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Views > March 5, 2004

Barriers, Real and Imagined

By Neve Gordon

The goal was to present Israel’s position, summed up in four words: We are the victims.

Imagine a domestic terrorist cell loose in a city that’s already murdered a few people. The intelligence agency claims that members of the black community are harboring them, and their victims are almost always white. Since the city is more or less segregated, the police commissioner erects a 25-foot concrete wall around black neighborhoods. All access to and from each neighborhood is blocked, except a single gate open 7 a.m. -9 a.m. and then again 5 p.m. -7 p.m. Special permits to pass through are distributed to a select few.

The black population is outraged. Their leaders protest the siege and sue the police. In their petition to the court they argue that the commissioner’s reaction constitutes a form of collective punishment informed by racism. Thousands of innocent men and women cannot reach work, their children cannot attend school and hospitals are out of bounds. “Our life has become unbearable,” they say.

A trial date is set, but a few days before the police commissioner notifies the public that he is unwilling to show up in court. He summons a press conference and tells reporters that this is a security issue, not a legal one.

This story represents Israeli and Palestinian positions regarding the barrier argued February 23-25 at The Hague.

Israel is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice and argues that although the wall may lead to inconveniences, one cannot compare a bit of discomfort with the deaths of innocent lives. Security for its citizens, the Israeli government argues, is more important.

To make its point, Israel brought a shattered bus—the remains of a bloody suicide attack—to The Hague. Parents whose children have been murdered were flown in, as were an entourage of university students. Their goal was to present Israel’s position, summed up in four words: We are the victims.

The Palestinian delegation, on the other hand, filed a well-documented petition against the wall, claiming that Israel is using terrorist attacks as pretence to strangle a whole population. Israel’s true goal, they argue, is to undermine the Palestinian infrastructure of existence and to undercut the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. The wall for them is a catastrophe, a weapon of dispossession, expropriation and expulsion whose major target is the civilian population. Not unlike terrorists, it makes no distinction between civilians and combatants.

Israel’s campaign is informed by two major fallacies. First, it conveniently ignores the fact that the wall is not being built on the 1949 Green Line border (the internationally recognized one), but rather deep inside Palestinian territory. Why cut through towns and villages, destroy and confiscate fields and olive groves, separate farmers and their lands and the sick from hospitals if security is the objective? If security indeed were the goal, wouldn’t it be more logical to erect the wall between Israel and the West Bank, not inside the West Bank?

Second, Israel, like every other country, has the right and the obligation to defend its citizens. But the Israeli government isn’t failing to protect its citizenry because it isn’t building the wall fast enough, as Israel’s Foreign Minister claimed after the most recent suicide bombing. Nor can blame be put on the military, which is by far the most powerful one in the Middle East.

Israeli citizens are not safe because the government continues its 37-year-old occupation and oppression of another people. The only way Israelis and Palestinians will ever be safe is if Israel ends the occupation this separation wall perpetuates by confiscating more and more land.

Like the imaginary wall built in the midst of a city to protect it from terrorists, the real wall being built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is both immoral and impractical. It is, accordingly, inimical to Israel’s own interests. Paradoxically, then, if the International Court of Justice rules in favor of the Palestinians, it also will be ruling in Israel’s interests, for it is in Israel’s long-term and therefore true interests that the Court find it guilty.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.

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  • Reader Comments

    The incidence of terror attacks has dropped precipitously where the wall has been completed.

    Does anybody want to get rid of metal detectors at airports and high crime schools because it interferes with free movement?

    Posted by Nus on Mar 10, 2004 at 3:13 PM

    Nus,

    How does it feel to have internalized the dictats of a perpetually crisis-ridden, security state? Just curious

    Posted by Stephen Dedalus on Mar 10, 2004 at 3:37 PM

    Please explain yourself - I don’t know what you mean.

    I think you are including untrue assumptions in your question.

    Posted by Nus on Mar 10, 2004 at 4:13 PM

    My assumption was that it appears you see nothing wrong with being frisked at airports or sending our children to facilities that bear more resemblance to prisons than healthy learning environments (Having taught at what you call “high crime schools,” I can assure you that there is nothing more that I would like to see than the removal of metal detectors. So long as I’m dreaming, it would also be nice not to have the teenagers herded into the schools like cattle...but then how else to instill the herd-like mentality that allows our democracy to denigrate to the point of an oligarch’s wet dream?). So your initial rhetorical question, to my mind, suggests you’ve internalized certain values concerning “security” and “readiness” that are by no means innate.

    And to return to the general point of this article, if the Israelis insisted on building a wall around their territory, no one could conceivably blame them...HOWEVER, this barrier is consciously being built to separate and appropriate internationally recognized Palestinian lands. To return to your example, Nus, how would you feel if those airport metal detectors were installed in your home?

    Posted by Stephen Dedalus on Mar 10, 2004 at 10:12 PM

    The main point that I try to make is while the Israeli Government claims it is not a judicial issue but rather political, where would civil rights be if the Supreme Court accepted similar claims regarding de segregation in the US south?  The issue is whether or not a law is being violated.  In the case of Israel’s so called security wall the answer is obviously yes.

    Posted by Lou Frankenthaler on Mar 11, 2004 at 4:36 AM

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