Almost 20 years ago today, ordinary Germans on both sides of a divided country took sledgehammers, and even their bare hands, to the 12-foot wall separating East from West Germany and made history.
At Duke last Monday, activist and conservative politician Vera Lengsfeld reminded us that normal people played a central role in the historical drama surrounding the fall of the wall.
During her talk, Lengsfeld resurrected the ghost of socialism’s past when she pointed to the danger of a political alliance between the Social Democratic Party and the Socialist Unity Party, a holdover from the East German Communist Party recently reborn as the Left Party. In doing so, she suggested that a vote for her was a vote against future walls.
Regular readers of The Chronicle have encountered the socialist bogeyman numerous times before. Leaving aside whether a new wall is in the offing if Germans elect superficially socialist parties, we all seem to agree that whatever we call the social system in East Germany, we are glad it fell along with the 96-mile wall around West Berlin propping it up.
But are we so committed to tearing down walls propping up authoritarian regimes in our own time?
In Israel today, a wall four times longer and in many places twice as tall as the Berlin Wall is under construction. Although a hodgepodge of razor wire, trenches, sniper towers, electrified fences, military roads, electronic surveillance and buffer zones up to 100 meters in length, the International Court of Justice (another “socialist” institution) has ruled that calling this complex monstrosity a wall for the purposes of international law is reasonable.
The main justification for the wall is security, and its defenders will tell you how precipitously attacks inside Israel fell once construction on the wall began. They won’t tell you, however, that Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security force, itself concluded in 2006 that the reduction in terrorist attacks inside Israel since 2002 was due more to its own improved counterterrorism measures, with the precipitous drop in 2005 due mainly to the truce Hamas declared Jan. 1 of that year, not the deterrent effects of the wall.
They’ll probably also forget to mention that more than 1000 Palestinians sneak around the wall every week to work in Israel, suggesting a very insecure and porous barrier indeed.
Terrorists and Palestinian workers alike, Shin Bet knows, have long since found ways around the wall.
So they’re lying when they tell us it’s for security. But what other purpose could a 25-foot wall stretching hundreds of miles serve? Like the Berlin Wall, it seeks to keep some people out and other people in. But there are some factors that make Israel’s wall unique among similar abominations.
Land is one of them. If the wall were solely for the purpose of security, one would expect it to follow the green line that ostensibly established the border of a future Palestinian state. Instead, it reaches, in many places, well inside the line, effectively annexing 10 percent of the West Bank to Israel.
Natural resources are another. The wall separates many Palestinian farming communities from their land, enclosing fertile Palestinian farmland behind its massive concrete slabs.
In addition, the wall annexes crucial West Bank water resources to Jewish settlements. Doing so makes Palestinian access to water dependent on Israeli benevolence, and leads to situations like that reported by Amnesty International recently, where Israel can turn on and off Palestinian access to water on a whim.
A final factor that never figured into the construction of the Berlin Wall is Israel’s “demographic problem.” This refers to the fact that sometime in the near future Palestinians will outnumber Israelis within the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—what is today Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—establishing minority Jewish rule over a non-Jewish majority as an undeniable fact.
The wall, in this interpretation, provides respite from this demographic problem, annexing settlers to the “Jewish state” and artificially boosting its numbers, while enclosing Palestinians in an ever shrinking pseudo-state. But it is only a temporary solution, and some day soon the “demographic problem” will make it very hard indeed to continue pretending Israel is a democracy according to any reasonable definition.
But hope remains. Grassroots resistance to the wall is mounting among Palestinians as well as small but significant numbers of Jewish Israelis who have loyalty not to the state of Israel, but to brother and sisterhood that knows no walls of separation.
As we celebrate the courageous actions of those ordinary Germans who stood up to the oppressive social system they lived under, let us have the courage to acknowledge similar struggles for freedom in our own time.
Michael Stauch is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in history. His column runs every other Friday.
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