Jerusalem’s Apartheid Wall

I’m now in Jerusalem. This morning, I had some time to spare so I thought
I should go and look at some local sections of the vast network of walls
and fences the Israelis are building throughout the West Bank.

Actually, before I went there I had a good visit with Tom Neu, the head of
the Jerusalem office of a humanitarian-aid organization called American Near
East Refugee Aid, with which I’m doing a little consulting work. Tom
gave me a copy of the latest edition of the map the local U.N. people put
out periodically that tries to indicate which roads are closed and open,
and where the Wall is being built. This info is vital for all the humanitarian-aid
workers attempting to deliver services to the hard-pressed Palestinians of
the West Bank

‘Wall’ is not quite an adequate term for this network of barriers that loops
back on itself many times, cutting the Palestinian population of the West
Bank into 12 or more separate pens. Like animals. (I see in today’s
paper that the Israeli military is now claiming they “did not realize” how
much hardship the Wall would cause to the Palestinians, so they’re asking
for more money to take ameliorative measures like bussing schoolkids from
one zone to another. But how about they just stop building the Wall
altogether– especially since they’re building it totally on somebody
else’s land, not their own?)

Anyway, I thought I should go check out the sections near Jerusalem…

Five minutes to the east of central Jerusalem is the close-in suburb of al-Aizariyeh,
which was the biblical village of Bethany. Under any normal view of
city planning, Aizariyeh would be considered part and parcel of metropolitan
Jerusalem– which indeed it is, in nearly all functional terms. The
35,000-plus Palestinians who live there have numerous close links to Jerusalem:
they work there, go to school there, do business there…. Just like
people from any other suburb.

In 1967 the Israeli army brought East Jerusalem and the rest of the West
Bank under military occupation. The following year, the Israeli government
unilaterally redrew the boundaries of “Jerusalem” in such a way as to include
as much of the open space around the city as possible while excluding as
many of the near-in centers of Palestinian population as possible. (Did
I mention that Israel also announced its unilateral annexation of the City
of Jerusalem–East as well as West– at the same time? Or, that all
such moves to unilaterally change the status of territories held under military
occupation are quite illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention?)

So Aizariyeh was not included in the new boundaries of Jerusalem. Which
means that now, with Wall-building being the latest crazy inhuman step being
forced onto the Palestinians by Sharon’s government in Israel, the 24-feet-high
sections of concrete Wall are being rammed through Aizariyeh as I write this.

Construction of this part of the Wall is going ahead at great speed, it seemed
to me. I took a taxi from my hotel in East Jerusalem. First,
we went from the Jerusalem side towards where the Wall is being built between
Jerusalem and Abu Dis, another close-in suburb that’s a little south of Aizariyeh.
You’re driving through a normal, slightly ramshackle portion of the
Palestinian part of Jerusalem and suddenly there’s an Israeli army jeep blocking
the street.

“No-one can go down there,” one of the three soldiers in the jeep told me,
pointing to the dusty portion of the street ahead. (His English was
barely any better than my Hebrew, which is almost non-existent. Neither
of the other soldiers seemed to speak English at all. My driver interpreted.)

Looking ahead, I saw the Wall cutting diagonally across the street some 250
yards ahead of us. It was being built as we watched. The footings
seemed to have been prepared further than where I saw the Wall in place.
The Wall sections are prefabricated elsewhere in portions that are
maybe 5 feet wide and 24 feet high, each with a 5-6-foot horizontal cross-piece
at the bottom. Three or four sections were piled up near the place
where they would be erected. The tall crane that would do the job was
swinging its boom slowly into position. Some workers were measuring
across a flat area. A huge truck emerged in front of me from another
street, bringing another three sections of the Wall to the worksite.

All this, in the middle of what would normally be a normal city side-street.
But with the Wall cutting right across it.

In addition, in the process of building this terrifying barrier, all the
access roads leading to the worksites, like the one that I was on, had been
summarily blocked off from normal passage. You couldn’t even get near
the Wall, let alone find a way to cross it.

We drove on, and saw another section of the Wall being built around the north
side of Aizariyeh. Here, there was more open space. A pretty
pastoral scene with a carpet of green grass on the hillside, some trees,
a few traditional stone terraces– and there, running right acorss it, the
24-foot high grey concrete monstrosity.

