[A-List] The Deeper Meaning of the Wall

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Virginia Tilley

CounterPunch (February 26 2004)

Some people are greatly gratified that the International Court of
Justice has been reviewing the legality of Israel's "security fence" -
known everywhere outside of Israeli rhetoric as "the Wall" (or, in the
media, increasingly as "the barrier").

Massive demonstrations have accompanied this review, rightly attacking
the Wall as a symbol and instrument of occupation.  And certainly the
Palestinian case is very solid.  Where it is constructed on West Bank
land, the Wall is clearly illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. 
(See "Israeli Settlements: Against the Law".)  It clearly serves
Israel's seizure of West Bank land, a goal only thinly veiled by the
Sharon government's anti-terrorism claim.  More broadly, its towering
bulk graphically signals the abuse of a vulnerable population under
occupation, galvanizing scandalized international denunciations.  For
human rights and Palestinian political activists, judicial review of the
Wall is also valuable for its spin-off effects: allowing the entire
question of Israeli occupation policy to come afresh under the spotlight
of international human-rights law, an exposure hopefully more
constructive than the worn and sterile orbit of (hitherto pointless)
international diplomacy.

But this close focus on the Wall's legality risks missing the bigger
picture. The Wall's deeper import is actually obscured by those
(including the ICRC and some Palestinian authorities) who hold that, if
it is constructed along the Green Line on Israeli land, they would have
no objection to it.  Our recognizing its true significance might be
further deflected by Israeli announcements, in recent days, that the
Wall will be moved over a few hundred yards, here and there, for a few
miles along its length, to make it more humane or "just".  For the
Wall's deeper purpose is not simply a land grab.  Its true purpose is to
consolidate the two-state solution - the Jewishness of Israel, the
isolation of the Palestinians - by sealing the crippled fragments of
Palestinian society within an impenetrable walled enclave.  And it will
have this grander - and ruinous - effect whatever its precise location.

The Wall in fact represents - actually, implements - Sharon's
"unilateral disengagement" strategy, a vision reflected also in his plan
to withdraw Jewish settlements from Gaza.  Sharon's mission in both
policies is brutally direct: to consolidate Israel as a Jewish state by
sealing off a (dismembered and debilitated) Palestinian enclave "state"
while he still holds power, and before international and domestic forces
(or simple demographic change) threaten to impose a one-state solution
and wreck the Zionist dream from within.

The Wall's "sealing" effect is an essential ingredient in this strategy. 
For even if a Palestinian "state" is established, the fragmentation of
Palestinian land, impoverishment of Palestinians in an enclave economy,
and continuing Palestinian demographic weight will continue to threaten
Israel's Jewish character through the constant pressure of proximate
Palestinian labor and trade on Israeli markets.  Even normal inter-
ethnic relations manifest to Sharon and his ilk as a political threat:
hence the recent Israeli law banning the immigration of Palestinian
spouses of Israeli citizens. Dire consequence may arise from such
fraternization-dissolution of ethnic and ultimately of political
boundaries, and the staged erosion of the Jewish state.

The Wall is therefore intended to re-impose stark ethnic division by the
crudest method: physically delimiting the two ethnic enclaves of Jewish
Israel on one side and the remaining wreck of Christian/Muslim Palestine
on the other.  Nor is that deeper ethnic purpose of the Wall obscure,
but runs openly in Israeli debates: for instance, in a draft statement
by this week's meeting of Conservative Rabbis in Jerusalem, which stated
frankly that the Wall is "a legitimate tool for self defense" but also
essential to "protect the Jewish and democratic character of the state
of Israel" (Ha'aretz, February 23).

Missing this angle, many people have overlooked the link of the Wall to
Sharon's Gaza-withdrawal plan - an announcement startling to many and
even publicly praised by people who should know better, like Kofi Annan. 
Close observers of Israeli settlement policy, however, received the plan
with little pleasure and less surprise.  Gaza has always been expendable
to political pragmatists like Sharon: the territory holds no ancient
Jewish sites important to biblical myth or Zionist imagination; water is
extremely scarce and the settlements have been especially expensive to
maintain; the modest number of settlers (some 7500) is unlikely to grow;
and security for that tiny population, juxtaposed against the massive
and terribly overcrowded Palestinian population, has been both difficult
and very expensive, and will only become more so.

