The Wall in Palestine: Security as Pretense for Dispossession

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1835.shtml

Here in Palestine we have been watching with great despair the visits of Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Sharon to Washington. Amidst the rhetoric of negotiations, over 100 bulldozers are working non-stop, every day, to continue construction of the Wall, which highlights the actual path that the Road Map is paving. While President Bush was correct in calling the Wall "a problem" and referring to it as "a wall snaking through the West Bank," on the ground there is no sign of an end to what has been called the largest "project" ever undertaken by Israel.

For us, and for all who have witnessed what is taking place, the Wall is nothing less than a collective noose around the Palestinian areas and the Palestinian people. In Qalqiliya, where Wall construction is nearing completion, close to 15% of its 41,600 inhabitants have been forced to leave, unable to survive in what many in the community call "the Apartheid Cage". In Palestine, and among various solidarity groups, the Wall is referred to as the Apartheid Wall -- part of a colonial project that embodies within it the long-term policy of occupation, discrimination, and expulsion.

The Wall is to guarantee that a free and sovereign Palestinian state will become impossible. Consequently, the recent usage by Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and US President Bush of the terms "viable" and "state" take on particularly cynical and empty meanings. Their increased calls for a "state" run in direct parallel with the impossibility of such a state existing, as the sealing of the fate of the Palestinian people into ghettos of the dispossessed takes hold.