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.