I jumped from the car to take some photos. At this point, there were
even a few demolished Palestinian houses in the scene, as well. (Sorry, but
I don’t have a digital camera with me, so I’ll have to wait till sometime next
week to get my film processed and the photos scanned and uploaded onto the blog.)

High above me, an enormous yellow bulldozer made its way along the track that
lined the Wall on this side of it. I think the ‘dozer driver must have
seen me taking photos, because as he passed me he swung the dozer’s arm around
and made it do a couple of balletic little dips in my direction before he
proceeded on his way.

I wonder, how do the Israelis who are planning and doing this work feel about
what they do? I understand that a majority of Jewish Israelis support
the general idea of the Wall because they think it will make them safe from
the heinous operations of the Palestinian suicide bombers. But why
should they think that closing the Palestinians up into vast concrete pens,
and continuing to cut them off from any hope of a productive, viable livelihood,
will give them any stake in a broader peace? Also, how many of these
Israelis have seen, for example, the movie The Pianist, and gained any sense
that what they are doing to the Palestinians is similar to the actions of
the Nazis who shut the Jews of Poland up into the vast urban ghetto in Warsaw?

Anyway, from there we drove to Aizariyeh. Not easy, at all– though
of course we could see some of its rooftops, and the tip of a couple of its
minarets, on the hillside behind the Wall. But to get there we had
to carry on driving eastward, almost to the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale
Adumim, make a little loop to the south, and then head back in westward toward
Aizariyeh.

Aizariyeh is strung out on a more or less east-west line along a series of
ridges that rise toward Jerusalem. My driver, Tayseer, took me along
the main street, a divided four-lane highway. A fairly standard mashreqi
Arab urban streetscape. The buildings lining the street were three
to five or six stories high, rectilinear, faced with the same blond stone
as all the buildings in Jerusalem. Stores, doctor’s offices, bakeries,
apartments… The schools were letting out, and exuberant chattering
clusters of middle-school girls lined one whole block. They wore Muslim
headscarves above their pantsuits, and American-style backpacks were slumg
on their backs.

Then suddenly, another intersection, and there was an Israeli army jeep.
It was so unexpected that Tayseer almost drove right by it. Luckily,
he stopped just as he heard a soldier cry out to him to stop. “No go
there!”

Tayseer talked quickly with the solder in some combination of Arabic and
Hebrew, then told me he thought I could walk into the block ahead. “But
stay to the left, okay. That’s what he said.” He said he’d wait
for me just back a little. I walked forward to where the Wall was,
here too, slicing right across the street. Nearer to the Wall, there
was a more formal army barricade whose purpose was, I suppose, to keep people
away from the worksite. An older Palestinian man in a red-checkered
head-dress was pleading with a young-looking soldier to let him through.
“I have to get to my doctor’s office!” he said in Arabic, pointing
to a building 20 yards beyond the barricade. “Look, here’s the letter
with my appointment on it.”

The soldier didn’t even look at the letter. “Mamnoua,” he said, again
and again (“forbidden”), and started pushing the old man away from him. Finally,
the old man turned back, his face bitter. I took a few photos, then
left.

I have read several accounts of the effect of this Wall on the daily life
of the people of Aizariyeh and Abu Dis. Also, in the northern West
Bank, where some parts of the Wall were completed a number of months ago,
enclosing whole populations in steel-and-concrete pens. Somehow, I found
that seeing the physicality of it, its sheer size, and the way it cuts right
through the heart of urban areas (and through the lives of these areas’ people)
right here around Jerusalem was particularly sickening. The shortsightedness,
as well as the brutality, of the whole project made me very sad indeed.

Fifteen years ago, when the Berlin Wall came down, the whole world (except, perhaps,
for a few diehard Stalinists somewhere) rejoiced . Chunks of that Wall
were collected and sold as treasured mementos of that fine day. I bet
you can still buy one on e-bay, if you want.

The Berlin Wall had sliced through the heart of that city for 28 years by
that point. I am sure that whether it takes 28 years, or longer–or,
as I dearly hope, considerably less than that–this Wall too will come to
an end.

So I have a suggestion: why can’t we just skip the intervening years of seperation,
privation, pauperization, and sorrow, and just start chipping chunks off
the unerected sections of this Wall right now and start selling them on e-bay?
Plus, of course, take down the sections that have already gone up.
And everybody starts treating their fellow-humans– on both sides of
this terrible line– with a basic amount of simple human respect??

No, I’m not an impossible dreamer. It happened in South Africa. Hallelujah!
So yes, it certainly can happen here.