We
are no longer able to see the sun set
Al-Ahram Weekly
7 - 13 July 2005
Issue No. 750
Focus
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/750/focus.htm
On 9 July last year the International Court of Justice
issued its opinion on the apartheid Wall Israel is constructing in the
West Bank. The opinion, argues Andrew Rubin*,
should open up other arenas of resistance
The Israeli wall -- the so-called security fence -- is
daunting and ominous matrix of social control and demographic separation
that is currently planned to be 670km long. It is thick and concrete,
eight metres high, and at some points 104 metres deep. It is three times
as high and twice as wide as the Berlin Wall. It is surrounded at a
distance by nests of barbed wires, rolled up like stacks of hay piled
high around it. High voltage circuits run through the so-called "smart
fences", three metres tall, that line the perimeter of the barrier.
Between the fence and the wall is trench, over two metres deep, studded
with piercing metal spikes.
Outside the smaller fence, the Israeli military has paved a
path of finely ground sand that is groomed to make footprints visible.
At certain intervals, there are 10m vertical steel poles housing highly
powered stadium lights and surveillance cameras. Adjacent to the wall,
on the Israeli side, stand huge and foreboding turrets and watchtowers
where Israeli observers and snipers are stationed. The Israeli military
has defined the area of the wall to be a "military zone", and soldiers
have orders to shoot to kill upon the discretion of the commanding
officer.
As part of the ongoing process of settlement that began in
the Occupied Territories after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in
1967, the wall dramatically alters the conditions of life in the
Occupied Territories of Palestine by establishing and consolidating a
set of territorial arrangements that attempts to physically ensure that
most of the existing and illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and
Gaza are ther
e
to stay. By virtue of its route, which is not along the
internationally recognised borders of 1967 (the Green line), the wall
annexes 58 per cent of the West Bank and confines the Palestinians to a
ghetto-like existence. Extending from the north of the West Bank area
around Jenin and far southwest to Tulkarm, it essentially closes off the
entirety of the Palestinian town of Qalqilya. Winding its way south
towards East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, it physically encloses over 78
Palestinian and Arab communities, such as Battir, Nahhalin, Ras
Al-'Amud, Ras Atiya, Abu Farad to cite only a few.
The wall, the Israeli construction of which began in June
2002, has severely disrupted and profoundly encumbered daily life. It
has undermined and wretchedly destroyed the social and economic fabric
of the Palestinian civil society. To make room for its path, entire
orchards and olive groves have been uprooted. Farmers have no access to
what little remains of their arable land. Thousands of Palestinian homes
-- over 42,165 in the West Bank -- have been demolished by the Israeli
military. Tens of thousands of dunams (1 dunam = 1000 square metres)
have been confiscated by the Israeli military in this systematic
process. Check-points and road-blocks obstruct Palestinians' unfettered
access to schools, health clinics, and work. Families have been
physically separated; and, in one instance, a house was purportedly
divided in half. In Qalqilya, the wall rises to such a height that, it
is said, one can no longer see the sun set.
Life in the Occupied Territories of Palestine has been
reduced generally to an utterly debased form of collective imprisonment.
In the area surrounding the town of Qalqilya alone -- includes Ras Atiya
and Arab Abu Farad ---- about 40,000 Palestinians remain virtually
enclosed by the wall. In October 2003, the check-point at Qalqilya was
completely closed for a period that lasted several weeks, shutting off
Palestinians in the surrounding area from the rest of the world in what
is essentially a more or less closed ghetto. Villages such as Rafat,
Deir Ballut, Az-Zawiya, have only one exit, and, in the case of Deir
Ballut, the military checkpoint is closed every evening at 19:00. In the
town of Jayyus, in the district of Qalqilya, the Israeli military opens
the check-point briefly. An Israeli military sign in Arabic announces
the check-point is open from 7:40 to 8:00, 14:00 to 14:15, and
18:45-19:00, only 50 minutes a day.
