    The Wall
    Israel Shamir

    We watched Pink Floyd's The Wall in a small, bare and shabby cinema
    called Semadar, The Vine Blossom in the quaint German Colony of
    Jerusalem. Emptied of ethnic Germans by the Jews in 1948, it still
    preserves its old stone houses roofed with red tiles, gables with
    immured plaques quoting Psalms inscribed in Gothic script, ivy creeping
    up its masonry and the mysterious Templars' Cemetery beyond heavy gate.

    Semadar, named after an expression in the Song of the Songs, was a
    favourite talkies' spot in our Paradise Lost, nostalgia-bewitched
    pre-war Palestine, when it was frequented by British officers, and the
    young cosmopolitan gang of the Holy City's best and brightest:
    Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Germans and native Palestinians. Many marriages
    crossing borders, religious affiliations and political passions were
    formed in its romantic small yard: a Sephardi Rabbi's daughter found
    herself a Scots flier, and a Nashashibi, scion of this noble Muslim Arab
    family, met a perky Left-Zionist girl. Semadar has not changed; it
    survived our Fall, the Partition, to become a fixture of Amos Oz
    Jerusalem-based novels like fossil ice survives global warming.

    Semadar remained a decent if rundown place for family outing in 1980s,
    the blessed days before video, TV and computers took over our free time,
    and we often went with the kids to the movies. However, the Wall was a
    flop. In the middle of the film, there is a horrifying shot of a mouth
    gaping to devour you, the spectator.

    This scary boneless but teeth-filled mouth covered the whole screen
    towering above our heads. It was too much for our seven-year old son,
    and he rushed out with a piercing yell. But outside, the foyer was
    plastered by posters with the same gaping mouth! It took a few hours to
    calm him down, and this symbol of the Wall, the dreadful devouring
    mouth, remained buried deep in my memory.

    It returned with a vengeance like a released spring today, when I ran
    into the Wall after a beautiful walk. For many hours we had driven and
    walked the soft Biblical hills of the Highlands, waded high green grass,
    picked purple lupines, crossed a brook still full of water, and of
    friendly full-faced and fully-dressed girls and boys who splashed each
    other and us with youthful abandon, and passed by their parents in the
    nearby village of Anata who were preparing a picnic repast and called
    their cordial salaams. We greeted a monk going down from his cliff
    hermitage of St Chariton and received his blessing; chased away a flock
    of four or five shy gazelles with white-spotted crupper; lit a candle at
    a Byzantine image of the Madonna in Taybeh village church, where
    according to carefully preserved local lore Christ spent his last days
    before the Passion. We drunk their famous Taybeh draft beer in the
    Stones, an airy two-tiered café in urbane Ramallah, with a tweed-clad
    professor of philosophy from Bir Zeit university, a wryly-smiling
    architect, a lapsed Jew from England with an uncanny resemblance to the
    younger Noam Chomsky, and a ravishing dark beauty of a French-speaking
    Palestinian girl brought up in Tunisian exile and schooled in Paris.

    As we drew towards the Shepherds' Fields, we run into the Wall. It cut
    into the tender Bethlehem countryside like a colossal devouring maw, and
    nature disappeared, marshmallow-like. Dozens of Caterpillars were
    tearing at the hills, uprooting fig trees and vines, crushing rocks for
    some monstrous Margarita. They demolished old peasant houses and
    medieval towers, and denuded the slopes walked by the Virgin. The Wall
    was built like a wide four-lane highway, flanked by 20-feet-high double
    steel mesh fences, topped with high tension wire, interspaced with
    cameras, sharpshooters' positions and a few gates. It was the most
    formidable prison camp perimeter fencing I have ever seen, and it
    skirted the village houses tightly, like a tipsy tango dancer holds his
    partner.

    The peasants looked through the mesh on their olive trees, still there,
    still in full modest bloom, but already separated, removed, unavailable.
    The peasants were locked in, as secure as in any jail, beyond this Wall.
    Their fields, their pastures, their springs of water were locked out. A
    gate was guarded by an Israeli soldier; it connected them to their
    livelihood, to their land, to their freedom – to be opened or closed by
    army decision. Always looking for a profitable angle, the army
    instituted a two-dollar fee per person per time for opening the gate. If
    these Palestinians wish to dally with their olive trees, let them pay
    for the pleasure.

