TURNING THE STRUGGLE INWARDS:

In the Shadow of the Wall
WHAT NOW FOR THE INTIFADA?: As it enters its fifth year, Foreign Editor David Pratt makes an emotional return to Jerusalem to find out the effect of Israel’s security barrier on its divided populace (David Pratt, 9/26/04, Sunday Herald)

[A]s the intifada enters its fifth year, many on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide are growing ever more concerned as to where it is leading them. According to recent Israeli Defence Force (IDF) estim ates, the coming year will be a critical period for the Palestinian people and the conflict.

“This year will be the year that will shape the Palestinian struggle. The Palestinian leadership will have to decide whether to aim towards a peace agreement with Israel or to continue with the armed resistance,” says one senior IDF officer.

But what of the Palestinians themselves? As Israel’s security wall daily encroaches into their territory and lives, do they also sense that a make or break showdown is fast approaching?

In the past, particularly in the years 1987 to 1993, following the first intifada or “war of the stones,” as it was known, anniversaries of the uprising were often opportunities for Palestinians to endorse resistance to the occupation through street demonstrations or an escalation of attacks on Israeli targets.

But this year the mood is different. While much of the fight against occupation by ordinary Palestinians remains heroic, these are unheroic times. Suicide bombings like that by a woman in the busy French Hill suburb of Jerusalem last week has lost the intifada some of its outside worldwide sympathy.

Meanwhile, a leadership crisis has led some to predict that what really preoccupies Palestinians these days is an “intra-fada” – an uprising not against Israel but against elements of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA), long perceived to be corrupt and politically out of touch.

Then there is the wall. It’s hard to overemphasise the sheer injustice of this concrete scar that gouges its way across olive tree orchards, family homes, grazing areas, places of work, schools and anything else that, frankly, the state of Israel decides to confiscate. Its sheer physical presence bears down when you are near it. Walking beside it, on either side, you can see Palestinians trying to live their lives under its weight. Like the South African regime during apartheid, the Israelis are well on the way with their policy of containment to creating the equivalent of the infamous Bantustans, where most black South Africans were forced to live.

“This used to be a beautiful place, now I live in the shadow, no sun, no light, even the air seems bad,” one local Abu Dis farmer tells me, struggling to make himself heard against the deafening sound of bulldozers working on the next stretch of wall nearby.

The degradation and humiliation of Palestinians is made all the worse by the employment of some of their men by private Israeli security firms to guard other Arab labourers who work on the wall’s construction.

“I know they blame us for this,” says one guard when asked what he thinks of the Palestinian villagers who stand nearby watching as a bulldozer digs up their back garden to lay cables used for high-powered security lights and electrified fencing.

Elsewhere, other Palestinian labourers can be seen daily running the gauntlet of army patrols to cross gaps in the wall before being picked up by Israeli employers to work in a variety of “dirty jobs” inside Israel itself. A useful source of cheap labour, few of these Israeli employers seem concerned by the security risk involved, or that one of their workers just might be a suicide bomber.

In these desperate economic times, most Palestinians have no choice but to take what they can that offers them a living. Even sometimes at the risk of being called a “collaborator”.

Why, most ordinary Palestinians ask, has the outside world been so quiet in its condemnation of the security wall despite the International Court’s ruling that its construction is illegal? Why is it called a “security” wall at all, when instead of just separating Israel from the West Bank it separates Arab from Arab?

Indeed, how can a people whose history is full of terrible ghettos, now themselves be building one?

Didn't he answer his own question just above when he wrote: "[T]hese are unheroic times. Suicide bombings like that by a woman in the busy French Hill suburb of Jerusalem last week has lost the intifada some of its outside worldwide sympathy.

Meanwhile, a leadership crisis has led some to predict that what really preoccupies Palestinians these days is an “intra-fada” – an uprising not against Israel but against elements of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA), long perceived to be corrupt and politically out of touch."

The wall is working, not least by changing an Israeli ghetto into a nation where folks are more concerned with what's happening within than attacking those without.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 25, 2004 8:41 PM