The human cost of the occupation in general and the
construction of the wall in particular is enormous. From 29 September,
2000 to 20 June, 2005, 3,625 Palestinians have been killed, nearly
30,000 injured, over 7,000 with live ammunition fire. In the long
history of the occupation that began in 1967, roughly 400,000
Palestinian have been detained at one point or another. Calculated as
proportion of the total Palestinian population in the West Bank and
Gaza, 40 per cent of Palestinian men have, at one time or another in
their lives, been imprisoned.
The wall has severely disrupted the free movement of
Palestinian, Druze, Bedouin and Arab residents of the Palestinian
Occupied Territories. In its current configuration, the Israeli wall
intersects Route 65 from Qalqilya to Nablus at five different and
separate points, making travel to the larger city of Nablus, where most
life-saving surgical procedures are performed, almost completely
inaccessible. It geographically divides the West Bank latitudinally in
half, making travel between the north and south impossible. What was
once only a short distance -- 20km -- between Qalqilya and Nablus is
made all the more insurmountable by a series of obstacles, checkpoints,
road blocks, and the physical barrier of the wall which together as a
system of geographical enclosure forces Palestinians to drive an extra
few hundred kilometres -- at least several hours -- to get to the
nearest major hospital equipped to deal with critically ill patients. In
one recent case, a woman with a complicated pregnancy was denied an exit
permit at Israeli checkpoint near Qalqilya. She was giving birth to
twins on the spot, yet the Israeli soldiers refused to let her drive to
the nearest hospital. Both babies died.
Entire villages are cut off from their crops -- mostly
citrus and olive groves. In the Salfit area, the Israelis seized roughly
90 per cent of the land in order to incorporate the Jewish settlements
of Ariel and Kaddom on the Israeli side of the wall. At certain points
the wall literally juts abruptly into Palestinian territory in order to
claim the Salfit area for Israeli settlements. As if that were not
enough, the wall's trajectory seizes some of the most fertile soil in
the region on the Israeli side, between the Green Line and the Wall
itself.
Daily existence in Gaza fairs no better. Although widely
celebrated as the end of the occupation of Gaza, the Sharon
disengagement is actually the exact opposite: it is the armed, military
encirclement of Gaza by the Israeli military. From 29 September, 2000 to
December 2004, 18,311 homes in Gaza have been destroyed. In Rafah alone,
which Israel invaded in October 2003, the Israeli military destroyed 120
houses, shut down 114 refugee shelters, and in that month alone left
1,240 Palestinians homeless. From the period of September 2000 to
December 2004, over 16,000 people were rendered homeless.
The aim of all this, which Ariel Sharon has admitted quite
candidly, is to prevent Gaza from having any external contact with the
outside world by land, air, or sea. Indeed, it is far more costly for
Israel military to continue to occupy Gaza from within its borders, than
to control Gaza from outside as a prison-like entity. Through a process
of systematic demolition and armed encirclement, Israel has established
a 200-300 metre buffer (the so-called Philadelphia corridor) between the
entrance to Gaza at the mouth of Salahuddin Gate -- the main entrance to
Rafah's central throughway (Jamal Abdel-Nasser Street) ---- and
demolished entire blocks of houses in front of the gate. In addition, it
has razed the houses along the borders of Gaza and Egypt -- the
Al-Brazil Block, As-Salam Block, and other make-shift residences that
are simply called "Block D" ---- to the ground. In the Rafah camp alone,
80 children under the age of 14 were killed by the Israelis in the
process. To put the housing demolition into some relative perspective
would be to say that the equivalent of 1.2 million homes in the United
States were destroyed. "What the army is doing in the Rafah camp is
nothing less than ethnic cleansing," says Dr Mustafa Barghouti, the head
of the Palestinian National Initiative
What is actually occurring is Israel's territorial
consolidation of four principles which have guided Israeli political
imagination since 1968: 1) that no Palestinian state shall share any
borders with any other country other than Israel; 2) a Palestinian state
will have no real or meaningful sovereignty, only a functional one
subordinate to Israel's sovereignty; 3) that Israel will preserve and
institutionalise the existing conditions in the Occupied Territories by
protecting existing Jewish settlements; and 4) Israel will continue to
build illegal settlements to create the illusion that any cessation of
construction is actually a sign of Israel's willingness to compromise
and a sign of its "good faith" -- a strategy that is practised by both
the Labour Party and Likkud, with the only real difference being the
conservative or liberal ideology that is used to justify its ongoing
colonial expansion in the West Bank.