    In some places the Wall was huge concrete construction, stealing away
    the landscape, the view, locking the villagers in an extended prison
    court. But the mesh wall was even worse by affording a tantalising sight
    of the land they once called theirs. The Wall runs for hundreds and
    hundreds of miles, surrounding villages, separating them from their
    land, and devouring the beautiful nature of Palestine.

    This Wall was not a new invention. I have seen it before. Not far from
    the sacred Mount Carmel there was an Armenian village. It was settled by
    Armenian refugees fleeing the Kurds' fury in 1915. The always hospitable
    Palestinians helped them build their houses and leased them the land,
    for these Armenians were peasants from the shores of the Lake Van. In
    1948 their village became part of the Jewish state. The Jews did not
    kill them, did not expel them, they just surrounded the village with a
    Wall, and strangulated it. The living village lost its lands and was
    turned into a prison with one always guarded – by the Jewish army –
    gate. The Armenians lasted ten years. In 1950s the last Armenian sold
    his house for a song to the Jews and fled.

    The Wall had a precursor: the system of 'for-Jews-only' highways. While
    even Haifa or Afula has no bypass road, every Arab village has a bypass:
    a broad highway encircling and limiting its development. Hundreds of
    Palestinian houses were demolished, thousands of acres devastated while
    building the bypass grid by recipe borrowed from the Hitchhiker's Guide
    to Galaxy. It was done for no visible reason, as tiny Jewish settlements
    did not need this multi-billion investment for 'security purpose'.
    Moreover, newly-built roads were usually blocked by the army. Now, with
    the Wall rising higher and higher, the bypass network begins to make
    sense: it was Stage One of devastation and imprisonment.

    The Wall will leave the olive groves in the hands of settlers, wrote
    ever-so-rational Uri Avneri. But the settlers do not need olives and do
    not intend to till the land. They prefer to torch the trees. The
    settlers are not the cause, but a rationalisation of the cause: desire
    to depopulate Palestine and kill its nature.

    Could it be different? The presently implemented programme of victorious
    Zionism was portrayed in a 1930s essay, The Iron Wall by Vladimir
    Zhabotinsky. But the roots are deeper, for the Wall is the utmost
    manifestation of the Jewish spirit and it fits the Jewish state. There
    are dozens of words for 'wall' in Jewish tongues, probably as many as
    Eskimo have for 'snow'. Jews' sacred symbol is the Wailing Wall; their
    favourite street is Wall Street. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Christians
    and Muslims build vertical pyramids, towers, cathedrals to connect
    Heaven and Earth; but the self-deifying Jews need no Heaven or Earth,
    and the first thing they build – from London to Minnesota - is eruv, a
    symbolic Wall to separate them from non-Jews. The only extant
    inscription from the Jewish Temple (destroyed forty years after Christ
    was tried in its Walls) is not the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, or
    moral teachings, but a piece of a Wall with warning: "Goy, if you cross
    this Wall, you will have to blame yourself for your painful death".

    The most important part of Jewish teaching is the maxim, 'build a Wall
    around the Torah'. It enhances every prohibition of the Law by a dozen
    of additional prohibitions. A Jew is forbidden to gather fruits on
    Sabbath, but 'the Wall' forbids also climbing a tree, lest one be
    tempted to gather its fruits. Well, what about fruitless birch or fir?
    It is banned for the same reason: this Saturday you will climb a birch,
    next Sabbath you will climb an apple tree, and in a month's time, you
    will pick an apple and commit a real transgression.

    Sharon's Wall is a Wall around the Torah, for if you let a goy wander
    freely he will sooner or later be able to kill a Jew. Sharon's Wall is a
    Temple Wall, for a goy who crosses it will have to blame himself for the
    bullet of a sharpshooter. Sharon's Wall is a Wailing Wall for
    Palestinians, and it is the Wall Street for the Jewish building
    contractors. The commanding voice is that of Jacob, but the hands are
    the hands of Esau: the Wall is built by the sweat of impoverished
    Palestinian workers, guarded by Russians, paid for by Americans to jail
    their brothers.

    The contractors are into a Bonanza, a remake of their previous
    endeavour, the fifty-feet-high Bar Lev Wall, constructed on the shores
    of Suez Canal in 1970s and demolished by the Soviet-made water cannons
    of the Egyptian Third Army of Marshal Sadat on October 6, 1973. The only
    part of the Wall that survived the 1973 war was the villas of the
    contractors.

