I wouldn't be very surprised if you haven't already heard of the "security fence," as our prestigious CNN terms it, that Israel is building to separateitself from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
This Israeli project of separation, otherwise known as apartheid, is so devastating for Palestinians that it makes the Israeli government look like nothing more than an old-school colonial power. This would be a bad portrayal indeed for Americans to see, especially since the Zionist state is supposedly one of the Bush administration's top allies in the world.
The apartheid wall is being built inside the Palestinian side of the Green Line, or armistice line of 1949. The Green Line is the term used for the border between the modern state of Israel, encompassing 78 percent of historic Palestine, and a mere 20 percent of the West Bank territory of historic Palestine, which has been strangled under a brutal Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-day War.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government claims the wall is being built for "security reasons" when in actuality it is nothing more than a continuation of the steps taken to make Palestinian lives so difficult that they will be encouraged to flee their homes and thus enable more Israelis to colonize their land. The Israeli government simply cannot let go of the century-old desire for more and more Palestinian land and the subsequent purging of Palestinian people it requires.
Seen widely as one of the principal founders of the Zionist project to relocate Jewish populations to historical Palestine, Theodore Herzl himself broached the concept of expelling the native Palestinian population. In order to create Zionist domination in the region Herzl claimed in his own diaries that both "the expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." He goes on to suggest "spiriting the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country."
The border between the West Bank and Israel is approximately 350 km long, but the wall's planned length is more than twice that. A security wall would need only to cover the border area, but Israel's brilliant colonial apartheid wall is twisting and turning like a snake to suck up as much Palestinian land as possible. In the process of building the wall creating a situation with the Palestinians "over there" and the Israelis "in here," Israel will confiscate some of the most fertile land in the region (up to 80 percent of the most fertile Palestinian land), colonize many of the few remaining water resources of the Palestinians (up to 65 pecent of their entire water resources) and reunite itself with numerous extremist settlers who have been slowly colonizing Palestinian territory in the West Bank for decades.
With regards to the possibility of simply expelling the Palestinians from Palestine, Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote "support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."
Even though this wall is little over a year old, it is already making life for Palestinians in the West Bank like a prison inside a prison camp. So far, 210,000 Palestinians have been surrounded by the confining walls of apartheid, restricting their movement severely against the rules of international law. Over 60 villages have been cut off from their means of sustenance and income.
The wall has consistently split villages between their dwellings and their farmland used to feed both those villages and much of the rest of the West Bank. Two thousand eight hundred acres of Palestinian land have been seized, 83,000 olive trees uprooted (the key word here is uprooted, and not destroyed, because these age old trees that provide a single source of income and pride to thousands of Palestinian farmers are often being transferred to Israeli settlement gardens or Israeli homes back in Israel) and 30 water wells confiscated.
All this is for the beneficial use of the Israeli government and its agricultural industry, which, incidentally, is one of the strongest lobby groups backing the apartheid wall's construction.
The apartheid wall has been condemned from everyone from the World Bank to Israeli human rights organizations and newspaper columnists. So why do we know so little about it here in the U.S.? The answer lies in the apartheid wall's financing: We pay for it. At a cost of up to $2 million per kilometer, the American taxpayers finances this wall. American taxpayers give about $5 billion annually to the state of Israel, much of which is used to buy arms from American weapons manufacturers. The $5 billion American taxpayers give to Israel represents over one-fourth of all U.S. aid given to the entire rest of the world. What a special relationship indeed. Now one can begin to see why folks in Washington might not want news to get out about the apartheid wall our good democratic ally in the Middle East is building.
The best description of the purpose of the apartheid wall is given in a short slogan by the Israeli human rights organization, Gush Shalom: "No Separation. No Security. Only Land Grab." Former Israeli Prime Minister Gold Meir once said, "How can we return the Occupied Territories? There is nobody to return them to." This traditional colonial denial of an indigenous presence may soon come true if the international world cannot combine with Palestinian resistance to oppression to demand that Israel cease its expropriation of Palestinian lands and the slow "politicide" of an entire people that goes with it.
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is a Trinity senior. His column appears every third Tuesday.
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