Possibly even more valuable to Sharon is, ironically, militant
Jewish-settler resistance to an ordered withdrawal from the Gaza
settlements, for it will provide him with crucial political capital in
retaining the West Bank settlements by signaling the far greater
political cost of dismantling the latter.  The settler movements, set on
retaining control of "Judea and Samaria" (names of Jewish kingdoms once
located in today's West Bank), are making the same political calculation. 
Abandoning Gaza for a more consolidated hold on the West Bank has
therefore been in the cards for decades; even its inevitable drama is
well-planned.  The only surprise was therefore Sharon's timing, so much
faster than anyone had foreseen - and in his hands, it portends only
more trouble.

Withdrawal from Gaza is indeed clearly timed to serve Sharon's
accelerated plan to consolidate Israel's control over the West Bank, via
the settlement grid he has worked for decades to construct.  EU and even
US officials (not famed for their insight) are anxiously trying to
confirm that the Gaza settlers will not be transferred there tokenistic
as that concern might be.  The archipelago of Jewish-only fortress-towns
and small cities is, in any case, now close to sufficient for Sharon's
purposes: firmly connected by a strategic matrix of fortified highways,
cutting Palestinian cities and villages off from each other and already
slicing Palestinian society into dismembered fragments.  Visitors to the
region are now aghast at the impact.  The Wall is only the most graphic
manifestation of this matrix.

But the Wall, again, has a deeper and more dire function than simple
annexation or even security in a risky annexation strategy.  Its ethnic
agenda is clear and offensive; even for some Israelis, it connotes awful
images from Germany and the Cold War.  Nowhere else in the world would
such a wall be tolerated: can the reader imagine international
acceptance of such a structure being raised by some government in the
former Yugoslavia? in Northern Ireland? in Chechnya? or in South Africa?
That it might be acceptable if it truly hugged the Green Line reflects a
collective inability of the international community to grasp its dangers
and import for the future, but also a reprehensible reluctance to
address its basic inadmissibility in the context of any ethnic conflict. 
And that it is somehow defensible to some supporters of Israel - whether
or not they are genuinely bamboozled by the anti-terrorism defense - has
to be seen as indicating a fundamental moral impoverishment at the heart
of the Zionist dream.

Which brings us to the bitter heart of the question.  In debates about
the Wall, Israel's friends - even its foes - are evading discussion of
its deeper ethnic significance because of the subject's delicacy. 
Creating a Jewish state has, of course, been the central dream of
mainstream Zionism (although not of all Zionism's currents) since the
turn of the last century.  It is therefore a political sacred cow, given
the passions attached.  But it is that Zionist dream which has now
turned to the crudest ethnic separation, threatening the region, and the
world, with lasting instability.

In recent years, a few courageous "post-Zionist" Jewish and
Jewish-Israeli voices have publicly raised the uneasy contradiction
between a truly democratic and a Jewish-dominant Israel, and questioned
the moral and political advisability of moving on to establish a truly
democratic Israel, through a one-state binational solution.  They are
still a fringe group, barely scratching the political surface.  But
great political change has often, throughout history, been launched by a
few intellectuals - a potential evidenced in the vitriolic attacks they
have received.  Whether other people presently appalled by the Wall wish
to grapple with that debate is, however, a second question.  The first
question is whether critics of the Wall can grasp its real meaning, and
so avoid wasting hard work, time, and political capital calling for its
simple relocation to the Green Line.

Virginia Tilley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart
and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

http://www.counterpunch.org/tilly02262004.html

Please also see these related essays:

"The Only Solution for Palestine", New Statesman Leader (March 29 2004)
http://www.apomie.com/onlysolution.htm

"Israel: The Alternative" by Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, Volume
50, Number 16 (October 23 2003) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671

"The One-State Solution" by Virginia Tilley, London Review of Books,
Volume 25 Number 21 (November 06 2003)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/till01_.html

"The Golem Turns on his Creator" by Uri Avnery, Avnery-news.com 
(May 04 2004)  http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html