“It is eight metres high and up to 220 miles long – and, say Palestinians, it is part of a blatant plan to seize their assets and force them off their land. Jessica McCallin in Jerusalem reports”
Fears mount as Israel’s ‘Berlin Wall’ threatens to imprison the West Bank](http://www.sundayherald.com/30424) Sunday Herald, UK
It makes the Berlin Wall look like the work of amateurs. Israel is building a barricade in and around the occupied Palestinian West Bank which will be four times the size of communist Germany’s claim to fame – and light years ahead of it technologically. The eight-metre-high wall is made out of huge, grey, concrete slabs and has watchtowers built into it every 300 metres or so. On either side of it are military roads, complete with tanks and armoured Jeeps, trenches, some six metres wide and four metres deep, barbed wire, cameras, motion sensors, electrified fencing and exclusion zones of between 35 and 50 metres. In parts, special material will be laid to detect infiltrators’ footprints. In all it is about 100 metres wide and has been and will continue to be built entirely on Palestinian land.
It’s difficult to say exactly how long the finished wall will be as Israel has not released complete maps. Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations have had to deduce its path using military orders for land seizures and lists of which illegal Israeli settlements will be to the west of the wall. Their conclusion is that it will run the entire 220-mile length of the West Bank and could even encircle it and be built not just on the border between the West Bank and Israel, but on the border between the West Bank and Jordan as well, effectively making the West Bank a huge open-air prison .
It will not be a straight wall. It will twist and turn, jutting, at times, tens of miles into the West Bank to include settlement clusters and corridors. Huge walled arms are expected to punch deep into the occupied territory, especially around the holy cities of Nablus and Hebron which have been settled by extremist, religious Jews. Nor will it follow the green line, the 1949 armistice line between Israel and the Arab states which now delineates Israel and the West Bank and – according to the Palestinians – should be used as the basis of a border between and independent Palestine and Israel.
Around Jerusalem, a 54km stretch is expected to be positively acrobatic. Since 1967 Israel has peppered East Jerusalem and the land to its east with settlements, breaking continuity between Palestinian built-up areas, preventing their expansion and cutting them off from the rest of the West Bank. To include as many of the settlements as possible in Israel and exclude as many of the Palestinians as possible, the wall will have to do a series of spectacular twists and bends .
Its first phase, the 70-mile-long northern part of the wall has been under construction since July. To date, 15 Palestinian villages have found themselves stuck between the wall and the green line and a further 15 villages have found themselves cut off from their farm land, now on the ‘Israeli’ side of the wall, and thus their livelihoods and way of life. In one area, a contiguous 90sqkm has already been seized. Homes have been demolished and farmland destroyed to make way for the wall.
Hundreds of homes in Palestinian towns such as Qalqiliya and Tulkarem now look out on the wall and have its cameras look into their rooms. Qalqiliya will be surrounded by the wall on three sides. The only entrance into and out of the town is an Israeli-manned checkpoint, one metre wide for pedestrians and about five metres wide for cars. This is supposed to allow normal thoroughfare to Qalqiliya’s 42,000 residents and the 45,000 residents from surrounding villages that depend on the town for hospitals, schools, shopping and other services.
Israel says it will allow free access in and out of the checkpoint, but an hour spent observing it showed this will almost certainly not happen. Countless people were turned away, in particular those from the nearby village of Jayyous which has been very active in campaigning against the wall and has attracted a lot of international media attention. Others were kept for up to one hour for no reason.
Why? ‘Because I feel like it,’ says the checkpoint’s commander, Erez Kalderon. ‘I’m allowed to keep them for as long as I feel.’ Getting past the checkpoint is so difficult that an estimated 2000 Qalqiliyan businessmen have already left the city for villages on the other side of the checkpoint.
And the reason for the wall, which is costing well over $2 billion in total? For Israel, the justification is the same as that used for all its actions: security. It is building the wall, which it calls a security or separation fence, to prevent the entry into Israel of militants and suicide-bombers. Government spokespeople will not expand on this argument nor explain why so many settlements and so much land is to be annexed. Palestinians dismiss the argument.
‘If it’s really for security then why not build it on the green line, why take my land?’ says Maa’rouf Zahran, Mayor of Qalqiliya Municipality. ‘And why does the wall need to be up to 100m wide? Why can’t it just be 10m wide, but higher. Surely the higher it is, the more security it provides.’
**The wall, which Palestinians call the Apartheid Wall, may in part be to try and foil attacks, some say, but that’s not the real reason for it. To them, it’s just the continuation of a policy of land expropriation and population expulsion which started with Israel’s establishment more than 54 years ago.
‘The real reason for the wall is to take as much Palestinian land and water resources and annex as many of the settlements as possible. Current estimates say it will take as much as 10% of the West Bank, including its most fertile land, and the whole of the western mountain aquifer, situated under the green line, which supplies the West Bank Palestinians with over 50% of their water,’ says Jamal Juma of the Palestinian Environmental NGO Network and a key campaigner against the wall. ‘Once the wall is up it will cripple Palestinian agriculture and economic activity, and turn the West Bank into a series of disconnected, dependent entities or Bantustans. It will make life unlivable and cause the Palestinians to leave which is what Israel, currently clamouring for transfer or ethnic cleansing, wants.’**
It took nearly three decades for the Berlin Wall to come down. Palestinians are afraid that if their wall is up for that long its impact will force them to leave their homes. Israel will call this ‘voluntary transfer’, implying Palestinians wanted to leave when in reality they had no option. When the wall finally comes down, they say, it will not be to reunite people and land – it will be because the land east of it is now free of its native inhabitants and ready to be completely taken over by Israel.
