Trying to hide the dark backyard
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, December 7, 2003
How many Israelis have actually seen the separation fence? How many have given any thought to its significance? Every foreign visitor interested in what is happening in the region makes visiting the fence a priority and world media constantly point their cameras at it - half a dozen foreign documentaries have already been shot along it. But most Israelis have never seen it. This ambitious strategic project that is going to make fundamental changes to the lnd, the landscape and relations between the peples, is passing through us with an amazing comination of utter indifference and astonishing ignorance.
Since the start of the settlement enterprise, which also took place with eyes deliberately closed in national blindness, there has not been a venture that with such speed created a new reality without any real discussion of its significance. Even environmental activists haven't piped up about how it is ripping up the landscape.
Just like the settlements, the project was started by the Labor Party while the Likud gave it the proper momentum, and just like the settlements, it will be a tragedy to be suffered for generations to come. Another year or in five, and the truth about the damage it caused will become evident, and then, just as with the settlements, it will be too late. After the settlements fulfilled their destructive purposes and capabilities, the
separation fence is the next fateful obstacle
Israel is putting up on the path to reconciliation with the Palestinians.
When its construction is completed, the two-state solution will be even further removed and practically impossible. The settlements and the fence are complementary and supplementary,
together they form a victorious proposition - that with them in place it will never be possible to reach an equitable peace.
There's no doubt the people want a fence. The
polls show that most Israelis are convinced
that separation from the Palestinian people is
a magic formula for eliminating terror and that
the fence is the guarantee of it. Together with
other mendacious myths, Ehud Barak is also
largely responsible for that, by turning the
separation concept into a vision. But Barak's
mantra of "us here and them there" quickly
turned into "them there and us here and also
over there."
Palestinians are corralled into ghettos beyond
the fence and Israelis remain on both sides.
The result being carved into the hills and
dales of the land separate not only Israelis
and Palestinians, but also Palestinians from
Palestinians. The vision of separation espoused
by Barak, Haim Ramon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer has turned into a vision of apartheid.
The first outrageous aspect of this is the harm
down to the tens of thousands of Palestinian
families after they went through all the
tribulations of the occupation - closures, land
grabs, house demolitions, humiliations,
checkpoints and the settlers in their midst.
Now they are being torn form their fields, work
places and schools, from their families and the
centers of their life, living behind a fence.
"Good fences make good neighbors?" No they
don't, not when the fence goes through the
neighbor's backyard, over his land, and
displaces the neighbors from their own land.
That makes for bad neighbors. Some 75,000
Palestinians who find themselves in fenced-in
enclaves, some 100,000 residents of the northern Jerusalem neighborhoods cut off from the city and the thousands of farmers already displaced from their land, are the next reservoir of hatred and despair and the new infrastructure of terror.
Israel wanted a security fence as a response to
terror? It could have been so simple. It should
have put it up on the Green Line, without any
deviations. Israel wants separation from the
Palestinians? It's so simple - it should evacuate the settlements.
Indeed, the fence does not signal good tidings
for the future of relations between the nations. Instead of seeking to establish two open civil societies, living side by side in cooperation, as is desirable and possible, a wall is going up. However, even if it is sad to think that Israel converted its expressed desire for peace and conciliation into separation, if the fence had gone up on the Green Line it would have been impossible to complain about a nation trying to defend itself, and despite the serious problems that fence would have created, it would have been possible to live with it. But the fence is
being built in a large part of Palestinian
territory. On that route, nobody can accept the
argument that the fence is apolitical. Like
other occupation measures - especially the
settlements and checkpoints - the fence is
being justified by security rationales that only provide cover for their real purpose. That is, smashing the last chance for an agreed upon
arrangement between the sides.
The fence therefore means the precise opposite
of its declared purpose. It is a fence for the
perpetuation of conflict. It won't separate the
peoples, but perpetuate the pathological
connection between the two peoples, the
connection between the occupier and the
occupied, blocking any chance for the
establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
The fence's construction is heading into its
last stretch, from the "Jerusalem envelope" to
the "Hebron envelope" and the route in the
north, and horrifyingly, "the eastern fence."
Soon Israel will find itself behind walls, trying to hide from the horrific reality of its own dark backyard, where it conducts a brutal, ruthless regime of occupation.
As sophisticated as the fence might be and as
high as it might go, it will not manage to hide
anything. Beyond it, the occupation will continue in all its fury, and Israel's chance of becoming a just society will recede ever further and further away - until it disappears.
