 13 Nov 2009.

In writing this, I’m bracing myself for being called an anti-Semite, an appeaser of terrorists and propagandist for the Palestinian cause.

I’m none of those things. I say this simply because these days, it seems, anyone who dares criticise the policies of the Israeli government leaves themselves open to such accusations.

The compulsion to write something that would leave me prone to such an attack was instigated earlier this week by watching Berlin’s champagne and fireworks celebrations commemor­ating the fall of the Wall.

How strange it must be, I thought, for any Palestinian in the village of Abu Dis, sitting before a TV screen looking on as the world indulges in rapturous back-slapping over the restoration of freedom and human rights that came with the passing of the wall.

I mention Abu Dis not because it’s special, but simply because I know it well, having spent some time there over the years. Indeed, I might just as easily have named umpteen other

Palestinian communities cut off behind the concrete wall and fence built by Israel that stands twice as high and runs four times as long as its infamous Berlin predecessor.

What was amazing about the Berlin jamboree – aside from the toppling dominoes – was that in the days leading up to and during the celebrations, scant mention was made of Israel’s illegal “separation wall” which today, like its bygone equivalent, stands as a global symbol of repression. Why, on this grand occasion marking the end of the Berlin Wall, was there not more reflection or objection to the injustice caused by its contemporary counterpart?

Perhaps, it is because the word apartheid is something the world would prefer to forget, and to which Israel itself takes grave exception. Apartheid, after all, is something of a historical embarrassment, even if its existence and enforcement – whatever Israel might say – shamefully continues today for millions of Palestinians corralled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 15 years after its demise in South Africa.

But there is another, altogether more worrying, reason for our collective reticence over Israel’s shameful policy of closure and containment of the Palestinian people. It has to do with the way the world becomes cowed whenever the need arises to confront this “democratic” state over policies that fly in the face of international law and human rights conventions.

Frankly, I can almost understand this reluctance to criticise Israel, given the relentless, uncompromising and intimidating response the Jewish state invokes whenever it is challenged or questioned. Look no further, for example, than Jerusalem’s reaction to last month’s Goldstone Report findings on the recent war in Gaza. Alternatively, ask any indivi­dual who has had the audacity to make public their objections to Israel’s wall or human rights violations, only to find themselves on the receiving end of an often vitriolic Zionist lobby.

One of the favourite responses of these Zionist cadres is to denounce any critic as an anti-Semite, or if that doesn’t work, an appeaser of terrorists. I remember well the first time I dared use the word apartheid in the context of Israel’s wall.

In pointing out in an article that the Hebrew word “hafrada”, which means “separation”, was often now used as a virtual catch-all term for an apartheid existence between Israelis and Palestinians, I was inundated with some very nasty email correspondence.

How many of those who sent these emails, I wonder, would have known that as far back as 1999, Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, spoke openly about the proposed wall, referring to it as “the Bantustan plan”, saying that the South African apartheid model offered the most appropriate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

How many also would have known that it was one of Israel’s own prominent military historians, Professor Martin van Creveld, of the Hebrew University, who was first to propose a wall round the West Bank, and who drew his inspiration for that same proposal from the Berlin Wall, after spending a year’s sabbatical in Germany in 1980-81?

“If I could, I would build a concrete wall so tall that even birds could not fly over it, and above all, so the people cannot look each other in the face – complete separation,” Van Creveld is quoted as saying in an article, some years before Mr Sharon, when Israeli Prime Minister, took his idea to heart and made the wall a bitter reality for those Palestinians who now live in its shadow.

Of course, whenever questions about the legality of the wall are raised, Israel invariably responds with the same answer: “It stops the bombers and that’s all that matters.”

But how can Israel insist on calling it a “security wall” when instead of just separating Israel from the West Bank, it separates Arab from Arab? Indeed, how could a people whose history is full of terrible ghettos now be building one themselves?

For Israelis such as these, there is simply no debate to be had. As far as they are concerned, the crushing effects of the wall on the lives of millions of Palestinians is a small price to pay for the relative – if somewhat imaginary – guarantee of their own personal security.

But to call it this way makes for a convenient defence of a policy they also know is little more than a land grab and indefensible in terms of international law.

“If you want security for your house, you build the wall in your own garden, not in your neighbour’s,” I remember Hassan Akramawi, a Palestinian shopkeeper, telling me near Abu Dis, where the wall had cut his business off from the village customers who gave him a meagre income.

For anyone who has never seen the wall, it’s hard to over emphasise the sheer injustice of this concrete scar that gouges its way across olive orchards, family homes, grazing areas, places of work, schools and anything else that, frankly, the state of Israel has decided to confiscate. Its sheer physical size bears down when you are near it.

The double standards displayed by many world leaders this week keen to add their ringing endorsement to the inhuman and intolerant rule the Berlin Wall represented, while remaining steadfastly mute on Israel’s present-day incarnation, is shaming to them all. As one old Palestinian man, a resident of Abu Dis, once put it to me succinctly: “Where is the world? Where is the world?”

Comments

[arabmuslim]

There is no state called Israel
This is a terrorist state called Israel.
State of thieves called Israel a
basis of the displacement
and killing of Innocent nation .
state of thieves basis
bloodshed and war
And the arrest of people
for tens of years to
prevent him from claiming
The right to life .
basis steal the land of the
Palestinian people
And then steal
the land of the Arab-Muslim
the entire .State of the
thieves do not know the law …..
Does not recognize the
law of the United Nations,
a state that considers itself above the
law . the law is the siege of Gaza
And the bloodshed and
destruction of houses and
killing innocent people
and occupying the country
This is a country named Israel thieves
This is a terrorist state called Israel