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Article Excerpt
If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel
the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere. --Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
The construction of walls has long been a tool in regulating--or attempting to regulate--human passage and the defense of territory. Walls encircling cities or bisecting open spaces are generally built to keep "others" out, the most famous case being the Great Wall of China. Walls are also used to keep people in, as with the Berlin Wall, which remains notorious even after it was dismantled. A new and infamous wall is the barrier that Israel is erecting to keep people in and out simultaneously. It is intended to protect Israelis from the plague of West Bank suicide bombers by keeping them out of Israel and by containing them in parts of the West Bank. From the Palestinian perspective the wall is a land grab, intended to create a de facto annexation of land to Israel. Inasmuch as Israel's current policy of "realignment" calls for unilateral territorial adjustment by 2008 should negotiations fail, this perspective is understandable.
For the international community, what is seemingly at issue is the precise location of the wall, and there has been enormous attention to, and condemnation of, its current and future course. Of the various walls currently deployed in international ethnoterritorial conflicts, among them those in the western Sahara, or Jammu and Kashmir, Israel's appears to be the only one on the map of public interest. Several questions immediately arise. What is so controversial about Israel's wall? What are its significance and likely impacts in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why does the attention given to it dwarf the concern expressed about the other walls that are scattered across the globe? Can Israel's wall make a positive contribution to the pursuit of peace? Although these questions may involve a measure of speculation, they invite examination of issues that make up the context of the dispute and that also relate to other ethnoterritorial conflicts. Why are walls built, whom do they serve, and, perhaps most important, how do they become obsolete?
The list of famous defensive walls includes structures both large and small, both recent and ancient. Among them, China's Great Wall is preeminent in notoriety, size, and age, although Hadrian's wall, separating what today is Scotland from England, has greater proximity to Western tourists and history. One message of these relic walls is that, long ago, enormous efforts were made to protect against invasion on battlefields that are now wholly within territories that the walls used to separate. Such walls, like those who built and fought over them, exist as (sometimes) visible ghosts in the landscape, reminders of another time and of battles that have faded into history.
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Two other walls that have recently come and gone provide more immediate metaphorical value. The first, the Maginot Line, was built in the 1930s to deflect a German attack on France, but early in World War II the Germans simply went around it and through Belgium on their way into France. Although popular history may judge it a failure, the line--actually a series of linked fortresses--served its purpose and shielded parts of France from German attack. Ultimately the German army's advance through Belgium made the Maginot Line irrelevant. The second, the Berlin Wall, encircled West Berlin and divided it from the eastern part of the city for 45 kilometers. It was first a symbol of the cold war and then a marker of its denouement. In both its rise and its fall, the Berlin Wall became an emblem for repression, denial of human rights, and state violence. Indeed, the wall acted as a lightening rod for the accumulated tension and hostility that characterized the bipolar world of the Soviet era.
Though still in the implementation phase, Israel's wall has already been the subject of considerable judgment and fury. It has been contested in the streets and fields of the West Bank, in the media in capitals around the world, in Israel's High Court in Jerusalem, in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and in the United Nations (Falk 2005; Lynk 2005; Williams 2006). What can be made of this wall that is being built in seemingly unparalleled infamy?
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DIMENSIONS
Like many other famous barriers, the wall is actually a pastiche of forms that sprawl across and through a variety of landscapes. Its path is torturous, for it wends its way according to topography, location of roads, and patterns of Israeli and Palestinian settlement. Although it basically outlines the West Bank, its route diverges in order to create a separation between a number of Israeli settlements and the surrounding Palestinian population. In so doing, it also separates some Palestinians from other Palestinians and from the West Bank itself. This has led to "subfences" that isolate both Israeli and Palestinian communities and has complicated the system of gates that allow passage from one side of the wall to the other. The Israeli government points out that most of the wall is, in fact, a structure of fences and other obstacles, which it calls a "barrier" (Figure 1); only a minor portion of it--roughly 6 percent, according to the Israel Ministry of Defence (MOD 2003)--is a...
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