This slogan was born spontaneously, opposite the Wall in Qalqilya, at the place where itbecomes a fence and turns east, penetrating deep into Palestinian territory. On the otherside of the wall the Palestinians were demonstrating. We were looking for a short rhyme tobroadcast by megaphone. A common effort brought forth the seven words that carry the wholemessage.
True, this is not the wall of Jericho that could be destroyed by the sounding of trumpets. Thepeople who are building this obstacle want it to stand for eternity, much as “united”Jerusalem is the “eternal capital of Israel”. The Israeli Right has no concept of a period oftime less than eternity. But among Israeli Leftist there are also some who believe that thewall has created an “irreversible” situation.
Not me. Because I remember other “irreversible” situations. And other “eternities”, too.
Our Wall is frequently being compared to the Berlin Wall. Visually and politically, this is areasonable comparison. Also because the “Berlin Wall” was not only an urban monstrosity. Itwas part of the German section of the Iron Curtain, cutting all of Germany into two andextending from the Baltic Sea in the north to the border of Czechoslovakia in the south – almosta thousand km, approximately the same as the planned length of Sharon’s monster.
In Germany, too, it was a huge obstacle, a combination of walls and fences, watchtowers andfiring positions, “death zones” and patrol paths. It divided the country, scarred thelandscape and separated parents from children. An awesome monster, arousing fear andloathing, a symbol of power and finality.
Especially finality. Everyone who saw it felt that this was a point of no return in Germanhistory, that the separation was eternal, that there was no point fighting against it.
Indeed, serious politicians based their policy on the wall’s permanency. Leftists andRightists resigned themselves to the fact. No serious commentator questioned it. Thesituation was “irreversible”.
And then, one day, like a completely unforeseen eruption of a volcano, it just happened. Theterrible wall disappeared, as if by itself. A communist minister made a slip of the tongue, thepolice had a moment of indecision, a crowd gathered – and the “irreversible” became eminently”reversible”. The situation had changed. Like the dinosaurs, the terrible monsterdisappeared from the earth.
(Some time before that I drove from West Germany to Berlin. I had to pass a DDR border station.Vopos (Volkspolizei) with hard faces and raw commands: “Your passport! Sit there! Wait!” No”please”, “thank you” or “excuse me”. Like the Nazis in Hollywood movies. Same uniform, samepeaked caps. same behavior, same everything.
Some days after the fall of the wall I passed there again. The same policemen were still there,but they were unrecognizable. Smiles from ear to ear. Unbounded civility. Please, Sir. Thankyou, Sir. Would you please, Sir. Just a moment, Sir. Obviously not only walls are reversible,people are reversible, too.)
There is, of course, an important distinction between the German and the Israeli wall. EastGermany had a border fixed by international agreement (between the Soviet Union and theWestern allies at the end of World War II). The wall was built entirely on this line. Its path wasself-evident. But here there is no agreement, no border, no self-evident path. Everything isdetermined by anonymous planners.
It is easy to imagine them sitting in their air-conditioned offices, a map spread out beforethem. A very special map, because it shows only Jewish settlements and bypass roads. ThePalestinian towns and villages do not appear on it at all. As if the ethnic cleansing, that somany in Israel (and in the Sharon government) are longing for, had already happened.
That is what’s so special about this Wall: it is inhuman. The planners have completely ignoredthe existence of (non-Jewish) human beings. They took into account hills and valleys,settlements and bypass roads. But they totally ignored the Palestinian neighborhoods andvillages, their inhabitants and their fields. As if they did not exist.
And so the Wall stands between children and their school, between students and theiruniversity, between patients and their doctor, between parents and their children, betweenvillages and their wells, between peasants and their fields. Like a big armored bulldozerthat crashes into a village and crushes and destroys everything in its path withoutfaltering, the Wall cuts thousands of the thin threads that constitute the fabric of people’sdaily lives, as if they weren’t there.
For the planners, these lives simply do not exist. The country is empty of non-Jews. At thebeginning of the 21 st century they act in accordance to the Zionist slogan that was current atthe end of the 19 th : “A land without a people for a people without a land”.
Indeed, the idea of the wall is rooted deep in the Zionist consciousness and has accompanied itright from the beginning. In his book ” Der Judenstaat ” that gave birth to the modern Zionistmovement, Theodor Herzl was already writing: “In Palestine we shall constitute a part of thewall of Europe against Asia…an outpost of culture against barbarism.” More than a hundredyears later, Sharon’s wall expresses exactly the same outlook.
Outsiders won’t understand this. Yasser Arafat told me this week that Abu-Mazen, on hisrecent visit to the United States, showed President Bush a map of the Wall. Bush was shocked. Heshook the map before the Vice President, Dick Cheney, and cried: “What’s this? Where is thePalestinian State?”
By its very existence the wall seems to express power. It announces: “We are mighty. We can dowhatever we want. We shall imprison the Palestinians in little enclaves and cut them off fromthe world.” But that is make-believe. In reality, the Wall expresses ancient Jewish fears. Inthe Middle Ages, the Jews surrounded themselves with walls in order to feel safe, long beforethey were obliged to live in ghettoes.
A State that surrounds itself with a Wall is nothing but a ghetto-state. A strong ghetto, forsure, an armed ghetto, a ghetto that frightens everybody in the neighborhood, – but a ghetto,nevertheless, that feels save only behind walls and barbed wire and watchtowers.
We shall not achieve peace unless we overcome this ghetto mentality. And first of all, we mustget rid of the Wall.