    This Wall is the real Roadmap of the Zionists, for when the Wall is
    completed, Palestine will be ruined and its happy dwellers turned into
    refugees. But the fate of Jews will not be enviable, either, for the
    Wall is everywhere. Every shop, every restaurant, every pub in once
    jolly Tel Aviv has its living Wall: a Russian or Ukrainian boy imported
    to guard it. For four dollar per hour they stop the bombers with their
    bodies and are buried beyond the cemetery Wall. We, Israelis, are
    frisked ten times a day, as we go to the shop, the office, to work or to
    have fun. There is no building you can enter without a search. Thus the
    Holy Land has become a high security prison for all its dwellers, Jews
    and non-Jews alike.

    It could be predicted. The Jews weren't locked by evil strangers within
    the ghetto walls, wrote Vladimir Zhabotinsky, they chose it as
    foreigners in China chose to live in their separate settlements. Fifty
    years later, Israel Shahak made another valid observation: the walls of
    ghetto were breached from outside, by the state, while the Jews weren't
    keen to leave. The visible walls were breached, but the inner walls
    remained. The Jewish state is enactment of the paranoid Jewish fear and
    loathing of stranger, while the Cabal policies of Pentagon are another
    manifestation of the same fear and loathing on global scale.

    Not only individuals, whole societies and cultures can be insane. This
    important discovery was made by an American social scientist Ruth
    Benedict, a close and admired friend of Margaret Mead and Franz Boas.
    Her Patterns of Culture (1934) remains one of the most widely read books
    in the social sciences ever written. In this work, Ruth Benedict
    described different Native American cultures and characterized the
    Pueblo Indians as "placid and harmonious".

    The Jewish social scientist Franz Boas provided her with data showing
    "the self-aggrandizing, megalomaniac character of the Kwakiutl", while
    Reo Fortune proved the Dobu Islanders were "paranoiac and mean
    spirited".

    This last definition fits the Jews as culture to a boot. What was this
    Cabal-instigated obsessive search for WMD in Iraq if not a fit of
    paranoia, fear of a cheated goy with an axe? Present Israel, the country
    of perennial body search, is the ultimate of paranoid societies,
    according to Ruth Benedict. The US is succumbing to the same disease
    under her present ruling clique of Leo Strauss’ followers: it builds
    walls and disarms far away lands, as well as their own citizens, for the
    Jewish paranoia is extremely contagious.

    It is useless to fight the Wall, as it was useless to fight the illegal
    settlements, as long you ignore the cause. 'The Wall is in the heart',
    ubeliba homa, sung the Jews as they conquered Jerusalem in 1967. The
    Wall is at the heart of the problem, and this is the Jewish state in
    Palestine. Young and not-so-young peace activists at the hilltops along
    the Wall still wave the slogan "Two States" at the bulldozers, though
    the bulldozers implement the dream of Two States, my nightmare: a Jewish
    state and a chain of reservations for the Goyim, the "Palestinian
    State". Whoever says, 'an Independent Palestinian State aside the Jewish
    state', turns a blind eye to the Wall. The Wall is an operation of
    separating the Siamese twins, and only the strongest one will survive
    it. Discussions of the Wall run into sand in Israel: vast majority of
    Israelis, from Labour to Likud, support it, while 'peace-loving'
    Israelis are the strongest supporters of the Devouring Maw.

    The Wall mocks the innocent souls inflamed by the Roadmap, another
    doomed plan to separate the Twins. Sharon is not worried for it provides
    enough delays to complete the Wall, it puts the onus of peacekeeping on
    the Palestinian side, it gives him full freedom of action in exchange
    for some empty promises.

    The peace activists hope to alter the course of the Wall a bit here and
    there. But it won't help, for the Wall will always separate people and
    their land. Wherever you put it, it will separate the refugees in
    Deheishe refugee camp from their houses ten miles away in Deir a-Sheik.
    It will separate the Christians of Taybeh from the Holy Sepulchre and
    the Muslims of Yassouf from al-Aqsa. It will separate the Jews from the
    holy sites. It will separate the Highlands peasants from their working
    places in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

    Sharon's Wall, this unmitigated disaster, provides a rare opportunity to
    observe the true nature of the Jewish State, and to call for its
    dismantling. Not the Wall, silly! The Jewish State.