Again, the Israeli ideological strategy has always been
informed by four general practices: the ongoing military occupation; the
preservation and expansion of existing and illegal Jewish settlement in
the West Bank and Gaza; the construction of new settlements (roughly a
102 new ones); and the construction of the wall to preserve and make
these practices seemingly physically irreversible realities on the
ground. The function of part of the latter strategy -- the building of
the wall ---- is as obvious as lines on the maps that represent its
trajectory.
A comparison between the 1993 maps of the Oslo Accords and
the existing plans for all three phases of the wall incontrovertibly
shows that the wall is nothing less than the physical and concrete
institutionalisation of precisely those aspects of Oslo that Israel had
agreed to: the establishment of tiny cloisters and pockets of
Palestinian self-rule, with no meaningful sovereignty, that Edward Said
compared to the bantustans which the British had devised as a means of
exerting colonial authority in Africa. Yet the comparison with British
form of colonial rule ends with the establishment of numerous,
non-contiguous bantustans. Whereas from 1918-1948 in British Mandate
Palestine, Britain had dredged and designed the Port of Haifa,
constructed six power stations for Palestinians and Jews, built public
roads and buildings for everyone, all Israel has done is to shore up its
military presence with more check-points, more prisons, more expanding
settlements, more rerouted irrigation systems (for the settlements),
more de- development (of Palestinian infrastructure and agriculture),
more barriers and more of its massive $3.4 billion wall. In others
words, it is colonialism without development, or "de-development" as
Sara Roy called it, the sole aim of which is the complete destruction of
the foundations of all aspects of Palestinian civil society.
Meaningful political resistance to this ongoing process has
taken mostly two forms, the first of which is an emerging movement of a
non-violent protest that has vigorously and mostly peacefully decried
the wall and Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land. As I write now
there are spirited protests by agricultural workers in Marda, a village
of some 2,000 inhabitants, much of whose land has been taken by the
nearby Jewish settlement of Ariel, and more of which Israeli forces are
trying to confiscate to build the wall. On 17 June in Bil'in, near
Ramallah and part of the Salfit area, a group of several hundred
demonstrators clashed with Israeli soldiers who came to enclose more
land, only to be dispersed with rounds of live ammunition fire and
clouds of tear gas. On 7 June, villagers in the town of Arab Rammadin
brought bulldozers, which were razing 2239 dunams (2.2 square km) for
the wall, to a halt.
In addition to these promising signs of an emerging
non-violent political resistance, there is the often overlooked decision
of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which issued its advisory
opinion a year ago on 9 July, 2004. Not only did the ICJ flatly put to
rest Israeli's disingenuous claims that the wall was needed to protect
Israeli security (if it were needed for that purpose, the Israeli
government could have legally built the wall along the 1967 Green Line),
but it established the ICJ's jurisdiction over a country that has, along
with the United States, refused to sign its charter.
What was remarkable about the decision was how conceptually
unremarkable it was. No new principles, except for the precedents of the
1907 Hague and Geneva Conventions and countless UN resolutions, were
needed to decide the patent illegality of the wall under the authority
of a canon of international law. In an essentially unanimous decision,
the court found that the Israeli wall was illegal in all respects and in
its existing dimensions and that it must be removed. The most
significant aspect of the decision was that it not only established and
asserted jurisdiction over the activities of a nation that has refused
to accept the ICJ'S jurisdiction, but that the decision arose from a
prevailing consensus among nearly all the nations of the world that the
matter was subject to the advise of the recently founded ICJ. The court
not only accepted the offer to judicially review the legal consequences
of the wall to international law, but also dismissed Israel's numerous
contentions that there was essentially no existing occupation de jure
; that the court had no jurisdiction over matters of Israeli occupation,
and that the Israeli Supreme Court had the last say in the matter.
This established a very important precedent because not
only is Israel not a signatory to the ICJ charter, but it also provides
the real possibility of legal recourse of Palestinians, who have no
meaningful sovereignty, no self-determination as a state, and therefore
cannot litigate its damages to a body it has historically been denied
membership as a nation of people. Moreover it denied the ultimate
legitimacy of the Israeli Supreme Court, whose ideals and principles
lawyers like Alan Dershowitz cannot seem to live without. Indeed, the
Israeli Supreme Court has an impoverished record insofar as Palestinian
human rights are concerned. For example, this is a court that had for
years condoned torture, rarely stood up to the military policy of
detention, human rights abuses, the destruction of houses, the
imposition of seemingly endless curfews, and extra-judicial
assassination, and the collective denial of Palestinian human rights. In
one case it valued -- actually ascribed a precise economic value ---- to
Palestinian life. A Palestinian life was worth no more than about five
shekels.
The ICJ decision, like all other world court decisions,
entails what are called erga omnes obligations that
require that other signatories to the ICJ's charter enforce and compel
Israel's compliance with its decisions: namely international agreements
such as the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Conventions on the Rights of
the Child, and the Geneva Convention which Israel is, in spite of its
attorneys best attempts to deny its material relevance, a signatory to.
What this means in terms of the diplomatic practices of
other nations remains to be seen, but it clearly opens up other arenas
of resistance to the wall that may take several forms. Nations could
impose a "Human Rights Tax" on companies contracted to supply goods
(bulldozers for example) and services to the Israeli government's
efforts to build and reinforce the wall. It may serve as a kind of
prelude to what appears to be a growing and globally orchestrated
movement to divest from Israel so long as it continues its illegal
occupation and refuses to remove the wall in its existing form. It
establishes the important condition for the coordinated emergence of an
international human rights movement (which for years was among Edward
Said's great dreams).
All of this is to say that the ICJ decision provides the
framework for developing new political and legal strategies of
resistance which may take the forms of various instruments of financial,
political and diplomatic pressure -- boycotts, embargoes, human rights
taxes, sanctions, and other restrictions on the flow of Israeli capital,
like the buying and selling of Israeli bonds in Canadian, European, or
Asian markets. It perhaps even raises the possibility of the civil
prosecution of those military and Israeli government officials and those
20 or so corporations, engineers, architects, military planners, and
CEOs that were and remain either commercially or politically involved in
constructing, designing, and planning the wall. Indeed, the
secretary-general of the United Nations announced in January 2005, that
the UN was in the process of compiling a registry of those Palestinians
who had directly suffered damages -- the loss of land, homes, crops,
employment, etc. While some critics saw this as the UN's tacit
acceptance of the irreversibility of the wall, the registry remains an
important document in the same way that Walid Khalidi's All That
Remains provides a more or less complete material, historical,
territorial, geographic and archival account of the displacing effects
of the 1948 War of Dispossession.
Yet whatever the wall signifies for the precarious
political and existential future of Palestinians, one thing is certain:
it is part of Israel's wilful repudiation of Palestinian existence in
general and Palestinian rights to meaningful sovereignty and self-
determination in particular. But it is more than that as well. It is an
attempt to make Palestinians physically invisible from the experience of
Israeli daily life which goes on at times as if the wall were merely the
comforting and soothing perimeter of Israeli lebensraum.
Guy de Maupassant purportedly lunched every day under the
Eiffel tower. "Why?" someone asked of him. "Because," he said, "it is
the only place in all of Paris where I don't have to look at the thing."
Perhaps the wall, as long as it exists, will serve as a constant
reminder that a large population of humanity manages by sheer will alone
to survive as a culture in a place where the sunset is no longer visible
to the naked eye ---- except in dreams. On the other side of the grey,
storm clouds of a military occupation, there is a blue sky where the sun
will always, in a matter of speaking, set ---- imagined or not.
* The writer is assistant professor of English at
Georgetown University. His book Archives of Authority is
forthcoming in 2006.
C a
p t i o n : An Israeli military sign in Arabic announcing the
check-point is open from 7:40 to 8:00, 14:00 to 14:15, and 18:45-19:00,
only 50 minutes a day; The trajectory of the Wall